With the emergence of Los Angeles as a cultural centre in the early 20th century, a new form of crime fiction emerged from the City of Angels. Dubbed ‘hard-boiled’ fiction or ‘noir’ fiction, novels of the 1930s by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler used private investigators and 'femme fatales' to survey L.A.’s social strata: from the wealthy elites to the criminal underclass.
In the 1940s, a wave of exiled European film-makers with first-hand experience of fascism arrived in Hollywood and proceeded to adapt hard-boiled ‘noir’ fiction into popular movies. Directors like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz imported their experience with German expressionism and the social threat of the Nazis into their adaptations of novels about contemporary social reality in L.A. Along with American directors John Huston and Howard Hawks, they pioneered a new film genre termed ‘film noir’, which came to define Hollywood cinema of the 1940s.
Together these novels and movies elevated popular commercial crime fiction into a modernist form. Blending psychoanalysis with mystery plots, fragmented narratives with sinister threat, anti-fascist politics with melodrama, and the Hays Code censorship with scandalous eroticism, film noir has continued to be an influential genre in contemporary story-telling. This day event will serve as an introduction to its key features and introduce some defining instances of the form.
Please note: this event will close to enrolments at 23:59 UTC on 4 December 2024.