NOIR AND THE URBAN IMAGINARY

By

Sean Maher B.C.A (Film/TV), MA (Film/Theatre),

MA.hons. by Research (First Class)

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Research)

School of Film and Television, Creative Industries Faculty,

Queensland University of Technology

2010

Principal Supervisor: D.Prof. Stuart Cunningham

Associate Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Geoff Portmann

 KEY WORDS

Blade Runner Modernism

Brisbane Line Modernity

Chinatown Neo Noir

Cinematic City Postmodernism

Film Noir Postmodernity

Historiography Urban

Imaginary Urbanism

Los Angeles Urban Theory

SHORT ABSTRACT

Noir and the Urban Imaginary is creative practice based PhD research comprising critical
analysis (40%) exegesis (10%) and a twenty-six minute film, The Brisbane Line (50%). The
research investigates intersection of four elements; the city, the cinema, history and
postmodernity. The thesis discusses relationships between each of the four elements and what
cinematic representation of cities reveals about modern and postmodern urban experience and
historicisation. Key concepts in the research include, urbanism, historiography,
modernity postmodernity, neo-noir.

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 TABLE of CONTENTS

Supplementary Material...vi

Statement of Original Authorship...vii

Acknowledgements....viii

Preface....xii

Introduction.....15

Praxis16

Methodological approach and Thesis Structure...19

Chapter One: Making Imaginary Sense of the Rational City

Introduction..........22

Urban Culture and the City..23

From Urban Studies to Urban Theory..25

Rise of the Symbolic Economy of Cities.....28

New Urban Economy...30

Interpretative Approaches: Implications of the Los Angeles School of Urbanism..32

Spatial City...36

Cinematic Intersections....37

The City as Image....40

The Cinematic City as History.....42

Conclusion45

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Chapter Two: Film Noir and Los Angeles: Imagining History in the

Most Contemporary City

Introduction......................................47

Los Angeles the Non-Conformist49

The Historical Void..52

Los Angeles Hollywoods Blank Screen.55

In the Shadow of HOLLYWOOD...57

Dark Crystal: Los Angeles and Reservoirs of Noir.....59

Film Noir as Historiography: Inventing Place in Los Angeles....61

The Specifi-city of Noir...65

Political and Cold Noir.71

Los Angeles the Dark Mirrored Labyrinth...73

Conclusion75

Chapter Three: Neo Noir the Postmodern Genre

Introduction .....77

Film Noir Style to Neo Noir Genre..79

From Out of the Past....81

Post Hollywood....82

From B-Movie to Art Film: Godards Gun Play..85

The Progeny of Film Noir: 1970s Neo Noir.87

Centrifugal Neo Noir89

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 Neo Noir as the Los Angeles Genre.91

Los Angeles the Frontdrop...92

Neo Noir Textual Play..93

Simulations and Simulacrum: Jamesons End of History, Baudrilliards End

of Reality..96

Temporal Twin Cities: Chinatown and Blade Runner 99

The Anti-Nostalgia of Chinatown..100

Los Angeles Reel...104

Blade Runner: The Los Angeles of Past-Present-Future Tense.....107

Quiet on the Set of Simulacra!...................................................................................110

Celluloid Materiality and Reality...112

Los Angeles and the Psychogeography of Noir.....114

Conclusion..119

Chapter Four: The Brisbane Line and Creative Practice Research

Introduction................................................................................................................121

Critical and Creative Pathways..121

Australian Noir?.........................................................................................................123

Built Environment Shadows...127

Sydney Simulacrum...128

Historical Research as Textual Resonance.129

Four Social History Influences...133

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 The City in Australian Film Imaginary or Imagined?.............................................142

Studio Cities...145

Archival Memory...147

Conclusion..153

Conclusion.155

Bibliography..........158

Filmography......168

Appendix

Ethical Clearance....176

Supplementary Material

1 X DVD The Brisbane Line (28mins.)

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Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for
an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and
belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person,
except where due reference is made.

Signature

Date: 16/11/10

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As with all PhD journeys this has been a long one. A key moment occurred as far back as
1994 when I was studying for my Masters degree at the University of New South Wales
(UNSW). I attended a seminar where Stuart Cunningham discussed his latest publication,
Framing Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and both Stuart and his
presentation left a lasting impression on me.

By the end of 1994 when I was accepted into the Masters Honours program at UNSW my
then supervisor, Assoc. Prof Dr Peter Gerdes and I devised a thesis inspired by Stuarts
cogent argument in Framing Culture on the need for greater intellectual engagement of
cultural policy and policy making by cultural theorists, arts practitioners and arts and
humanities researchers. Three years later the result was my Masters honours thesis,
Structural Reorganisation of Australian Feature Film Funding Policy under Division 10BA.
Within a year of completing that research I was employed by Jock Given at the
Communications Law Centre (CLC) as a policy researcher, the same place where Stuart had
written Framing Culture. Funded by the Australian Film Commission my task at the CLC
was to write a report on the internationalisation of the Australian television production sector.
In 2001 I presented the reports findings at the Australian Broadcasting Authoritys annual
conference in Canberra where I once again met Stuart Cunningham.

