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Tag: noir

Noir in the Age of #MeToo

With the release of an annotated edition of The Big Sleep this month, author Megan Abbott reflects on noir and the work of Raymond Chandler:

What fascinates and compels me most about Chandler in this #MeToo moment are the ways his novels speak to our current climate. Because if you want to understand toxic white masculinity, you could learn a lot by looking at noir.

Loosely defined, noir describes the flood of dark, fatalistic books and films that emerged before, during, and especially after World War II. As scholars like Janey Place have pointed out, this was an era when many white American men felt embattled. Their livelihoods had been taken away—first by the Depression, then by the war, and then by the women who replaced them while they were off fighting. Into this climate noir flowered: Tales of white, straight men—the detective, the cop, the sap—who feel toppled from their rightful seat of power and who feel deeply threatened by women, so threatened that they render them all-powerful and blame them for all the bad things these straight white men do. Kill a guy, rob a bank—the femme fatale made me do it. These novels simmer with resentment over perceived encroachment and a desire to contain female power.

In an earlier essay for the LA Times, Abbott looks at why women are interested in true crime stories:

[In] the last few years, and especially in recent months as the Harvey Weinstein and associated scandals have dominated headlines, I’ve come to think of true crime books as performing much the same function as crime novels (also dominated by female readers): serving as the place women can go to read about the dark, messy stuff of their lives that they’re not supposed to talk about — domestic abuse, serial predation, sexual assault, troubled family lives, conflicted feelings about motherhood, the weight of trauma, partner violence and the myriad ways the justice system can fail, and silence, women.

While these weighty issues aren’t generally resolved in true crime… these books provide a common site to work through crises, to exorcise demons. I’ve come to believe that what draws women to true crime tales is an instinctual understanding that this is the world they live in.

And at Vulture Abbot talks to Ruth Franklin about her new novel, Give Me Your Hand:

The seductive female criminal, a.k.a. femme fatale, has always been a noir staple: Mary Astor in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, Ava Gardner in ‘The Killers’But Abbott argues that these characters aren’t psychologically authentic. They’re “a projection of male anxiety,” she says, vampy caricatures whose primary purpose is to use their irresistible charms to lure the detective-hero into a setup. As Abbott sees it, classic noir “always comes back to the idea of femininity as a kind of dark continent.” Male writers “really don’t want to look in there,” she says. They want to believe female violence “is always an aberration … What if those stories had been told from the femme fatale’s point of view? Think how different they would look.”

On a semi-related note, film critic David Thomson recently wrote a long piece for the London Review of Books on Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir Vertigo in light of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. It’s interesting as a dissection of a classic movie, but it is not, ultimately, the take I wanted. Thomson’s claim that a medium that has historically been dominated by the male gaze is somehow essentially so, is surely something that only a male critic would say. Women need to be given the space to address these issues, and, frankly it is a female critic’s reassessment of Hitchcock that I want to read. 

Both the Abbott and Thompson pieces on noir reminded of Claire Dederer’s 2017 essay, ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?‘, on Woody Allen and whether genius and monstrosity go hand in hand. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already. In the essay, Dederer talks briefly about Roman Polanski. I would love to read a contemporary reassessment of Chinatown. 1        

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Find Your Stories in the Dirt

cover design by Steven Seighman
cover design by Steven Seighman

I mentioned Andrew F. Sullivan’s piece on High-Rise last week, and I recently spoke to the author about his own novel WASTE, and about influence of David Lynch on his writing in a Q & A for Publishers Group Canada:

Initially, I think I was very resistant to Lynch. I think I thought a lot of it was just nonsense for the sake of nonsense. It was Blue Velvet that won me over, that showed me you could implicate and confront your audience, you could tell a sad, vicious truth and people would want to hear it/see it. Lynch opened up so many opportunities to leave the explanation out, to make the work immersive and unsettling while still dancing around the established conventions for storytelling. What he was doing seemed very singular, but also invested in the everyday, in waking up, going to work, putting in the hours. He created a world, especially in Twin Peaks, that began as just slightly askew, plausible even. He lured you into the nightmare and then told you it was real. And everyone questions the theories their friends have, there is no code to break. His work exposes the peculiarities of each audience member in their own response—their passions, fears and obsessions. How can they make this story make sense? What demons does it awaken?

Lynch is still doing that. He is always doing that.

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A Dirge for a New World

Empire Design
Empire Design

Andrew F. Sullivan, author of ultra-violent urban noir WASTE,1 reviews Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of High-Rise by J.G. Ballard for TIFF.Net:

Wheatley and Ballard point to a pattern—a dissolution of social order that cannot be prevented by technology or progress. Even the most unnatural setting seems to only drive humanity back to its base needs—food, water, shelter, flesh. The past, the basest parts of being human, carry more weight than any building, any new technological development. Elevators become new traps for the hunters. The supermarket on the seventh floor is one last place to forage. Even the soundtrack reimagines this future past for the audience, Portishead performing ABBA’s pop hit “S.O.S.” as a warning for the residents and viewers alike—a dirge for a new world.

