PADRAIC KILLEEN, 2022, New York, Bloomsbury, pp. 271, $162.00 (cloth)
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow Kevin Brianton, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Film noir is characterized by its dark and pessimistic atmosphere, typically depicting crime, corruption, and moral ambiguity. In The Dark Interval: Film Noir, Iconography and Affect,Padraic Killeen begins his book by arguing against a strict definition for film noir and for a passion towards the genre. It is a promising start. Killeen argues that ‘noir cinema has produced some of our culture’s most riveting images of the human in strange intervals of stillness, detachment and suspended time.’ Killeen hopes to draw these ideas out further by employing the work of various philosophers, critics, and thinkers across a wide range of disciplines. Killeen is careful to separate, “The protagonists of noir are people who lapse into crime, collapse into love, fall from grace, lose their way, lose their minds.” He wants to focus, however, on a ‘temporal lapse, [or] a lapse into a time that seems outside of time’. (p.8)
For full review see
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01439685.2023.2232151
Cinema history 