By the end of 2001 I was working at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School
(AFTRS) in Sydney where I was lecturing in Australian film and media policy as well as co-
ordinating visits of personnel from the various film funding bodies. In this production
intensive environment I also reconnected to my filmmaking practice. Working alongside PhD
candidate Richard Smith and Dr Jane Roscoe the topic of me commencing a PhD was
constant. At AFTRS I again came across Stuart and the developments occurring in Brisbane
at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Browsing the QUT website I gazed
enviously northward to Queensland and the fusion of theory, practice, policy and research
that was occurring under the innovative title of the newly launched Creative Industries
Faculty that had been jointly engineered by Stuart Cunningham and John Hartley. In 2005, it
was then announced that Stuart had received Centre of Excellence funding for Australias
first research centre into Creative Industries Innovation, the only centre of its kind in
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Australia not Science and Technology based, which it remains. With this development I
could postpone my PhD no longer and I immediately called Stuart and requested he supervise
me as a PhD student at QUT.

In 2006, thanks to Stuarts acceptance of my PhD proposal I relocated to Brisbane with my

wife Emma and two children, Charlotte and Isabelle, and the rest, as they say is history.

Ever since I arrived at QUT Stuart Cunningham has provided me with unwavering
supervisory support that would be the envy of any PhD candidate. Fulfilling all my
expectations I have benefited enormously from Stuarts advice, expertise, mentoring, rigor,
breadth of knowledge and ideas. His relentless schedule has never compromised his
commitment to both me and my research. Stuart has always been available and his feedback
has been poignant, challenging, insightful and while sometimes relentless and unforgiving,
always of the highest intellectual calibre. I am eternally grateful to have been in his orbit
these past four years and to have been the beneficiary of his razor sharp intellect and warm
generosity. Stuart, I had a lot of expectations you may not have been aware of but you easily
exceeded them. You are a true mentor and inspiration. Thank you!

My Associate Supervisor and now colleague, Assoc. Prof. Geoff Portmann, has had the
patience of a Saint with this resource hungry filmmaker, teaching colleague and occasional
vanishing researcher. Geoff has guided the creative practice dimensions of the research
overseeing the film from idea to script through endless cuts like the truest of mentors. I
admire your wisdom, patience and especially dedication to all things Story! Thank you Geoff
for all your creative insights and dedicated collegial support.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to each of my colleagues in Film and TV at QUT
who, in the lead up to my submission have been like PhD midwives; Prof. Alan McKee,
Helen Yeates, Dr Jon Silver, Wayne Taylor, Jeanette McGown, Peter Schembri and Michael
Noonan. Alan McKee is an inspiration to all of us, working alongside him is almost too
much fun, reminding me of the bountiful days I used to spend with Dr Jane Roscoe and now,
Dr Richard Smith, at AFTRS. Helen Yeates is a true Sage not to mention a cosmopolitan bon
vivant, thank you for your intellectual inspiration and helping Brisbane to feel like home. Dr
Jon Silver has provided invaluable support and advice especially in the final stages. Like the
best of Executive Producers and Producers Jon has never let me lose sight of the Big Picture
and I look forward to our continued friendship and partnerships. Jeanette McGown has
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guided me through the dark labyrinth that can be part of the management of QUT
undergraduates. Not only a teaching inspiration, Jeanette has the sharpest editing eye in the
business who, with laser like accuracy, can detect a single extraneous or out of place frame.
Wayne Taylor was my coffee pal until he took an ascetic turn and gave up the dark bean and
for which I remain forever remorseful. Wayne may have missed his true calling as a coffee
merchant come viticulturalist but all his students and the art of cinematography thank him for
not listening. Peter Schembri has been a fellow PhD journeyman, to whom my only advice
now is to keep going, there is a finish line! Michael Noonan is another fellow PhD traveller,
filmmaker, colleague and teacher who has demonstrated unrivalled fortitude and stamina
during the course of his candidature and been an inspiration and great friend.

Rebecca Wolgast, Producer of The Brisbane Line, is a QUT alumnus extraordinaire and has
been my partner in crime in the making of the film. I can only hope I have returned half the
support and favours you have extended to me. Thank you for your great company and
ceaseless dedication to the film and its post-PhD afterlife.

In general, from the day I arrived at QUT I have been the beneficiary of a widespread culture
of support that permeates the Creative Industries Faculty. From staff like Carine Chai and
Sally Hooke in the Equipment Loans Centre to Alice Stein our liaison librarian, QUT is rich
with teaching, research and support staff who nurture the intellectual and creative capital that
is generated here on a daily basis. I would like to acknowledge the many people and
colleagues who have assisted in all manner of ways over the past four years: Assoc. Prof. Dr
Paul Makeham, Dr Sue Carson, Prof. Dr Terry Flew, Prof. Dr Brad Haseman, Prof. Susan
Street, Dr Christina Spurgeon, Dr Emma Felton, Jenny Mayes, Dr Phoebe Hart, Tim Milfull,
Carol Williams, Jeanette Bellany, Britta Froehling, Kate Simmonds and Jessica Hicks. All
my undergraduate students, notably the 2008 BFA FTV cohort who crewed on The Brisbane
Line, especially Sascha Heredia, Pasquale Heredia, Chris Cosgrove and Rich Wang.

Special thanks to my family and friends. My parents, Lizette and Peter Baverstock, my
brothers, Douglas Maher and Mark Switzer, my other parents, Joan and Charles Armitage,
and my two cherished daughters, Charlotte and Isabelle Maher. My former MA Hons.
supervisor at UNSW, Assoc. Prof. Dr Peter Gerdes and former colleague and friend Dr. Jane
Roscoe, both of whom provided crucial support at the application stage. To each and every
one of you I thank you for your advice, support and friendship over the years.

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Finally, the one person without whom any of this would ever have been possible. My deepest
gratitude goes to my wife, Emma Armitage. Your faith in me and the support you extend to
all my efforts is unquantifiable. Thank you for your unwavering love and devotion, this is
equally yours.

