The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781611680478)

Noir is among the most popular, acclaimed, and critically assessed film styles of all time. The unfortunate consequence is an ever-growing divergence between fans and scholars with regard to goals and methods for appreciating and studying noir. The Maltese Touch of Evil aims to bridge that gap. Based on a series of popular podcasts, this unique and inspired investigation of film noir sets out to examine the case of noir more closely, and in the process reconfigures the critical evidence on noir that has been presented to date. The Maltese Touch of Evil reproduces and re-sequences nearly 150 still images from 31 great films, laying them out with the authors' informed and entertaining insights into the significance of each shot. The result is a de facto meta-film noir, a celebration of the genre that shows how these films are themselves "constrained" texts whose carefully calculated visual forms simultaneously generate narrative and critical commentary on that narrative. You will never look at film noir the same way again.

Author: Shannon Scott Clute,Richard L. Edwards
ISBN-10: 1611680476
ISBN-13: 9781611680478
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
Language: English
Published: 12/13/2011
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 8.94h x 6.04w x 0.93d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2012