Noir Narratives Research Articles

The Research on the Representational Strategies of Femme Fatale in Contemporary Chinese Film-noir

In 2014, Chinese director Diao Yinan’s feature Black Coal, Thin Ice wins the Golden Bear Award for Best Director at the 64th Berlin Film Festival, sparking enthusiastic discussion on the prospect of the so-called 'Chinese film-noir'. Among the classic noir elements that sparked discussion in these films, the lethal woman, or the ‘femme fatale’ stands out to be the one that attracts the most attention. In the span of a decade, the Chinese femme fatale varies quite enormously in her role in the narrative and the gender implication her relationship with the noir hero represents. This essay will build on Mark Conrad’s definition of film-noir, Jack Boozer’s categorization of femme fatale, and Elisabeth Bronfen’s tragic theory to analyze the construction of femme fatale in 2010s Chinese film noir. Equipped with these theoretical tools, this essay will focus on recent Chinese films-noirs and draw connections between their different representational strategy of the femme fatale to complete their noir narrative. This essay argues that while films like the Hunt Down (2019) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) approaches the lethal woman in the classic androcentric or even misogynist way, Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) and the Wild Goose Lake (2019) endows her with more subjectivity and agency while complicating her relationship with the noir hero.

Domestic noir: Fictionalising trauma survival

How can authors fictionalise trauma without cognitively suffering intense vicarious trauma in that writing process? This paper explores this question through the lens of fictionalised Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) representations in domestic noir narratives. Domestic noir operates within the constraints of a domestic space that is subverted from a sanctuary to a potential psychological space of tyranny or violence. This may include reiterative chronic traumas such as IPV or other forms of relationship violence. Viewed as a trauma fiction, domestic noir is peculiarly suited to interrogating the survivor narrative. The domestic noir models focused on IPV develop a complex combination of the victim, survivor and hero in their representations of traumatised protagonists. The effects of writing about IPV trauma may be transformed by this fictionalising into an emerging hero-as-survivor narrative. The Emerging Hero Process developed and elaborated within this paper indicates, through reiterative cycles of the protagonist’s emotional and behavioural response, their capacity to summon the heroic act that may enable a reframed and reconciled survivor outlook. The Emerging Hero Process has evolved into an IPV writing model of a survivor narrative that may also filter or reposition the vicarious trauma of the writing process.

All Body? Transformation, Generic Codes and Embodied Memory in Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018)

Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018) was reviewed as a neo-noir re-working and a star vehicle for Nicole Kidman. This article argues that it in fact offers a complex re-visioning of both the noir narrative to which reviewers compared it, and the ‘woman’s film’ and its successor, the maternal revenge film. It examines the ways in which Kusama’s film plays on cinematic genre codes and structures to suggest that they constitute a ‘compulsion to repeat’, in which femininity as performance is scripted, defined and positioned, and, where it threatens transgression, rendered abject as bodily excess. The film’s flashback structure, it argues, first exposes the various scripts through which its protagonist Erin’s younger self performs the roles she is given, and then stages the recovery of embodied memory, as generic codes and structures give way to the phenomenology of the process of remembering. Through its construction of a memory text in which time is fractured and/or slowed in moments of intensity, the film works against conventional accounts of subjectivity to suggest that Erin’s recovery of memory is also a recovery of a specifically maternal body. It thus stages an attempt to retrieve, or construct, a subjectivity that is embodied, relational, and maternal.

Designing Player Intent through “Playful” Interaction

Designing Player Intent through “Playful” Interaction

From the Guest Thematic Editors: Latinx Detective and Noir Narratives

From the Guest Thematic Editors: Latinx Detective and Noir Narratives

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s <em>The Night Manager</em>

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s <em>The Night Manager</em>

Between Realism and Camp Aesthetic: the Hollywood Spaces in the American Noir Narrative

While delighting in the crude realism and urban violence, the American noir narrative that emerged in the mid-20’s of the last century folds into some aspects of the postmodern camp aesthetic in that it repeatedly incorporates elements that, coming from popular culture, have acquired a certain degree of prestige and recognition over time. As this article attempts to demonstrate, this amalgam of dichotomous ingredients harmonizes in those police novels and stories that choose Hollywood spaces to ironically contextualize its intrigues.

