"If hard-boiled novels found a new glamour in grit, film noir perfected the look."

Hard-boiled, hard-edged and Hollywood

OLIVER HARRIS

"If hard-boiled novels found a new glamour in grit, film noir perfected the look. The essays in Kiss the Blood off My Hands seek fresh angles on a genre that has attracted so much scholarship that the academic field has its own worn tropes: German Expressionism, post-war ambience, gender politics. Several essays in Robert Miklitsch’s edited collection advance the study of film noir by attending to previously neglected aspects of style: sound, for example (Krin Gabbard looks at love songs; Neil Verma places the genre back in the lost context of the period’s hugely popular radio dramas, an old technology recovered via digital means). In a similar vein, Vivian Sobchack considers the use of back projections to convey the impression of driving: a cost-cutting measure turned to its own expressive ends in his chosen example, Detour (1945), where these juddering views can convey inner torment as effectively as any retrospective voiceover."