Residents begin to harvest the building itself for what they need and reject the outside world. Wheatley’s design team has mimicked the 70s-era incredibly well, but everything is innovative. The products and designs on the shelves are made specifically for this brave new world. The future is behind us. The high-rise becomes a place unto itself—a slow motion horrorshow.

Much like his previous work, Wheatley refuses to provide a straight narrative for the audience and at times, the film descends into an anarchic blend of images without the rules to bind them—as it should. We scurry past a horse on a rooftop, a gang of TV presenters armed with baseball bats and chair legs, a dog drowned in the pool. Parties turn into rituals, sacrifices, religious ceremonies and then dissolve back into chaos once again. Wheatley’s camera starts out sleek and mannered, transitioning smoothly from one floor to the next. However, once the social order slides, the narrative structure breaks under the strain. Viewers slider from one party to another, the camera following bodies as they rise and fall. The film itself opens with an ending.

 

Edwin Turner has also written about High-Rise at Biblioklept. Ed’s opinion of the movie is less favourable than Andrew’s, but his post also pointed me to Tasha Robinson’s interesting review of the film at The Verge:

There’s a touch of Luis Buñuel’s ‘Exterminating Angel’ in the way everyone in the building seems to be stuck there, isolated from the outside by mutual consent, for no reason anyone cares to address. But Wheatley’s visual style never feels beholden to Buñuel. It’s more familiar from 1960s speculative-fiction films. The Brutalist architecture and cold sterility of the building suggests Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Alphaville,’ and the polished futurism and stiffly remote characters are reminiscent of François Truffaut’s ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ The retro cars, suits, and architecture all put ‘High-Rise’ more in a quaint, remote past than a dystopian future. They also add to the sense of otherworldliness that hangs over the film.

And so does the sense that High-Rise is driven more by Wheatley’s poster-ready striking images —€” a suicide falling from a high balcony in ultra slow motion, Laing expressionless and spattered with paint — than by any sort of human drives. “Laing would surrender to a logic more powerful than reason,” Hiddleston narrates, hand-waving away any irrational behavior. No one in the film really operates on reason, they just represent emotional factions. Wilder becomes a feral, untrustworthy spirit of the denied and oppressed. Ann becomes an equally monstrous symbol of the selfish, out-of-touch aristocracy that actively enjoys spitting on everyone below them. Both sides are poisonous. Laing isn’t an innocent caught in the middle, he’s desperately looking for a place to fit in, and his narrative isn’t about saving anyone, not even himself.

Empire Design
Empire Design

 

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Timothy Goodman: The New Yorker Fiction Issue


For the New Yorker‘s Summer Fiction Issue, ‘Crimes and Misdemeanours,’ designer Timothy Goodman created six black and white ‘title cards’ to the stories in the magazine.  According to Goodman, the designs “cover an array of styles from Gothic to Western to 70’s Bollywood, depending on the premise of stories. Two of the pieces were laser cut, all of them were shot on top of textures or old photos to capture the noir vernacular.”

There is also a nice video trailer for the issue, shot by Grant Cornett and edited by Ivan Hurzeler:

(via Design Work Life)

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Midweek Miscellany

L’Exception Française —  The Guardian on an exhibition in Paris celebrating the centenary of French publisher Gallimard:

Gaston [Gallimard] himself always protested that he had never had any ambition or even vocation to be a publisher. And when in 1910 he was invited to join the “adventure” of the Nouvelle revue française (Nrf), it was an example of what became a rule, letting his friends “guide his life”. Modest, somewhat detached, well turned-out and above all, perhaps, “without side”, he was to prove a magnet for writers of violently contrasting aesthetic and political allegiances. He had charm, and he had luck. He drew towards him, and elected to that most exalted of circles, the comité de lecture, such arbiters of literary taste and intellectual vigour as Jacques Rivière, Jean Paulhan, André Malraux, Albert Camus and Raymond Queneau.

Gallimard, 1911-2011: Un siècle d’édition is at the Bibliothèque nationale de France until 3 July, 2011.

Dry Eyed — David L. Ulin revisits James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce for the LA Times:

“Mildred Pierce” is less a work of noir than it is a straightforward realist novel: dry-eyed, unsentimental, in which a woman finds grace, of a kind, first by surpassing her limitations and then by recognizing them. That’s a metaphor for what it means to be a grown-up, for what it means to have to take care of a family, to sacrifice in the name of a greater good. It’s also an acute portrait of a society in transition — that of Los Angeles between the wars.

