Miami Film Noir :: Film Cinema Movies

MIAMI NOIRWe have much to learn from Mike Davis, CITY OF QUARTZ (Vintage, 1992) who discusses the stupid effects that the representations of Los Angeles in hardboiled novels and their translation into film noir cinema had on the protrude and myth of that city.Together they radically reworked the metaphorical figure of the city, using the crisis of the ticker class (rarely the workers or the poor) to expose how the dream had become nightmare. . . . It is hard to misinform the damage which noirs dystopianization of Los Angeles, together with the exiles European intellectuals living and working in L.A. denunciation of its fashion urbanity, inflicted upon the accumulated ideological capital of the regions boosters. Noir, often in illicit shackle with San Francisco or New York elitism, made Los Angeles the city that American intellectuals love to hatred (although, paradoxically, this seems only to increase its fascination for postwar European intellectuals). As Richard Lehan has em phasized, plausibly no city in the Western world has a to a greater extent negative image. . . . It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the paramount bloc of cultural conflict in Los Angeles has always been about the construction/ explanation of the city myth, which enters the material landscape as a design for hypothesis and domination (Davis, 20-21).Miami, most notably in the works of Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford, and in the television system series MIAMI VICE, has received more or less of the same treatment, belatedly, or in a post- or neo- noir modality of the writing style. . As Davis noted, noir was like a transformational grammar turning all(prenominal) charming ingredient of the boosters arcadia into a sinister equivalent (38). We need to separate out those aspects of this noir/booster conflict that are generic and those that are proper(postnominal) to Miami. Boosterism is a fundamental feature of Miamis existence. The same paradoxes of attraction are an a lpha part of Florida tourism. However, noir carries with it a state of caput, an atmosphere and mood, that are specific to the genre and may or may not have anything to do with the affectionateness of place specific to our zone.In any case, we should keep in mind that a book about the mythical America of crime writers includes some discussion of the Miami River setting. The Interviewer, John Williams, spoke with James Hall, author of the hard-boiled weep LINE, as they rode in Halls boat on the bay near the rivers mouth.