Hegemony, popular culture and geopolitics: the Reader's Digest and the construction of danger

Air power was a contested military strategy during the first half of the 20th century. During World War 2, the doctrine of air power became a dominant part of US national defence contributing to the nationalisation of air space. In this paper I raise parallels between the rise of the doctrine of air power in the US during World War 2 and the concerns about national security following the attacks on September 11, 2001. The visual and spatial logics of air power generate a 'cosmic view' that unifies and fixes targets from the air. Yet, this articulation of nationalism is challenged by the current practices and conditions of warfare.

Mobility and war: the cosmic view of US 'air power'

and dystopian science fiction: in the center would be Double Indemnity, and at either margin Cat People and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But this arrangement would leave out important titles. There is in fact no completely satisfactory way to organize the category, and nobody is sure whether the films in question constitute a period, a genre, a cycle, a style, or simply a "phenomenon."' Whatever noir "is," the standard histories say it originated in America, emerging out of a synthesis of hard-boiled fiction and German Expressionism. The term is also associated with certain visual and narrative traits, which some commentators have tried to localize in the period between 1941 and 1958. Others contend that noir began much earlier and never went away.2 One of the most comprehensive (but far from complete) references, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's Film Noir: An Encyclopedia of the American Style, begins in 1927 and ends in the present, listing over 500 motion pictures of various stylistic and generic descriptions.3 Encylopedic surveys of the Silver and Ward type can be educational and entertaining, but they also have a kinship with Jorge Luis Borges's fictional work of Chinese scholarship, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which contains a whimsical taxonomy of the animal kingdom: those belonging to the Emperor; mermaids; stray dogs; those painted with a fine camel's-hair brush; those resembling flies from a distance; others; etc. Unfortunately, nothing links together all the things discussed as noir-not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings. Little wonder that no writer has been able to find the

American Film Noir: The History of an Idea

Film noir is a notoriously complex concept to define. Since a complete study of the stylistics of film noir has not yet appeared, this thesis, integrated in the area of film studies, is an endeavour to come to terms with film noir and film genre in a number of ways, and is essentially an earnest attempt at reexamining through a process of iconographic analysis this descriptive term applied to American films of the early forties to the late fifties. This project concentrates on the following research question: can film noir be regarded as a cinematic genre as such? The cinematic and social backgrounds to film noir are outlined so as to understand this cinematographic phenomenon as an extension of the literary hard-boiled movement, a subversive worldview that blatantly set itself in opposition to the self-promoting American myths that had marked many Depression-era Hollywood films. Specific cultural movements and socio-political events, psychoanalysis, structuralism and auteurism will be explored, as they all have helped contextualise noir patterns, and enabled the term film noir to gradually gain authority in American film criticism. The films to be analysed focus on specific visual symbols and cinematographic elements (like lighting techniques and photography), and their iconographic signification will be examined from a semiotic perspective. Through the notions of the Saussurian “sign” and the Peircean “icon”, it is intended to demonstrate how the film symbols in noirs give rise to signifiers which are emphatically indexical, that is, how they crosscut from one symbol (or event) to another, directing and constraining the spectator’s attention. The thesis then concludes that film noir, for reasons of its complexity and indefinition, cannot be considered and understood as a film genre, and that its visual style (the dominant aspect of noir) spans a number of genres serving the purpose of stressing the disenchanted aftermath of the war, represents the underside of American urban life, and most especially emphasises uncertainty, anxiety, and the dark side of human existence.

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Sources, signification and genre stability in American Film Noir

(2002). Looking American: Louise Dahl-Wolfe's Fashion Photographs of the 1930s and 1940s. Fashion Theory: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 45-60.

Looking American: Louise Dahl-Wolfe's Fashion Photographs of the 1930s and 1940s

Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950

The appeal of the structuralist movement of the 1960s derived from its bold claim that all aspects of culture could be understood as structures, or as products of structural operations, that were linguistic in nature. Cultural critics were encouraged to demystify the apparent chaos of social reality by using semiotic analysis to identify the limited set of generative "deep structures" constant within the inexhaustible varieties of cultural activity and experience. One result of such an undertaking was the specification of significant similarities between the writing of literature and the writing of history. Historians have traditionally claimed both that their work constitutes a unifying of science and art and that their practice is distinct from those of science and art. Structuralism refigured this apparent confusion by pointing to the undeniable deep structure of narrative which likened historiographic productions to literature. Furthermore, the claim of affinity between history and science was seriously challenged as subsequent studies of narrative described the realist text (whether in literature or in history) as a suspect representational endeavor. It was demonstrated that the defining properties of narrative render it formally, and thus necessarily, inadequate to the task of representing the totality of material social reality. In simplest form, a narrative foregrounds the individual agency of a set of characters and also structures a cause and effect sequence of actions leading to a designated endpoint (closure). Such a textual form, applied to a historical

Dana Benelli

Papers

Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940-1950

History, Narrative, and Innocence Unprotected