Ominous Faultlines in a World Gone Wrong: Courmayeur Noir in Festival Randy Malamud
Ominous Faultlines in a World Gone Wrong: Courmayeur Noir In Festival Randy Malamud In the sublime shadows of the Italian Alps, Courmayeur Confidential, Mulholland Drive, The Dark Knight trilogy), Noir In Festival’s 23-year run suggests America’s monop- hyper-noir (even ‘noirer’ than noir! Sin City, Django Un- 1 oly on this dark cinematic tradition may be on the wane. chained), and tech noir (The Matrix, cyberpunk) it remained The roots of film noir wind broadly through the geogra- a made-in-America commodity. phy of film history. One assumes it’s American to the core: Courmayeur’s 2013 program proved that contemporary Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, Dashiell Hammett. But noir, like anything poised to thrive nowadays, is indubita- au contraire, the term itself (obviously) emanates from bly global. Its December event featured Hong Kong film- a Gallic sensibility: French critic Nino Frank planted the maker Johnny To’s wonderfully macabre comedy, Blind flag when he coined ‘‘film noir’’ in 1946. He was discussing Detective (with the funniest crime reenactment scenes American films, but still: it took a Frenchman to appreci- ever); Erik Matti’s Filipino killer-thriller On the Job; and 2 ate them. Or maybe the genre is German, growing out Argentinian Lucı´a Puenzo’s resonantly disturbing Wakol- of Weimar expressionism, strassenfilm (street stories), da, an adaptation of her own novel about Josef Mengele’s 3 Lang’s M. 1960 refuge in a remote Patagonian Naziphile community. In fact, film noir is a hybrid which began to flourish in The Black Lion jury award went to Denis Villeneuve’s 1940s Hollywood, but was molded by displaced Europeans Enemy, a Canadian production adapted from Jose´ Sarama- (Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger) and go’s Portuguese novel The Double (and with a bona fide keenly inflected by their continental aesthetic and philo- binational spirit).
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