Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City » (New & Expanded Edition)

Nicholas Christopher is the author of two novels: Veronica and The Soloist, and six books of poetry, including the forthcoming The Creation of the Night Sky. His work has appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, The New Republic, among other leading magazines. He teaches at Columbia University and NYU, and lives in New York City.

Starting with the classic Out of the Past, Christopher takes us on the grand tour of the great film noirs. With style and humor, he identifies the genre's central motif — “The city as labyrinth is key to entering the psychological and aesthetic framework of the film noir” — and goes on to analyze more than three hundred films from 1940 to the present. Imbuing the language of film with the lyricism so praised in his novels, Christopher draws from his vast knowledge of literature to explore the genre's numerous influences. (Although it was a French critic who coined the term “film noir,” Christopher argues that Americans had been shooting films in the genre years even before the term was invented.) Citing cultural, social, and historical influences from all over the world, he effortlessly guides us through the labyrinth.
This edition includes a new afterword and expanded filmography, making this bold and thoroughly researched book more relevant and comprehensive than ever.

Publishers Weekly

Film is perhaps the most American of art forms, and film noir is easily the most American of its genres, a dark mirror that momentarily captures our ever-changing culture. In his new book, poet (Five Degrees and Other Poems) and novelist (The Soloist) Christopher guides readers into the labyrinth of the genre's gritty, urban underworld with its ruthless gangsters, hard-boiled detectives, femmes fatales and other fringe elements. Intellectually stimulating, thoroughly researched and excellently written, the book draws on a myriad of intellectual sources, from Roland Barthes to Marshall McLuhan. Christopher handily deconstructs the essence of film noir and shows the exchange of influences between the noir sensibility and every other aspect of American culture, from the paintings of Edward Hopper to the new role of women in the 20th century to the cultural paradigm shift of the war years and the atomic age. He discusses multitudes of films, from classics like Double Indemnity to neo-noirs like Chinatown, and, notably, a thorough and complex interpretation of the recent The Usual Suspects. Christopher writes with the mind of a scholar and the heart of a poet-incisive, metaphorical, illuminating and artful, yet without conceit or grandiosity. This fascinating book will be a treat for film buffs, film professionals and everyone in between. (Mar.)