A Black and White Obsession

The roots of my fascination with film noir can be traced back to a detective fiction class during my undergraduate days.  In the course I was exposed to "The Curtain," an early short story by Raymond Chandler, who would later, in his own terms, "cannibalize" that material for his first novel The Big Sleep.  I was immediately drawn to Chandler's use of language and his poetic description of the corruption endemic to  Los Angeles.. In Chandler's work, the detective figure is similar to the knights of the roundtable--a man on a quest for truth who faces many imposing obstacles in the course of his journey and often is charged with rescuing a damsel in distress.  Like Galahad or Lancelot, the detective is also bound by his own personal code.  I was so intrigued by this concept that my first paper in graduate school was an investigation of the connection between Arthurian lore and detective fiction.  Chandler's novels and those of other hard-boiled writers Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain provided filmmakers with the material of film noir, so my interest in the cinematic genre was a logical consequence of my taste in literature. Chandler's himself in many ways is the patron saint of noir.  Both the film version of The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity, for which he was the screenwriter, punching up the dialogue in Cain's sordid narrative of lust and greed, are considered to be seminal works of film noir, and many reviews of contemporary updates of the genre can't help but invoke his name as a point of comparison.

To this day, my interest with the dark side of human experience continues, and I  have written extensively on the topic.  For a number of years I presented papers at the Popular Culture Association's annual convention, examining aspects of film noir in movies including Chinatown, The Maltese Falcon, Brick, and Memento.  I also have explored the connection between Body Heat and the German film Jericho, both of which are heavily indebted to Double Indemnity in terms of both plot and tone.
As the semester progresses, it is my hope that you will begin to share my enthusiasm for film noir and also recognize the pervasive influence it has had on various forms of media since its inception after World War II.