Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir
This volume stands out as one of the best and perhaps the single most essential book in English on film noir. Biesen reveals an untold part of the movement with originality, sophistication, and vitality. Her work will become a foundation for subsequent interpretation of film noir, as well as an ideal text in film, history, and cultural studies courses.(Brian Taves, film historian, author ofThe Romance of Adventure: The Genre of Historical Adventure Movies)Biesen adds a new perspective that enhances scholarship on the subject and makes this book a must.(Choice)Ms Biesen describes too how film noir drew on societal anxieties as Americans faced fear, loss and shortages during the war and viewed ever-more-harrowing newsreel footage. 'As life on the homefront became increasingly hard-boiled,' she writes, 'so too did American film.'(Nina AyoubChronicle of Higher Education)Biesen's book is readable, informative and jargon free... Biesen uses her research into studio archives, the films' attendant publicity and the contemporary press to bring alive the wartime period of film noir and its transformation into a post-war genre for dealing with troubled veterans returning home, the coming of the Cold War, nuclear angst and the effects of McCarthyism on Hollywood and the nation at large.(Times Literary Supplement)Readers will come away fromBlackoutwith a fuller understanding of the industrial and historical contexts of wartimefilm noir.(Charles MalandCineaste)This text offers a compelling history of wartime Hollywood and a provocative challenge to current noir scholarship.(Southern California Quarterly)An important contribution to the history offilm noir.(Jan-Christopher HorakScreening the Past)A film noir aficionado, Biesen provides the most detailed and thoroughly researched interpretation of this era's American film noir.(Clayton KoppesAmerican Historical Review)The author is to be congratulated on producing an exemplary study in empirical film history.(Brian NeveHistorical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television)