Noirscapes: Using the screen to rewrite Los Angeles noir as urban historiography

Abstract

Abstract Noirscapes is a transmedia experience, and the cameras are rolling. Writing its own version of Los Angeles’ history, Noirscapes is a filmed scholarly discourse that literally drives through the urban environment of the city of Los Angeles constructing a noir historiography. The authors of this article are film-makerresearchers who, as a mode of creative practice research, are using screens and the medium of film to write with, on and for the screen. The premise of Noirscapes is that film noir can function partly as a surrogate history of Los Angeles, so that film noir screens provide written cinematic evidence of the city’s actual as well as imagined history. Noirscapes presents a series of short films that constitute a creative practice research output. Filming and driving across the freeways and boulevards of present day Los Angeles allowed the film-makers to traverse production locations and to discuss their role in urban historiography, as featured through iconic film noirs like Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Chinatown (1974). Noirscapes demonstrates how film-making and spectatorship can be used as complementary research methods that enquire with, on and for the screen.