- 343 Pages
- Published by Limelight Editions
- Softcover
Product Description
This bountiful anthology combines all the key early writings on film noir with many newer essays, including some published here for the first time. The colelction is assembled by the editors of the Third Edition of Film Noir: An Enclyclopedic Reference to the American Style, now regarded as the standard work on the subject…. More >>
#1 by BetsyM on March 30, 2010 - 3:07 pm
How to take a facinating subject and make it seem deadly dull. I suggest that you movies online, get ‘em and watch ‘em. If you like faux academia, then this is the text book you will want.
Rating: 2 / 5
#2 by Dorothy Mullen on March 30, 2010 - 3:38 pm
I give this book two stars instead of one because it fills a gap in my film noir book collection, but I have to say it has dated badly. I bought because I loved Alain Silver’s book Noir Style, which is a collection of black-and-white stills from film noir classics, with marvelous commentary. But the Film Noir Reader opens with a collection of essays from the 1970s that display everything bad about the 70s, academic, pretentious, pompous, over-anxious to establish a high-brow status for a low-brow art form (at least it was then). In the 2nd and 3rd sections, the “up-to-date” essays, we get, for instance, an analysis of the TV show Miami Vice in terms of its film noir elements… Miami Vice???
Rating: 2 / 5
#3 by k-girl on March 30, 2010 - 4:04 pm
This book was in great condition there was a few lines underlined, but still was like new.
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by Michael Samerdyke on March 30, 2010 - 5:02 pm
Film Noir Reader 2 is as interesting as its forerunner. Not every article is great, but there is a lot of interest here.
The book opens with film writings from the Forties that show that while Americans did not coin the term film noir, some writers did notice a trend developing.
There are interesting articles on Cornell Woolrich, Sam Fuller and noir and painting. The article on British Film Noir is quite fascinating.
At the end of the book is a piece by a professor who discusses how he teaches a course on film noir. So this book traces film noir from a barely discerned trend to an academic course of study. Neat.
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by Scott Simonsen on March 30, 2010 - 5:05 pm
Perhaps I expected something more. The essays in this book are often repetitive and non-progressional in subject matter. The softcover version of the book has stills that are more brown and white than black and white… For my money, I am a bigger fan of Hirsch’s “The dark side of the screen”. It is a well thought, well researched look at noir with a cohesive structure. This all is not to say that a majority of the essays in the Reader are not helpful. Of course it is great to read Schrader’s piece and some others which deal with nice specifics (how economics affected growth of B genre, lighting, etc.) but at the end of the day I feel too many of the essays are only about defining the genre (or not genre) rather than delving into other things. Also, I probably will buy more books by these authors simply because their care for noir is so true and strong…
Rating: 4 / 5