The Menace of Intimacy: Domestic Noir, Feminist Criminology, and Emily Maguire’s *An Isolated Incident*

Viewed through the lens of feminist criminology, how does the subgenre of domestic noir dramatise domestic violence through generic or subversive elements of craft? Drew Humphries asserts that feminist criminology has challenged, reframed and improved legal definitions and data collection regarding women and violence (as both victims and perpetrators), and that those changes have been registered more widely in the community via media both in journalistic choices and in the themes and features of literary genres (xi). Drawing on this conceptual framework, my research analyses representations of domestic violence in domestic noir novels with reference to feminist criminological theories, including gender critiques of Life Course Theory and the General Strain Theory of Deviance. This article presents a textual analysis of Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident (2016) as a literary crime novel with domestic noir features centring on the use of domestic violence to build narrative interest and deliver dramatic tension, while also identifying the subversion of generic elements to enable thematic consideration of intersectional feminist concerns. I demonstrate that the rise in popularity of domestic noir occurs against a backdrop of an increased culture of interest in domestic violence, arguing that domestic noir narrative strategies leverage the complexities of feminist gains in criminology and criminal justice to give voice to women’s and girls’ experiences of gendered violence.

Noir Sensibility and the Mystical East in Amir Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” of Amir Muhammad’s KL Noir: Red

This paper examines Amir Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever”, one noir story taken from Amir Muhammad’s KL Noir: Red (2013), a noir anthology published in Malaysia. Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” is a self-claimed noir work contained by noir sensibility with portrayals of postcolonial experiences written from the perspective of contemporary-postcolonial Malaysian society. Both its noir sensibility and postcolonial experiences constitute the darkness and alienation which are commonly associated with noir fiction. Consequently, this paper looks into noir sensibility or noir parameters that construct Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” and, simultaneously, the inclusion of subversion of the West and East as a fragment of the postcolonial experiences that can also function as noir sensibility. The finding shows that the noir sensibility is manifested, firstly, by the noir theme comprising issues of mysticism and violence and, secondly, by the noir protagonist who is doomed and alienated. Additionally, the mystical East represented by the figure of Nyai Roro Kidul, the Queen of the Sea, has drowned the characters into darkness, chaos and, most importantly, subversion of the West and the East binary. Thus, they impressively shape this story to be a noir narrative with postcolonial issue. Keywords: noir sensibility; mysticism; subversion; postcolonialism

Realism + Its Discontents: Determinism Noir

Abstract This short comic based narrative depicts the challenges to and climate of an alternative form of realism in the art-world as a new project for art's politics and construction. Determinism Noir, Realism and Its Discontents calls upon the classic genre of noir narratives to situate themes of agency, mastery, rationalism and metaphysics. These ideas and images are generated in the nihilistic climate of alienation, itself borne out through the machinic, technological and capitalistic forces of the Twentieth Century. The comic presents three parts: first we see the formation of a project base to insinuate a rational determinism: A world of cause that is unpredictable but nevertheless, a pragmatic working environment; second we see a report, based on real life events, showing arguments from politics and the art-world that continue to voice the fear that it is representation itself that has blighted art's real political purchase. The comic criticizes these arguments as having left art with either a naive commitment to an abstract and essential mythology of present-ness or an antirealist self-contortion that dispossesses it of power. The third part of this narrative re-joins the work of the epistemological detective work that is the exercise for this new realist project. Beech's abstract story gels painterly construction, philosophical argument and political diatribe to extend her ongoing work. Here she argues that art must surpass the egotistic self-consciousness that have wrongly subtended claims to realism, whilst condemning those that aspire to exit realism altogether.