A Map of Wrong Turns — Robert Darnton breaks down why the Google Books settlement failed for the NYRB:

The cumulative effect of these objections, elaborated in 500 memoranda filed with the court and endorsed in large part by Judge Chin’s decision, could give the impression that the settlement, even in its amended version, is so flawed that it deserves to be pronounced dead and buried. Yet it has many positive features. Above all, it could provide millions of people with access to millions of books. If the price were moderate, the benefit would be extraordinary, and the result would give new life to old books, which rarely get consulted from their present locations on the remote shelves or distant storage facilities of research libraries… How can these advantages be preserved without the accompanying drawbacks?

See also: John Naughton on the settlement in The Observer.

Geographic Ingredients — An interesting article by Alison Arieff on communities of local manufacturers for The New York Times:

“For decades we have developed a culture of disposability — from consumer goods to medical instruments and machine tools. To fuel economic growth, marketers replaced longevity with planned obsolescence — and our mastery of technology has given birth to ever-accelerating unplanned obsolescence. I think there is increasing awareness that this is no longer sustainable on the scale we have developed.”

Interestingly, one of the companies Arieff mentions is DODOcase who use traditional bookbinding techniques to make beautiful cases for iPads and e-readers.

And finally…

A quick reminder that tomorrow, Thursday March 31st 2011, is the deadline for AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers competition. You can enter online here.

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Midweek Miscellany

Chris Ware’s cover for the latest issue of The New Yorker (via The Ephemerist).

Pop Will Eat Itself — Author Lev Grossman (The Magicians) on automated recommendations:

[Recommendation engines] introduce us to new things, which is good, but those new things tend to be a lot like the old things, and they tend to be drawn from the shallow pool of things other people have already liked. As a result, they create a blockbuster culture in which the same few runaway hits get recommended over and over again. It’s the backlash against the “long tail,” the idea that shopping online is all about near infinite selection and cultural diversity. It has a bad habit of eating its own tail and leaving you back where you started.

The Dark Underside of American LifeThe Observer‘s film critic Philip French on the late Jim Thompson and Michael Winterbottom‘s film adaptation of The Killer Inside Me:

Thompson was a man of the left, a lifelong alcoholic and became closely acquainted with the dark underside of American life, the lonely crowd where petty criminals, low-level cops, conmen and prostitutes rub shoulders… One of Thompson’s critics has called him without disparagement “a dime novel Dostoevsky”…

And finally… Popville, a super stylish pop-up book by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud, published by Macmillan (thanks Sio!):

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Something for the Weekend

David Drummond’s Parker Series for University of Chicago Press.

“a little bit Warhol, a little bit Factory Records” —  Christian Schwartz explains why he started type foundry Commercial Type at I Love Typography:

It’s much easier to be an “armchair quarterback,” second-guessing everyone else’s seemingly questionable decisions regarding everything… than it is to deal with the actual reality of budgets, technology, and timelines. Theorizing about how and why things work is all well and good, but putting our ideas into practice is of course the real test…

Typography and JudaicaSteven Heller interviews book designer and typographer Scott-Martin Kosofsky. Fascinating stuff:

It’s the best of times and the worst of times, but I have a feeling that people have always said that… In regard to print, I think we’re at a great moment, with access to mature technology and aesthetics… There’s no excuse for anything looking less than great. But books (and print in general) have lost their pride of place. Book publishers, a group nearly always behind the curve, have failed to grasp that their online counterparts spend a lot of time and money concentrating on User Experience, while they remain unfamiliar with the concept. It wasn’t always that way, but when the professionalism and discipline that was demanded by metal type fell away, things got worse and worse, especially typographically.

Punk — An interview with Jaime Hernandez about Love and Rockets and the recently published The Art of Jaime Hernandez at NYC Graphic:

“That’s how Love and Rockets started: we were just cocky and didn’t know we could fail. We went ahead and published the first one ourselves and didn’t care what the outcome would be, we just wanted to be printed. Hopefully we could sell it and make money, but there was no one to tell us not to. That was the punk part of it. The more we got good response, the more we kept doing it.”

And finally…

The Pollak Coffee Table Book seen at UnderConsideration’s FPO. Breathtakingly beautiful.

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10+ Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration

10 Websites for Vintage Books, Covers and Inspiration” is one of the most popular posts on The Casual Optimist, and here, at long last, is the promised follow-up: “10 Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration.”

There are a lot of amazing photostreams with book sets — Covers etc, insect54, Kyle Katz, mjkghk, Montague, Paula Wirth, and Scott Lindberg to name just a few that I’ve come across — but I’ve decided to focus this post on my favourite group pools because they collate the best of these individual streams together.

