The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism

by Shannon Scott Clute, Richard L. Edwards

Overview

Noir is among the most popular, acclaimed, and critically assessed film styles of all time. The unfortunate consequence is an ever-growing divergence between fans and scholars with regard to goals and methods for appreciating and studying noir. The Maltese Touch of Evil aims to bridge that gap. Based on a series of popular podcasts, this unique and inspired investigation of film noir sets out to examine the case of noir more closely, and in the process reconfigures the critical evidence on noir that has been presented to date. The Maltese Touch of Evil reproduces and re-sequences nearly 150 still images from 31 great films, laying them out with the authors’ informed and entertaining insights into the significance of each shot. The result is a de facto meta–film noir, a celebration of the genre that shows how these films are themselves “constrained” texts whose carefully calculated visual forms simultaneously generate narrative and critical commentary on that narrative. You will never look at film noir the same way again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611681857
Publisher:	Dartmouth College Press
Publication date:	12/13/2011
Series:	Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	316
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

SHANNON SCOTT CLUTE is an independent scholar who works for Turner Classic Movies in Atlanta. RICHARD L. EDWARDS is Lead Instructional Designer in the Integrated Learning Institute at Ball State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments • Preface • A Void in Film Noir Studies • One Hundred Thousand Billion Films Noir: Oulipian Works and Potential • Workshop of Potential Criticism: Anoulipism and Plagiarism by Anticipation • Build My Scaffolding High: Noir Films as Constrained Texts • Oufinopo: The Noiremes • Postscript: How We Wrote Our Noiremes • Postliminary 1: The Guilty Parties: Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir • Postliminary 2: Computers and Writers: The MTOE Project • Appendix 1: Selected Filmography • Appendix 2: Podcastography • Notes • Further Readings • References • Index

What People are Saying About This

Foster Hirsch

"A lucky combination of academic rigor and verbal playfulness, The Maltese Touch of Evil is provocatively open-ended. The authors, smooth writers both, are perceptive close readers, and their high-spirited commitment to unpacking selected noire moments is contagious: they make you want to join their conversation, whether in agreement or correction, defense or denial. Their intensive work reminds us yet again of the peculiar richness of the noir canon."
— Foster Hirsch, author of The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir and Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir

Editorial Reviews

Readers may have different senses how these noiremes cohere into a meta-film, but the individual commentaries are unfailingly insightful and suggestive of the noir ethos. In addition to the usual suspects, films include Sunset Boulevard, It's a Wonderful Life, Blade Runner, Batman Begins, and Good Night and Good Luck. This last chapter, a model for close analysis, will reward the reader more than the opening chapters. . . . Recommended.”—Choice

From the Publisher