Out of the Past and Into Flares: Neo-Noir in 70s America

As political corruption, disillusionment with 1960s optimism, and growing outrage over the Vietnam War became increasingly pertinent in the United States in the early 1970s, Hollywood’s reins were taken over by a generation mostly born during its “Golden Age”. Innately conscious of genre conventions and feeling an affinity with the psychological destabilisation of the immediate post-World War II era, filmmakers and audiences were, as noted by Paul Schrader in his iconic and influential 1972 essay “Notes on Film Noir”, “again taking a look at the underside of the American character”.

Adapting and reinventing the forms of Hollywood’s ’40s and ’50s crime procedurals and melodramas without the restrictions of Production Code censorship, “neo-noir” of the ’70s further heightened the genre’s sense of alienation and moral ambivalence through an even deeper pessimism, ironic self-referentiality and an autumnal melancholy, and through the careful deployment of ageing figures from the genre’s classic period such as Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) and John Huston in Chinatown (1974).

These films also channelled the confusion and disillusionment of their era by recasting noir’s world through the lens of contemporary filmmaking, replacing the high-contrast black-and-white imagery of classic crime cinema with, for example, the sun-stroked haziness of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) or the murky darkness of Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971).

This season surveys a variety of works made both within and outside of the Hollywood system, roughly spanning the period from the close of the ’60s to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of Watergate in 1974, exploring how America’s fractured psyche was reflected on screen during this vibrant and chaotic period.