I’ve also decided to highlight groups that are about specific subjects, genres, publishers, or designers, because I think these are more useful than the more general (but still interesting) book pools such as A+ Book Covers, Book Cover Club, and My Books

ABC Verlag Graphic Design books

1. ABC Verlag, Zurich — A collection of scans and images from Zurich-based ABC Verlag who specialized in graphic design and fine art books between 1962 to 1989.

1627

2. Antique Books — images of books, covers and illustrations that are a hundred years old or more.

Design and Paper: Number 13: Spread

3. Designers’ Books — “what’s on the shelves of designers and other smart creatives.” Not to be confused with the also excellent designers-books.com pool or Book Design pool.

Literature in America

4. Alvin & Elaine Lustig Design — celebrates the work of Alvin and Elaine Lustig, both renowned for their incredible book cover designs.

They Shoot Horses Don't They

5. The Penguin Paperback Spotters’ Guild — An astonishing collection of vintage Penguins, Pelicans, Peregrines, and Puffins. Also of interest: The Great Pan! Illustrated Pan Book Covers and Vintage Fontana Books.

Playback by Raymond Chandler Cover art by William Rose

6. Pulp Fiction — As you would expect: detective novels, crime fiction, adventure comics, trashy romance, weird science, blaxploitation and more. See also: The Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers and The Crime & Mystery Book Covers.

Thoughts on Design by Paul Rand

7. The Paul Rand Modern Graphic Design Fan Club — Like the Lustig Design group, this is not just a book pool, but it does, however, include many of Paul Rand’s iconic book designs, making it essential to this list in my opinion.

I Know an Old Lady, by Rose Bonne. Pictures by Abner Graboff.
8. The Retro Kid A collection of cool illustrated children’s books from the mid-1940’s through the mid-1960’s, curated by The Ward-O-Matic illustrator Ward Jenkins.

metropolis thea v marbou

9. The SciFi Books Pool Vintage science fiction covers from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

computers

10. Vintage Paperbacks — The place for amazing paperbacks that aren’t Penguins. Curated by graphic designer and art director Gregory Boerum, the focus is on quality stuff with design interest from the 1960’s and 70’s.

So there we have it: 10 of my favourites. What are yours?

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10 Websites for Vintage Books, Covers and Inspiration

1. A Journey Round My Skull — “Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature.”

2. The Art of Penguin Science FictionA comprehensive collection of Penguin sci-fi covers from 1935 onwards.

3. BibliOdyssey“Books… Illustrations… Science… History… Visual Materia Obscura… Eclectic Bookart.”

4. Book (Design) Stories — Felix Wiedler’s incredible collection of modernist design and typography books from Germany and Switzerland 1925–1965.

5. Book Worship — “graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s”.

6. I Was A Bronze Age BoyComic books, crime fiction and pulp magazines curated by Mark Justice. Awesome name. Awesome blog.

7. Killer Covers of the Week — Pulpy goodness and vintage crime fiction covers expertly curated The Rap Sheet‘s J. Kingston Pierce.

8. The Pelican ProjectThings Magazine‘s collection of Pelican paperbacks organized by decade.

9. Pop Sensation — Rex Parker appraises, critiques and generally ridicules his vintage paperback collection.

10. Spanish Book CoversSpanish pulp: detectives, masked gangsters, pin-ups, skeletons, and zombies! (French language)

AND BONUS! 11. French Book Covers — But not entirely safe for work… It’s French. You have been warned.

Let me know if I’ve missed any other great vintage book cover sites. AND  I’m working on a list of book cover related photostreams and groups on Flickr so please pass on your recommendations! Cheers.

modernist book design in germany and switzerland 1925–1965 (and beyond)

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Megan Abbott Noir Covers

For all my love of clean lines and Swiss modernism, I’m also a total sucker for trashy pulp paperback covers and film-noir movie posters, so when I stumbled across these covers illustrated by Richie Fahey for Megan Abbott‘s crime novels, I thought I should post the series:

Meg Abbott interviewed in 3:AM Magazine.

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Parker

Darwyn Cooke (author of one of my favourite superhero comics of recent years, the award-winning The New Frontier) talks about his comic book adaptation of The Hunter by Richard Stark (AKA Donald E. Westlake) — also the inspiration for John Boorman’s film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin — with Tom Spurgeon and writer Ed Brubaker at The Comics Reporter:

The first chapter of that book is so well written it makes me want to puke, but it was like there’s nothing visual left if you put the prose down. It’s all there. It’s an external description, people’s reaction to the guy. So it’s like, “You know what? Let’s take a good chunk of space here and see if we can achieve the feeling of that chapter purely through the visuals that he’s directing. Right down to the holes in his shoe.

Publisher IDW has a preview of the first chapter here.

Am I excited? Yes. Yes, I am.

Link

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