Me: "So, exactly what year was it in which no dark and
sinister crime film was produced?"
Jim: "Gee, I thought I said that, too. Roughly (and
the operative word there is roughly) 1964. This doesn't mean,
by the way, that if you find one or two produced or released
on '65 or '66, that the point fails. . .
. The question here is whether or not there were B&W
crime films that are identifiable by the visual stylistics
associated with film noir after roughly 1964."
That was not my question, as you can see above. You rewrote
my question to make it fit your definition. I did not ask
when noir ended. I did not ask when B & W crime films
stopped being made. I simply asked if there was a single year
in which dark and sinister crime films were absent.
That said, I do recognize a difference between classic noir
and later noir, just as there is a difference between the
Golden Age Batman, the Silver Age Batman and whatever later
period Batmans are called. That's why I like the idea of
period. I'm perfectly willing to agree with you that that
type of noir film ended around 1964 (even if I still argue
the parameters that define it), but I'm not willing to say
noir films ended then. As you have noted, though, this is
more a matter of application than definition. In his book on
Noir Film, Paul Duncan broke them down into noir, post-noir
and neo-noir. That works for me.
However, I'd say much the same applies to written noir and
hardboiled. And I'd say that it went through the same
hibernation you claim for noir films. Although the old
authors continued to write new books, very few new authors
started tilling the land in the '60s and early '70s, as spy
books flooded the genre market. For instance, Michael
Collins's Dan Fortune was one of very few new PIs introduced
in the '60s. Robert B Parker did much to revive the genre
when he came along. And he was very self-conscious in his
debt to Chandler. However, he made some very influential
changes, too, and became a leading light of the new period of
private eye fiction. The culture had changed, so its
hardboiled fiction did, too. And that's why I like the idea
of period in fiction, too.
Mark
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