Trump and the Resurgence of American Noir

This essay examines the political persona of Donald Trump as mediated by the imagery of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir. By evoking and distorting noir’s challenge to the status quo, its suspicion of systems of power and questioning of dominant norms, Trump has fashioned his political persona in ways that deliberately revise the popular conception of the hardboiled hero as brash-talking rebel at the margins of a corrupt system. Reading Trump’s persona through the mediating function of noir exposes how Trump’s rhetoric plays on, and benefits from, a theme of citizen estrangement while simultaneously reinforcing political expediency and self-interested power. Moreover, it is not only Trump who uses noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. The media have also participated in crafting images of Trump as either entertaining disruptor or more darkly destabilising. As responses to crises of capitalism, corruption, and social fracture, noir narratives provide critical ways of investigating periods of disequilibrium and their resurfacing in the present. Analysing the production, expression, and reception of Trump’s political persona through the historical and discursive structures of noir underscores the salience of the study of persona to reveal underlying fissures in current American politics and society.

There was nothing, there was nowhere to go: writing Australian rural noir

When I embarked on my doctorate in creative writing, I wanted to write about the decline of an alternative community in the 1980s, similar to the one in which I had grown up. A noir novel seemed the perfect vehicle for the dark themes I planned to explore, and promised to be very different from the private eye series I usually wrote. Typically, noir is located in urban environments and many studies of noir fiction and film maintain that an urban setting is integral to the genre, speaking as it does to the anxiety and alienation of modern life, feelings of anonymity and of being the outsider, and the corruption and criminality of the city. Much contemporary noir fiction still takes place in metropolitan areas; however, there is, increasingly, a sub-genre situated in rural locations, as illustrated by the rise of ‘Country’ or ‘Hillbilly Noir’ in the USA. Australian crime fiction has long made use of the bush and outback as a location – usually as a site of conquest where the hero ultimately triumphs over the antagonist; however, noir narratives are different, invariably ending in destruction and defeat. This article will investigate Australian Rural Noir through a comparative textual analysis of Kenneth Cooke’s Wake in Fright, Chris Womersley’s The Low Road and Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites. It will consider the ways in which Australian rural noir uses landscape to subvert the pastoral paradigm and will examine the tensions between the exterior landscape and the interior life of the protagonists, reflecting on the particularly Australian cultural anxieties implicit in these texts. I also discuss my own research-led practice, the challenges involved in being an insider researcher and, finally, consider whether this nexus between the critical and creative helps or hinders the creative writing process.

America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture by Erik Dussere (review)

Reviewed by: America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture by Erik Dussere Christopher Breu Erik Dussere. America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 299pp. There are as many narratives of noir’s development as there are definitions of noir. Notoriously difficult to define in positive qualities, noir has variously been described as a genre; a mood; a subspecies of crime and detective narratives (filmic or novelistic); or, as I have argued elsewhere, a negative deformation or volatilization of other genres. Even as its stylistic roots in European movements like expressionism and existentialism have been acknowledged, noir is often described as a distinctly American phenomenon. Thus, the negativity and darkness ascribed to noir are seen as part of a negative exceptionalism, a homegrown critique of the culture and politics of the US that is simultaneously its distinctive product. While there has been a range of recent work on noir as a distinctly global phenomenon (Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland’s Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization, for example), the negative exceptionalist paradigm central to a great deal of writing on noir is still very much alive and well. One can glean as much from reading Erik Dussere’s America Is Elsewhere. Both the power and the limitations of Dussere’s book can be linked to its redeployment of this negative exceptionalist paradigm. His argument hinges on the opposition between postwar consumer culture and notions of authenticity he sees at the heart of noir: “what I have been calling the ‘dialectic’ of authenticity and consumer culture staged by the texts in the noir tradition is a crucial, perhaps a constitutive, component of American self-understanding in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (247). As this emphasis on “American self-understanding” suggests, Dussere’s argument is cast in the dialectics of American identity central to an older tradition of American studies that runs from, say, Perry Anderson through Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin to Sacvan Bercovitch. Indeed, a careful and rich reading of Trilling’s concept of authenticity underpins Dussere’s negative exceptionalist account of the opposition between the “two Americas,” in which the two versions of the nation “occupy the same geographical space, with the visible and consumerist republic twinned by the alternative, dispossessed America beneath” (132). While Dussere cites more recent American studies scholars, such as Donald Pease and Deborah Madsen, who present more searching critiques of the rhetoric of exceptionalism that challenge the fantasy of a singular American self, his model of the “two Americas” harkens back to Bercovitch’s model of American disensus, in which the jeremiad is the dominant form of expression. [End Page 158] Part of Dussere’s investment in the concept of American authenticity is bound up with the version of noir his book chooses to narrate. One way to think about the noir narrative is in terms of different schools centered on paradigmatic writers or practices of filmmaking. Thus, we can talk about the James M. Cain school of noir; the Dashiell Hammett school; the Chester Himes school; the Patricia Highsmith school; the classic Hollywood school; the French New Wave school; the Nikkatsu school; the schools associated with international noir writers like Natsuo Kirnio, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Stieg Larsson; and others. Each of these schools carries within it a set of assumptions about noir that shapes the story told by the critic. Thus, if the critic’s account is narrated in relationship to the Hollywood, Hammett, or Taibo schools, she will tend to read a continuity between narratives that focus on the figure of the hard-boiled detective and petty criminals, while a critic working within the Cain, Highsmith, or Kirino schools might make a much stronger distinction between hard-boiled fiction (privileging the figure of the hard-boiled detective) and noir proper (which tends to narrate the lives of petty criminals and two-time losers who wind up on the wrong side of the law). The national or international dimensions of the narrative would also be shaped by the school the critic affiliates with as well as who he includes within the school...