Dedicated to Emma, a Londonner, always..

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Preface

The PhD thesis, Noir and the Urban Imaginary, consists of creative practice (50%), critical
inquiry (40%) and exegesis (10%) cumulatively pursued through the sum total of the three
integrated parts. The questions investigated by the research address how cities and their
cinematic representations sustain each other through a combination of experiential, historical
and symbolic functions and reveal vital aspects and functions of postmodern representation.

Although a film was figured into the design of the thesis from its inception, both critical and
creative practices operated in tandem throughout the research and each occasionally led. Due
to its scale in both conceptual and production terms the film warrants an equal weighting but
the theoretical, critical and textual analysis underpinning the research are not subordinate to
the creative practice.

The research for Noir and the Urban Imaginary has always been pursued holistically with
equal emphasis afforded to both dimensions of the critical inquiry and creative output. The
critical inquiry and the film have been approached as forming two parts of a single unified
research output. Pursuing critical and creative aspects in tandem enriched the overall research
process and has enabled lateral shifts across critical thinking, analysis, and creative problem
solving. Consequently, the critical inquiry extends beyond reflective exegetical analysis of
the creation of the film. Instead, the theoretical dimensions have functioned as key drivers of
ideas that often supplied vital inputs and direction to the filmmaking processes which in turn,
represents certain theoretical aspects that have been creatively applied.

The methodological aim of the research has been to wholly integrate creative practice within
rigorous theoretical inquiry. As a result, clear delineation between the creative and more
traditional research endeavours throughout the research are impossible to fully chart. At one
level, the film, The Brisbane Line, can be seen to operate at the level of applied theory. The
critical investigation certainly generated ideas that fed directly into the production process,
notably at the scriptwriting stage. However, a far less distinct separation occurred between
the filmmaking and theoretical investigation as different phases of the research shifted
between the various stages of the production process and draft chapters of the critical inquiry.
As each creative and critical component progressed the research was alternatively steered

xii
resulting in each mode periodically leading the research. Particularly in the early stages, the
theoretical investigation was clearly a leader and overtook development of the film at
scriptwriting stage. By the middle period of the research issues were raised by the
filmmaking processes that posed new questions and new directions around Brisbane history
that needed to be supplied back from the critical inquiry and final exegesis element detailed
in Chapter Four. The exchange between each of the components, creative, critical and
exegetical continued to oscillate in a complementary dynamic until the very end with final
chapter drafting and postproduction occurring simultaneously.

Research incorporating creative practice remains formative in the Creative Industries. The
thesis aims to contribute to understandings in the methodological relationship between
traditional research outputs and emerging creative practice ones. The experience of this
research has led me to understand the dynamic between critical inquiry, exegesis and creative
practice as one that is clearly not linear with one mode continually in front of the other. My
experience has revealed how creative work can reposition research questions and approaches
to the research in otherwise unimagined ways. Traditional theoretical formulations and
speculations are constantly re-invigorated when combining these research approaches with
the creative problem solving required, in this instance, by filmmaking and its associated
processes.

At the same time, the serious business of critical analysis had much to offer the creative
process and imaginative play essential to the scriptwriting and filmmaking phases. Film
theory covering psychoanalytical, genre, documentary, narrative and semiotics of cinema
meant textual analysis skills were forefront during the creative processes across pre-
production and scriptwriting, production and post-production. In an effort to engage the
many intertextual associations unleashed by noir my directorial and scriptwriting decision
making processes were calibrated by a system I developed during the theoretical phases
which I labelled the Semiotic Grid. In deploying it as a directorial tool, I later termed it
Story Grid, and I employed it as an essential shorthand for communicating to my crew the
directorial logic behind the creative choices that were designed to express narrative themes
visually through mise-en-scene and camera movements by way of motifs, framing and
montage.

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In conclusion, since the theoretical, exegetical and creative aspects of the research have been
approached and designed to function inextricably as a single research output readers are
advised to approach the thesis in the following manner. I recommend a chronological reading
of the theoretical chapters One to Three, followed by the Fourth self-reflective chapter.
Finally a viewing of the film will complete the reading process. In this way the film, as
creative practice, is positioned like a fifth and final chapter of the research where the ideas
and merits of the theoretical argument find creative application and capstone the research.

In terms of the life of the film beyond the purposes of this research it is planned that it will
find a broader audience amongst the film festival circuit followed by a free-to-air broadcast.

Sean Maher, June, 2010

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Introduction

The city and the cinema represent an inter-disciplinary knowledge domain extensive in
history, scale and scope. Cinema studies have consistently charted aspects of the relationship
between cities and their representation since the time of Vertov and the City Symphony films
of the 1920s. While cities occupy a large and vital part of the filmmaking imaginary,
understanding the relationship between both real and reel cities has increasingly caught
the attention of critics beyond cinema studies and been incorporated into a growing number
of disciplines. While it may be too inherently discursive to constitute a discipline unto itself,
according to Dietrich Neumann, in recent years the level of sustained critical analysis of the
relationship between the city and the cinema has led to the creation of a knowledge domain
sufficient to be labelled a field. The history of the cinematic interpretation of the city has
emerged as a new field of inquiry bringing together the history of art and architecture, urban,
social and cinema studies (Alsayyad, 2006, 258).

