Staging Murders: The Social Imaginary, Film, and the City

Klein, Norman M.

doi:10.1353/wan.1998.0033

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Just as the city mysteries of Poe, Balzac and other largely forgotten sensationalist authors of a century earlier 'registered the dreaded rise of the metropolis, film noir registered its decline, accomplishing a demonization and an estrangement from its landscape in advance of its actual abandonment'. 25 It was precisely this quest for racial and social distinction that led one Saturday Evening Post writer to compare the 'human tides . .…”

Section: City/suburbmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War

Farish

2003

cultural geographies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also ushered in an era of anxious urbanism in the USA. Despite its status as the inheritor of European modernism, the champion of capitalism and the centre of a rapidly globalizing popular culture, America still struggled with the contradictory results of urbanization and military supremacy. In this essay, I bring political and urban geography together in a study of American cities and their role as strategic environments in the developing geopolitical conflict of the Cold War. New technologies such as the atomic bomb prompted a diverse wave of lurid disaster scenarios, as well as subsequent scientific attempts to contain, control and reduce risk and danger. Whether considered or far-fetched, these schemes were profoundly geographical, and borrowed much from the logic of postwar social science. In subtle yet pervasive ways they contributed to the prominent discourses of urban decline and suburbanization, and thus to the changing material fabric of postwar American cities.

show abstract

Section: City/suburbmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War

Farish

2003

cultural geographies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In film, the result was a liminal and unique form of movie, situated``between Europe and America, between high modernism and blood melodrama, and between low-budget movies and art cinema'' (Naremore, 1998, page 236). Although results were all too often``delusional journeys into panic and conservative white flight'' (Klein, 1998, page 89), the location of noir at the convergence of modernism and popular culture is precisely the source of its importance to film theorists, cultural historians, and urban scholars.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Noir is instructive in its depiction of a lingering, depressed population that could possibly stand in for a diverse array of residents despite its resilient whiteness. Yet, as Norman Klein (1998), Julian Murphet (1998), and others have argued, the negative status assigned to noir's neighborhoods, and the alienation of the suburban middle class (also the target market of film noir) from these spaces, resulted in depictions of fearful, bewildered, but industrious white males moving quickly through dehumanized but nonetheless racialized landscapes öshadowy terrains enjoyed voyeuristically by viewers located in much more comfortable places. Thus the paradigmatic condition of`lonely streets' is achieved only after significant erasures, and the retention of an existential authenticity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cities in Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir

Farish

2005

Environ Plan D

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper historicizes American cities after the Second World War through the rich motif of noir literature and film. But, in doing so, the paper is also a critical consideration of noir's work in urban studies. Noir has been drawn, often usefully but also unfortunately, away from its referents, from the terrain that it most directly summons but also from the spaces in which its contradictions are most apparent. Moving from a discussion of the distractions of Chinatown to contextual themes such as mobility and ruin, the paper links noir criticism and noir texts with broader debates in postwar urbanism and modernism. As just part of these discourses, noir not only is irreducible to certain essences, but can potentially perform the opposite role, challenging conventions of urban understanding and practice. The result would be a more detailed and subtle account of modernism's American geographies.

show abstract

Breaking Bad, Making Good: Notes on a Televisual Tourist Industry

Tzanelli

Yar

2014

Mobilities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores emerging intersections between the consumption of mediated popular culture and the real and imagined topographies within which those representations are framed. Through an examination of the 'televisual tourism' centred around the successful TV series Breaking Bad, we scrutinise the multiple modes of sensorial and embodied travel experience enjoyed by fans of the show as they consume their way around the show's sites, scenes, and tastes in the city of Albuquerque . This exploitation of media textuality through fan tourism is, we suggest, centred upon a carefully managed commodification of crime, criminality and transgression.

show abstract

Staging Murders: The Social Imaginary, Film, and the City

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War

Disaster and decentralization: American cities and the Cold War

Cities in Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir

Breaking Bad, Making Good: Notes on a Televisual Tourist Industry

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About