Georges Perec and Anne Garréta: Oulipo, Constraint and Crime Fiction

This article examines two novels written by members of the Oulipo group, exploring the ways in which Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969) and Anne F. Garréta's La Décomposition (1999) both use Oulipian constraints within a narrative infrastructure drawn from subgenres of crime fiction: La Disparition is a whodunnit, and La Décomposition a first-person noir narrative. I argue that Perec and Garréta use the alliance of constraint and crime fiction in order to articulate a probing account of their protagonists’ impossible quests for metaphysical certainty in the face of death and loss. The genre-constraint alliance is also the means by which Perec and Garréta express their dissatisfaction with aspects of contemporary literary culture and reception. The article examines why the tropes of crime fiction are of particular use to these Oulipian authors in their investigation of the purposes and potential of literature.

Narrative, contingency, modernity: Jean Rouch's Moi, un Noir (1958)

This article deals with the ethnographic production of modernity in Jean Rouch's film about Nigerien economic migrants in pre-independence Ivory Coast, Moi, un Noir. Following Fredric Jameson's assertion that we can conceive of modernity as a rhetorical trope and a narrative category that is subject to potentially limitless rewritings, the article suggests that Moi, un Noir's improvisational narrative allows Rouch to re-stage a narrative of modernity that relies on contingency and a geographical triangulation of idea(l)s of the modern between the United States, France and West Africa. Further, this article examines Rouch's doctrine of collaborative ethnographic work, what he calls shared anthropology, in relation to the collective nature of Moi un Noir's narrative, which relies on the spontaneous participation of Rouch's actors (who were also his research subjects) who were shown a rough cut of the film and prompted to discuss their lives as they saw fit. Finally, the article explores, how Rouch's unique, experimental blend of fictional and documentary cinematic forms positions him as both a provocative theorist of modernity as well as a reflexive anthropologist avant la lettre.

Bologna's Noir Identity: Narrating the City in Carlo Lucarelli's Crime Fiction

This article examines the representation of Bologna in Carlo Lucarelli's crime fiction. It focuses mainly on his early novels: the comic trilogy which includes Nikita (1992), Falange armata (1993) and Il giorno del lupo (1994), and on his most successful noir novel Almost blue (1997). In these crime stories, Lucarelli makes Bologna a prominent character and embarks on discussing issues of identity, social change, and urban growth. However, by drawing on traditional noir narratives, he especially elaborates his notion of Bologna's dark side, and ponders on the tensions generated by the development of new youth cultures, new metropolitan communities, and new forms of criminality. Bologna is portrayed as a disquieting noir city, but it is ultimately presented as a symbol of the postmodern metropolis (or postmetropolis): a space in transition characterized by constant transformations and elusive identities.

Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America

In the post-war era, American urban fiction was dominated by the imagery of containment. This book offers a critique of this familiar story, evident in the noir narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote and others.