My thesis argument develops what film criticism has established is a highly attenuated
relationship existing between film noir and the modern city. Scholars like Edward
Dimendberg and James Naremore have delved extensively into this relationship between the
modern city and film noir and I extend this analysis arguing a similar relationship applies to
neo noir and the postmodern city. Although firmly originating in cinema studies the research
aims to broaden a film theory perspective on film noir and neo noir representations of cities
by taking account of urban theory and its insights into the relationship between cities, texts
and the symbolic functions surrounding representation of the city.

By targeting the established cinema studies areas of film noir and neo noir, the research
conducts an inquiry into the role each has played in rendering the modern and postmodern
city. By concentrating on the effect of film noir and neo noir on the representation of the
city, the research confines itself to a delineated area of cinematic representation that controls
the scale and scope of the subject at hand.

An essential frame of reference for the critical inquiry and creative practice has been the
relationship between Los Angeles, film noir and neo noir. By focusing on film noir and Los
Angeles it is possible to identify some key moments when film noir transitioned from a
modernist film style into a postmodern film genre and chart the impact of certain modernist
and postmodernist tendencies in the representation of the city. Understanding the relationship
15
between Los Angeles and its manifold cinematic representations demonstrates how filmic
saturation through film noir and neo noir renderings have effected processes of historicisation
that have led to the postmodern blurring between real and reel cities.

Both film noir and neo noir enjoy wide critical and popular currency but since they form
essential cornerstones of the research it is worth specifying how I have approached their
definitions. Film noir is the term originally applied to stylistic thematic tendencies in
American cinema that surfaced in the lead up to World War Two and beyond that literally
produced what the French critics, Chaumeton and Etienne foremost amongst them, termed
dark film or film noir.

For the purposes of this research I have been content to comply with the widespread
consensus across cinema studies that see the original cycle of film noir end just prior to 1960.
For many critics and scholars the demise of film noir can even be pin-pointed to a precise
title, Orson Welles Touch of Evil (1958). Films after this date and title that display similar
characteristics to the original cycle of film noir have been variously identified as neo noir,
proto neo noir and post- noir and Chapter Three discusses these taxonomical issues in greater
detail. For the purposes of a working definition across the research however, film noir refers
to crime thrillers, crime dramas, heist films and chase films amongst others that were
produced from the late 1930s up until the late 1950s but which obtained their status as film
noir retrospectively, critically identified as such after their time of production. Whereas, neo
noir refers to those post-1960s films, of similar content and expression but which consciously
employed noir stylistics and conventions against the rising currency and understanding of the
term film noir. The consciousness of film noir stylistics and functions in the operations of the
texts is, for the purposes of this research, a defining feature of neo noir and which
corresponds to film criticism consensus about the historical divide separating the two terms.

Praxis

As critical inquiry complementing creative practice research, this thesis pursues new
theoretical understandings of how historicisation of the city can be approached through
cinema and how this can be actively and creatively applied through a filmmaking practice.
Central questions asked by the research include: How does a film noir style differ from a neo

16
noir genre? What separates the relationship between film noir and the modern city and neo
noir and the postmodern city? Can neo noir be considered the first postmodern film genre?
Finally, how have cinematic cities played a role in the interpretation and historicisation of
actual modern and postmodern cities?

The work of theorists like Edward Dimendberg, Paula Rabinowitz, and James Naremore have
previously outlined some key dynamics existing between film noir and its representations of
cities and have provided crucial in-points for both the theoretical investigation and creative
practice approach. While the work of each of these three scholars will be discussed in detail,
the research also connects with recent studies conducted by film theorists and film historians
Robert Rosenstone, Vivian Sobchack, Marcia Landy and Alison Landsberg.

In Revisioning history film and the construction of a new past, Robert Rosenstone has
argued contemporary processes of historiography must take account of cinematic renderings
and the contributions that can be made from the production of over a century of audio visual
material. For Rosenstone, history captured both directly and indirectly by film will
increasingly challenge the written word:

The New History film also provides a series of challenges for written
history it tests the boundaries of what we can say about the past and how
we can say it, points to the limitations of conventional historical form,
suggests new ways to envision the past, and alters our sense of what it is.
(Rosenstone, 1995, 12)

A similar line of argument is pursued by Vivian Sobchack in The Persistence of History,

Marcia Landys, The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, Alison Landsbergs
Prosthetic Memory and the collection of writings in Memory and Popular Film edited by
Paul Grainge. What these film theorists engage is the challenge posed by over a century of
cinema and the production of audio visual material to historiographical approaches and
historical discourse.

Alongside film theory are the ideas and writings by urban theorists like Mike Davis, Darko
Suvin, Edward Soja, and Allen Scott, scholars associated with the Los Angeles School of
Urbanism, which has underscored my methodological approach. The writers and the school
17
have become synonymous with innovative approaches to urban studies that have given rise to
the critical framework known as Urban Theory and which is the focus of Chapter One.

Occupying an almost spectral presence behind many theorists and treaties on postmodernism
is Frederic Jameson. As the author of the seminal, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (1991), intersections with Jameson are inevitable in almost any discussion on
postmodernity. In my discussion I have positioned a number of central statements by
Jameson to function as moments of conjecture and negotiation. I have adopted this approach
because Jamesons body of work on postmodernity could easily have dominated the entire
discussion pursued in this research only to duplicate much of the critical disagreements that
have already been marshalled against his writings. While I remain engaged by Jamesons
position on a number of points about postmodernity I have also been assuaged by some of the
more carefully conducted rebukes. One of the most sustained and convincing challenges, with
perhaps some of the biggest implications, is conducted by Graham McPhee in The
Architecture of the Visible (2002). McPhee argues Jamesons position on the separation of
temporality from visual representation and spatiality in postmodernism is a fundamental
oversight. The poignancy of McPhees argument is based on his re-positioning of what
Jameson sees as the role of temporality within postmodern experience:

