• Noircast Special 4: TCM Presents Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir
    Jun 4 2015

    Miguel Rodriquez of Monster Island Resort and Will McKinley of Cinematically Insane interview Clute and Edwards on the topic of TCM Presents Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir, a free multimedia online course presented by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Ball State University. This course is the latest collaboration by the creators of the Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir podcast series and will benefit from the promotional and social media support of TCM, where Clute now serves as head of Marketing and Editorial, and the innovative multimedia course materials created by Ball State University, where Edwards is Executive Director of iLearn Research. The course is free and open to the public, will run in conjunction with the two-month “Summer of Darkness” festival on TCM, featuring 24 hours of film noir every Friday in June and July, 2015.

    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    1 ora e 21 min
  • Episode 53: Out of the Past Act II
    Nov 24 2011

    OUT OF THE PAST is perhaps the most carefully structured of all films noir--a narrative divided (like protagonist Jeff Markum/Bailey) between an inescapable past and an impossible future, teetering on the slimmest hope for the present such that any action taken by its poor players tips them down into the abyss. Director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring perfectly synchronized their efforts on this film, creating a narrative masterpiece where every image perfectly accompanies or contrasts every line of dialogue, where the whole is so self-conscious that it forces us to view each moment through every other, creating a true mise-en- abyme. It would be as impossible for the viewer to enter into such a story as it is for the characters to escape it, if it weren't for the decision to create a "Meta" narration at exactly the halfway point of the film, allowing the viewer to sort past from present in a film that constantly blurs that distinction in order to show how lives are always lived in servitude to what comes out of the past. For all of these reasons, the film is a constant source of inspiration, and a constant obsession, for those who watch it carefully. Artist and novelist Jonathan Santlofer joins Clute and Edwards to discuss how the film has repeatedly inspired his work, and Clute and Edwards consider how the case they would make for this movie is reframed each time they reopen their investigation into its means and motives.

    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    46 min
  • Episode 52: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with Scott McGee)
    Oct 15 2011

    Appearances can be deceiving. On the surface, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is pure science fiction, the tale of seed pods from outer space that produce emotionless body doubles of each citizen in the small town of Santa Mira. Often read as an allegory of either Communism or McCarthyism, where every person who becomes "one of them" loses autonomy by willingly buying into the unthinking collective, the film in fact plumbs questions of humanity in the modern era with subtlety and nuance more common to films noir than to science fiction movies. As Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) fight to remain human, they question the mass hysteria of the era, recognize that all appearances are misleading in a mass media culture, and discuss how we lose our humanity in times of social dislocation. Director Don Siegal, screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring and producer Walter Wanger draw on their extensive experience in creating iconic films noir to craft a movie that self-consciously adopts a noir style and noir thematics whenever the stakes are high, demonstrating in the process that noir is ideally suited to addressing human questions in the years following WWII, when retaining our humanity in spite of technological progress is precisely what is in question.

    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    44 min
  • Episode 51: L.A. Noire
    Aug 16 2011

    A product of Clute and Edwards' longstanding fascination with film noir and hard-boiled literature, this podcast investigates how certain mid-century visual and storytelling conventions evolved into Rockstar Games/Team Bondi's new video game L.A. NOIRE. To some degree, noir and hard-boiled themselves evolved from a 19th-century literary tradition that involved contests of deduction and linear modes of problem-solving (a tradition established by Edgar Allan Poe), but in the wake of two world wars and other evidence of the havoc wreaked by modern "progress" those storytelling traditions evolved into something darker and more nuanced—something that offered less certain outcomes. L.A NOIRE plays on both traditions: it is linear and problem-based in its narrative structure, yet its underlying worldview is as brooding and morally ambiguous as the finest films noir and hard-boiled novels. Like all great digital works it is a mashup that weaves together swaths of historical events and pop culture yarns, and the result is a vast tapestry of noir at once familiar and altogether unique.

    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    38 min
  • Episode 50: The Blue Dahlia
    Nov 8 2009
    A script by Raymond Chandler. Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd, and William Bendix in leading roles. Costumes by the great Edith Head, and cinematography by Lionel Lindon, who had been nominated for best cinematography just the year before for the Oscar sensation GOING MY WAY. In short, THE BLUE DAHLIA seems to have everything going it's way. Why, then, does the film fail to deliver the emotional impact of near contemporary titles like THE KILLERS or THE BIG SLEEP? To frame an answer to this question, we must first displace the many frames through which we have become accustomed to viewing the film—most notably Producer John Houseman's apocryphal account of how Chandler's alcoholism impacted the screenplay. If we divest ourselves of these frames and really focus on the film, we see that Chandler's script rescues, rather than compromises, this movie. THE BLUE DAHLIA is more a victim of an identity crisis, a film unable for reasons of censorship and limited artistic vision to commit fully to the noir worldview that came home full force in 1946. And thus, as a marginal success, it's a film that can teach us a great deal about how noir came to be both a dominant Hollywood style and a philosophical stance.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    43 min
  • Episode 49: Bande à part (with Dr. Jeffrey Peters)
    Aug 24 2009
    In this episode, guest investigator Jeffrey Peters (Associate Professor of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Kentucky), leads a panel of five undergraduate students from his Honors Program course "French Film Noir" in a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 BAND OF OUTSIDERS (Bande à part), starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur. Jeff is a specialist in early modern French literature and culture, poetics and rhetoric, and film studies, and former chair of the Division of French and Italian at UK. He is joined by Honor students Bethany Futrell, Jesseca Johnson, Ryan Palmer, Nick Purol, and Daniel Robbins. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir at http://outofthepast.libsyn.com.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    37 min
  • Episode 48: In a Lonely Place (with Megan Abbott)
    Dec 27 2008
    Clute and Edwards welcome guest investigator Megan Abbott , the reigning Dark Dame of Noir. Megan is the author of a superb nonfiction study of hardboiled and noir protagonists entitled THE STREET WAS MINE, and three gut-wrenching throwback crime novels: DIE A LITTLE, THE SONG IS YOU, and QUEENPIN. The first title is scheduled to be released as a United Artists feature film in 2010, with Jessica Biel in the lead role. Megan's choice for this episode is the 1950 Nicholas Ray film IN A LONELY PLACE, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. To learn more about Megan's work, visit www.meganabbott.com. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir at http://outofthepast.libsyn.com.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    51 min
  • Episode 47: Bob Le Flambeur (with Howard Rodman and Mike White)
    Aug 12 2008
    Howard Rodman and Mike White are this episode's guest investigators. Rodman and White discuss Jean-Pierre Melville's great 1956 film, Bob Le Flambeur. Howard Rodman is a screenwriter, novelist and USC film professor. His most recent screen credits include Savage Grace and August. Mike White is the publisher and editors of Cahiers du Cinemart, an obscure and obtuse film magazine from Detroit. Visit Mike's website at impossiblefunky.com. This podcast is brought to you by Clute and Edwards, of www.noircast.net. To leave a comment on this episode, or make a donation to the podcast, please visit Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir at http://outofthepast.libsyn.com.
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    39 min