What an interesting find! From the pen of James Kennaway, a historian of medicine at Durham University with an interest in popular culture, this detailed account of the shifting representation of the nature, hidden dangers and even strategic uses of music now arrives. In the five main chapters of Kennaway’s study, music and disorder, nervous […]
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Author: Dr. A. Ebert
Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy by Robert B. Pippin (2012)
Whenever you hear a character in the next film noir you are watching say something that sounds a lot like sarcasm, heavy irony or simply like the words of a doomed man… you may have caught one of the moments Professor Pippin uses to build a whole theory. Build it around the attitude, not the […]
In Lonely Places. Film Noir Beyond the City by Imogen Sara Smith (2011)
There seem to be specific instances that make a particular type of movie clearly identifiable as belonging to a certain group. For example, we like to have deserts, gunfights and horses if we watch a western movie, and we may look out for earrings, battleships, sabers and the Jolly Roger when we watch a pirates […]
Hello, Bonjour, Howdy… To all of you … out there: POPCULTUREshelf is here!
And this is where from now on you will find articles on popular culture, book reviews roughly from the fields of cultural studies, American studies, musicology, design, architecture, literary criticism and other stuff that keeps my mind (and yours, I guess) busy. This website usually is being updated every two weeks. However, this may also […]
The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman (2012)
Let us put aside for a moment the rather usual and thus “uncritical” approach to the USA in the 1940s and 1950s as a cultural, political and national whole; and now let us try to experience that world through the eyes of a fictional character in a Film Noir. Then we would sense the many […]
Film Noir Graphics: Where Danger Lives by Alain Silver and James Ursini (2012)
So there comes another promising title by professional collaborators team Alain Silver and James Ursini, two critics, collectors and authors of books and journals on movie directors, film industry, and film noir in particular. By their mere output, the two authors today form part of the canon of modern film noir appreciation. The reader then […]
SOULFOOD. Food & Music. Fat & Yummy + CD (2012)
Now, I would generally disagree with anybody who wanted to convince me of the crucial interrelatedness of a certain style of music and the corresponding style of cooking to complement the music. Suppose Mozart grew up eating not the fluffy pastry so typical of certain regions of Austria, but instead, let’s say smoked salmon and […]
Out of the Shadows: Expanding the Canon of Classic Film Noir by Gene D. Phillips (2011)
Since the last two years saw an enormous wave of reissues of vintage crime novels – mostly out of print and now hard to find hard-boiled mystery – often being the source document for movies of the film-noir genre, it is not at all surprising to witness a growing interest in the movies of that […]