Jameson conceives of vision as purely spatial, and so the visual

intensification characteristic of postmodern culture is understood by him
as the breakdown of temporality. Butvision must be understood in
terms of the configuration of space and time, and that is a mistake to think
of it only in spatial terms: to conceive of vision as somehow purely
spatial means that its intensification can only be understood as the loss of
historicity and of what Jameson calls the retrospective dimension
indispensable to any reorientation of our collective futureHowever,
once the involvement of space and time in vision is remembered, the
technological intensification of visual experience need not be thought of as
necessarily blank and disabling, nor disorientation assumed to be a
permanent or fixed condition. (McPhee, 2002, 94)

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By offering a historical negotiation of the condition of postmodernity McPhees argument
has large implications for all inhabitants of the postmodern. McPhees perspective advocates
the possibility to reconnect with history and temporality in the determining effects of
postmodernity in our spatialised age. Alterations in the cultural landscape from which we
both experience and analyse our postmodern condition remains subject to history and
temporal engagements with it. For McPhee and others, we will inevitably emerge from the
confines of this post phase of modernity at some point and ameliorate some of its
disorientating effects, just when is not clear, but a time nevertheless.

As a renegotiation of postmodernity, this research has been conducted in the more optimistic
and resolute vein of McPhee and other critics who celebrate the possibilities of
postmodernitys effect on processes of historiography and the ability of visual media
technologies to imagine and construct vibrant representations and engender all manner of
social and cultural engagement. From the vantage point of my own filmmaking and critical
practice postmodernism is not just a totalising system governed by incoherence and
disorientation. As the only historical paradigm on offer, its altered co-ordinates not only
seem navigable and playful but are exhilarating to trace both critically and creatively.

Methodological Approach and Thesis Structure

Approaching the intersections between the city and the cinema was always going to pose a
challenge to issues of scale and scope, so the methodological approach has been essential to
maintaining strict parameters and ensuring each of the various inputs and approaches cohere.
The research has been conducted by employing the complementary methodologies under
qualitative analysis of critical and textual analysis, exegetical and self-reflective analysis and
creative practice. The three modes, critical, exegetical and creative operated in unison but at
different phases of the research individual modes would periodically lead. Postproduction on
the film ensured the decision making around the processes of creative practice persisted to the
very end with the final cut of The Brisbane Line concluding one week before completing the
Final Seminar draft of these chapters.

The research inputs and data sets that have gone into the thesis have spanned film theory,
film history, urban theory, urban history, cultural studies, social history, oral history and

19
photographic archives. Museum exhibitions have included the Museum of Brisbane, State
Library of Queensland, Brisbane Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane, NSW Police
and Justice Museum, Museum of Sydney and the British Film Institute, each of which
provided regular sources of information and inspiration.

The research is arranged across three theoretical chapters, one exegetical chapter and one
creative practice work, the twenty-six minute film, The Brisbane Line. In Chapter One, the
discussion outlines how urban analyses of the city have been increasingly opened up beyond
traditional social science approaches through the incorporation of textual analyses of literary,
cinematic and other creative texts. The chapter identifies the rise of urban theory as the basis
upon which analyses of the rational city, a traditional object of study of urban planning and
other social science disciplines, has expanded in an effort to take account of the impact of the
imaginary and symbolic city. Urban theory is seen to offer new possibilities for
comprehending junctures in the citys historical, social, cultural, economic, political and
imaginary formations. The rise of the symbolic city through urban theory means the
cinematic city has a renewed and vital context within which to assess its impact on urban
sense of place and lived experience.

In Chapter Two I focus on the role cinema has played in the construction of a Los Angeles
imaginary. The cinema that is emphasised is both the traditional hardware of the Hollywood
Studio infrastructure as well as the software of textual representation. The corpus of the
original twenty year cycle of film noir is discussed in terms of its role in constituting a
specific place-identity for Los Angeles, one that has been uniquely configured by its hosting
of the still dominant global image industry that is Hollywood.

In Chapter Three a case study approach taken on Chinatown and Blade Runner refocuses the
discussion of Chapter Two by charting the rise of neo noir as a genre and its relationship to
film noir, Los Angeles and postmodern representation. Together, Chapters Two and Three
map key intersections between a real Los Angeles of geography and history and a reel Los
Angeles of film noir and neo noir.

In Chapter Four, an exegetical discussion addresses the processes involved in making the
creative practice, The Brisbane Line. In this chapter I chart the creative processes involved in
designing a film that could realise the aims of the research and apply the thesis that films are
instrumental urban representations that can affect sense of place and urban history. To
20
contextualise the creative practice I detail the sources that contributed to the conceptualising
of the film and examine the occasional history surrounding the adoption of film noir and neo
noir filmmaking practices in the Australian national cinema.

A fundamental aim of the research has been to combine creative practice with a rigorous
theoretical inquiry into the postmodern representation of cities. The theoretical objective has
been the pursuit of a film history that exploits aspects of urban theory and postmodern
approaches to historiography. By pursuing creative practice within the research the intention
has been to apply the findings and principles discussed in the theoretical chapters in a
deliberate and creatively provocative manner. The critical analysis on neo noir, film noir and
the extraordinary positioning of Los Angeles within this history of cinema have shaped the
means by which an Australian neo noir film can be approached with a cinematically
neglected city like Brisbane at the centre of its narrative.

