6. The afterlife of noir

Abstract

Noir continues to be an unusually flexible, pervasive, and durable mood or narrative tendency, embracing different media and different national cultures. Its moods and imagery have been appropriated across the range of filmmaking practice. Will film noir—or indeed any film—survive in the decades to come? ‘The afterlife of noir’ explains that feature-length noir hasn’t disappeared, but the new digital media environment may impact the genre. It considers the problems with creating lists of film noirs and sub-categorization. Depending on how we use the term noir, we can make it stand for a dead period, a nostalgia for something that never quite existed, or an ongoing form.