The rise of the modern city has been both literal and metaphoric across the twentieth century.
Cinema has been both an agent in this process and chronicler. With film noir we are
presented with a body of films that not only reveals a literal record of many of the physical
transformations occurring across the modern American city, but according to Edward
Dimendberg, something that also represents the arrival of a new cinematic form responding
to and perpetuating modernitys spatial reorganisation of American cities. The research seeks
to extend aspects of Dimendbergs argument into neo noir by tracing similar cause and effect
relationships with the postmodern city and applying some of these ideas through an urban
narrative film.

The thesis posits that the cinematic city is an essential component of the social imaginary
and symbolic economy of actual cities arguing the cinematic city is capable of delivering
textual meanings that can challenge and supplement more conventional aspects of urban
history and experience embedded in the physical city like its built environment, urban
planning and the rational narratives around its development. In order to fulfil the potential
offered by the cinematic city theorists need to collate and curate the body of work necessary
for a critical re-evaluation. Second, practitioners like filmmakers need to be reminded of the
potency and valency of combining cities and cinema, especially relevant in Australia one of
the worlds most urbanised of cultures but which has a tendency to overlook its urban
environments in its national cinema.

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Chapter 1 Making Imaginary Sense of the Rational City

Introduction

The postmodern city is the focus of what has recently become known as urban theory.
Comprising a field more than a discipline, urban theory constitutes a set of ideas drawn from
Marxist critical and political theory, urban geography, social theory and practices like
sociology. Urban theory combines each of these approaches in an effort to define key
relationships existing between the city, globalisation, twenty-first century capitalism and
postmodernity. This chapter outlines developments occurring within urban theory which
have informed the research and involve theoretical and conceptual intersections between
actual and imagined cities, between symbolic and cinematic cities.

The interdisciplinary nature of urban theory sees it drawing participants and practices from
across the social sciences, arts and humanities reflecting the critical convergences occurring
within postmodern criticism. Urban theory itself constitutes a key critical response to
contemporary urbanism, but crucially, it can also be seen as symptomatic of postmodernity
itself. A highly interdisciplinary discourse, urban theory reflects and embodies the historical
processes underpinning the paradigm shift from a previously delineated modernity into a far
more hybridised postmodernity.

The modern to postmodern paradigm shift indicates how the objective vantage points from
which modernity and its features were once assessed seem to have collapsed under
postmodernity. As the modernist foundations for detached and empirically aligned
perspectives have given way, they have been replaced by a diversity of imbricated and
relative ones under postmodernity. The repercussions on urban theory as a kind of
postmodern critical practice sees its analyses resist absolutes with a tendency to draw on
marginal and emerging critical and historical perspectives that challenge previously
hegemonic practices and viewpoints.

Urban theory is the source for innovative critical approaches to actual cities and their myriad
functions. Urban theory seeks understandings of the contemporary city and its globalised,
postmodern context and the role it affords to imaginary and symbolic renderings of the city is
a key consideration of the research. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter and thesis
22
investigation to survey the development of urban theory in its entirety, the intention is to
outline those features of urban theory that have informed the research by contextualising
connections between cinematic, fictional, symbolic and actual cities. By examining some of
the shifts away from a discipline of urban studies to the wider discussion and formulation of
a practice of urban theory, the focus is on how urban theory represents a critical re-
evaluation of the modern city and what it has identified as its growing symbolic economy.

Urban Culture and the City

As the physical embodiment and perhaps supreme manifestation of twentieth century

modernity, the modern city, or metropolis, has occupied a central place in discussions and
analyses of modernity from the time of the original urban theorists Walter Benjamin, Henri
Lefebvre and Georg Simmel. The writings of these three pioneers of urban culture variously
investigated how modernity was manifesting in the urban experience of Western culture and
how the city represented transformations in ways of life that ranged from work and
consumption patterns to the level of consciousness itself. In his most influential essay
Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Georg Simmel theorised on the impact the modern
metropolis could have on the psyche and inner lives of its population.

With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic,
occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town
and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The
metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of
consciousness than does rural life. (Simmel, 2005, 25)

For Walter Benjamin many of the essentials of modernity were characterised by intersections
between art and technology, while metropolitan life and the city of Paris, occupied the centre
of modernity. But like Simmel, Benjamin was also interested in the way the modern
metropolis was interpreted and encountered as a series of shocks. In discussing the work of
Baudelaire, Benjamin noted how the poet used shock to characterise movement in modern
urban space. Moving through [metropolitan] traffic involves the individual in a series of

23
shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in
rapid succession, like the energy from a battery (Benjamin, 1997, 175).

Henri Lefebvre saw the city as the ultimate site for exploring the complexities surrounding
urban processes of social configuration. According to Lefebvre, relations between spatiality,
society, and history needed to be understood and conceived in terms of a new spatiality, a
process that would de-abstract all social relations, whether they were linked to class, family,
community, market or the state. Lefebvre argued social relations needed to be interpreted on
the basis of their material and symbolic spatial relations. According to Edward Soja,
Lefebvre perceived that the,

urban problematic derives from the complex interaction between macro- and
micro-geographical configurations of city-space. When viewed from above,
these developmental geographies describe the overall condition and
conditioning of urban reality in general or global terms. Viewed from
below, they are more grounded in localized spatial practices and the
particular experiences of everyday life. The tensions and contradictions that
arise from these different scales of spatial specificity, as well as from the
contrasting perspectives used to interpret them, are resolved - or at least unfold
in a third process, which Lefebvre described most comprehensively as the
(social) production of (social) space.

(Soja, 2000, 10)

Lefebvre, like Benjamin and Simmel, articulated many of the social, cultural and economic
upheavals of modernity, the meta-context for the greater part of the twentieth century. For
each writer, the city and urban experience was undoubtedly the central prism through which
modernity manifested and they laid the foundations for critical and philosophical approaches
to urban culture.

24
From Urban Studies to Urban Theory

By the middle decades of the twentieth century critical approaches to the city had altered
considerably from the time of Lefebvre, Simmel and Benjamin. Ascendant discourses had
formed around the specialised and empiricist modes that had coalesced around urban studies.
Approaches like sociology, human geography, architecture and urban planning were
discretely arranged into disciplines and specialisations pursued in relative isolation from one
another. By the 1980s, into the 1990s, however, as Anthony King has outlined, new
directions and innovations in the areas of urban studies gained momentum producing
innovations that saw an increasing cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches to the city
(King, 1996, 1). For King, the multi-disciplinary approach to the city saw the hegemony of
the social sciences and their claim on the city challenged along with the sets of assumptions
that underpinned traditional urban studies. Multidisciplinary approaches increasingly drew
on cultural meanings contained within the city expanding the repertoire of data sets that could
be employed by urban analyses and leading to greater consideration of the role played by
cultural, creative and imaginary factors and their part in generating meanings in the city.

[T]he discourse of the city, at one time simply a privileged territory in the
social sciences on which generally white, western and usually male urban
sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, or city planners inscribed their
theoretical models, or where urban and architectural historians told their
different stories, has increasingly become the happy-hunting ground of
film theorists, poets, art historians, writers, television producers, literary
critics, and postmodern cultural connoisseurs of all kinds in the
humanities.

(King, 1996, 2)

It is this emphasis on documenting the cultural, imagined and more lived dimensions of the
city that characterises urban theory which began to employ cross disciplinary methodologies
informed by the rise of cultural studies. Urban theory not only jostled and challenged
conventional urban planning understandings but impacted discourses like history, sociology,

25
social geography, through to political science and Marxism, as it embraced cross and inter-
disciplinarity.

Across the social sciences themselves, methodological innovations have seen critical and
analytical approaches expanded to incorporate knowledge, ideas and insights offered by a
wider array of sources including fictional and other creative texts. Norman Denzin describes
these methodological innovations as representing a distinct turn of the social sciences toward
more interpretative, postmodern, and criticalist practices and theorizing (Denzin 2005, 191).
Methodological innovations in the social sciences parallel developments in urban theory
which has seen historical and rational analyses of the city freely incorporate creative, critical
and textual analysis of films, novels, poems, paintings, plays and other imagined renderings
much more readily than ever before.

As critical approaches to both the rational city and imagined city become more
intertwined, contemporary analyses associated with urban theory evidence the same
restructuring that is occurring within their object of study. Previously in urban studies, the
rational city described that object of study celebrated and promoted under modernity and
traditionally approached quantitatively through the social sciences and the disciplines of
anthropology, sociology, architecture, urban planning, urban history and urban geography.
Meanwhile, the richness, diversity, complexity and contradictory quality of the modern city
has produced innumerable creative treatments that have given life to the imaginary city
something that is approached qualitatively and textually. In these creative renderings the city
can be constructed as metaphor, symbol, history, backdrop, dramaturgy, design, commodity,
narrative and character.

As literary, cinematic, biographical, photographic and other symbolic and creative renderings
of the city are included in rational city analyses, the exchange in ideas and approaches to the
city has expanded the armoury that can be deployed to tackle comprehension of the modern
city and its inherent superabundance. During the twentieth century, the spectacular rise of the
modern city and its countless creative renderings has, in effect, played an active role in the
phenomenology of the city and its cultural way of life. Images of the modern city have been
pivotal in its development by relaying and recording key elements of its historical progress
and according to Allan Siegel, articulating its prismatic lived realities.

26
 It would be erroneous to talk of the city as a singular, unified social reality
that we have all experienced, participated in, or have an understanding of.
Such a city does not exist. More appropriate to the discussion are images
of a city, a multi-faceted city that represents ideological concepts,
economic forces, and social spaces that reflect a diversity of cultural,
historical, and geographical markers.

(Siegel, 2003, 143)

A conventional urban planning study like William Fultons, The Reluctant Metropolis, the
politics of urban growth in Los Angeles (2001) reflects how this traditional discipline has
opened up amidst the disciplinary raids of urban theory into the city. In discussing the history
of Los Angeles and its population explosion as waves of domestic US migrants flocked to the
city in the early part of the twentieth century, Fulton draws on those other texts that would
have sat outside inveterate urban studies analysis. Reaching beyond quantifiable studies and
reports Fulton acknowledges the way fiction, and in this case Raymond Chandlers, is able to
capture something conventional, empirical data could never account for but which fiction can
readily supply and provide insight into what Siegel described above as cultural, historical,
and geographical markers. In this example, Chandlers novels shed light onto lived aspects
of Los Angeles history, something a previous, traditional urban study would leave
statistically abstract.

Perhaps the most vivid source of information about the consequences of the
growth machine on Los Angeles is the writing of mystery novelist Raymond
Chandler, especially his novels The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely and The
Lady in the Lake. Chandler had a great eye for detail of all kinds, and the
details he provides us with about the Southern California landscape and its
people are filled with insight. In Farewell, My Lovely, published in 1940,
detective Philip Marlow visits a neighbourhood busybody living in a
transitional section of what we would now call South Central. Seeking to gain
her confidence, he admires her carved sideboard and says: I bet that side
piece was the admiration of Sioux Falls. She answers: Mason City. Yesser,
we had a nice home there once, me and George. Best there was. Just in that
27
 one exchange Chandler manages to convey volumes about the hopes and the
realities of Midwestern migrants living in Los Angeles in the 1930s.

(Fulton, 2001, 366)

While Chandlers prose only constitutes a small component of Fultons study, by including
and praising Chandler in this way Fulton acknowledges the way fiction can capture
subjective experience at a precise moment in the citys history and poignantly illustrates the
human dimension to what would otherwise be consigned to some kind of aggregated
demographic. Fulton states that literary accounts like Chandlers amount to one kind of
information. Yet clearly, it is a very different kind of information traditionally employed
by urban geographers and urban planners, one that has only recently been employed through
the influence of urban theory.

Rise of the Symbolic Economy of Cities

Over the past two decades urban theory has seen perspectives offered by traditional, rational
analysis of the city incorporate cultural perspectives in response to the marked changes
occurring in the material form of actual cities and their symbolic function. In no small part,
many of these developments in urban form can be seen as reactions to the Robert Moses
style of grand urban planning schemes and the impacts that have accrued over the course of
the modernist project in the twentieth century. Modernist urban planning appeared to have
reached its zenith with the construction of Brasilia by the Le Corbusier protg, Oscar
Niemeyer, principal architect, and Lucio Costa, principal urban planner. Designated the
capital of Brazil in 1960, its design aesthetic and urban planning intents have been under a
process of revision in the West ever since. The extreme rationalism of modernist urban
planning and the design logics in architecture synonymous with Le Corbusier and the
International Style have been challenged by movements positing grass roots urban
regeneration and renewal. As a counter modernist movement, the return to human scale and
community orientated design and planning rose to prominence in the 1960s and articulated by
Jane Jacobs in her landmark study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961),

28
The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric
failure and ignore empiric success (Jacobs, 1961, 24).

Concomitant with the challenge to top down urban planning approaches has been the rise of
the notion of the spatial formation of cities and the increased role of the symbolic economy of
postmodern cities. Both developments have witnessed a renewed emphasis and
acknowledgement of the primacy of the many cultural dimensions occurring within the city
leading urban theory to draw on relations between urban social formation and spatial
dimension originally articulated by Lefebvre.

A crucial development in the shift from the modern city to the postmodern urban is this
notion of spatial formation. One of the central challenges posed by ideas around spatial
formation and the symbolic economy is the sets of assumptions that have privileged notions
of economic determinism and the relationship between Base and Superstructure. In the
classical Marxist economic model Base is the economic engine comprised of land, labour and
capital. The organisation of Base and its operations effectively drive society determining the
shape, features and operations of the surrounding cultural Superstructure that provides the
society with its external cultural identity and forms. In traditional economic as well as
Marxist theory, Base drives the Superstructure and if society is ever to be transformed, or
revolutionised under Marxism, the control, ownership and re-distribution of all Base factors
was the central and defining objective. Transformations in Superstructure would inevitably
follow suit once the foundations of Base had been overturned.

According to urban sociologist Sharon Zukin, as cities have become the centre of culture, the
role of culture in cities has become a powerful means of controlling cities (Zukin, 2005,
282). For Zukin, while the Base economy of cities may have traditionally relied upon land,
labour and capital, increasingly these factors are driven by an aesthetic power and what she
describes as cities second and more abstract symbolic economy devised by place
entrepreneurs, officials and investors whose ability to deal with the symbols of growth yields
real results in real estate development, new businesses and jobs (Zukin, 2005, 283).

Zukins analysis and emphasis on the symbolic economy of the city raises questions
surrounding some fundamental principles behind theories of capital and relationships
between Base and Superstructure. In an approach typical of urban theory, Zukin pursues
areas of convergence between the symbolic and actual city. By examining the altered role of
29
Superstructure and the functions of elements like symbols and representations of the city,
analyses like Zukins seek to understand the contemporary city through its increasingly
complex symbolic economy which has the power to shape cities from within altering what
was once considered the secondary position of Superstructure.

The significance of urban theory is how it applies conceptual and critical frameworks that are
capable of rethinking the modernist rational city of Base economic determinants by taking
account of the imaginary and symbolic dimensions underpinning spatial formation. Rather
than approaching what was previously perceived to be real cities and their economic
hardware separate to their creative representations, urban theory approaches see the
postmodern urban as comprised of a complex amalgam of Base and Superstructure elements
that co-contribute to urban spatial formation.

Urban Space gains its meanings as a consequence of the activities carried

on within it, the characteristics of the people who occupy it, the form given
to it by its physical structures, and the perceptions with which people
regard it. Consequently, such space does not simply exist; it is instead a
social creation.

(Fainstein & Campbell, 1996, 10)

The change from urban studies to urban theory then is in the emphasis given to the factors
underpinning social creation as first raised by Lefebvre, and the increased role of cultural
and symbolic elements in shaping both external physical features of the city, as well as the
internal, experiential dimensions of the city that produces its spatialized reality.

New Urban Economy

The theoretical perspectives offered by urban theory form a fundamental critical response to
processes of Western post-industrialisation at the end of the twentieth century. The external
and internal changes wrought upon Western cities by these dramatic re-alignments of capital,
labour and resources in the globalising context of the twenty-first century has demanded a
critical re-evaluation of economic models and modes of urban discourse.
30
By addressing transformations emanating out of Herbert Marcuses Cultural Sphere or
Marxs Superstructure, urban theory challenges historical assumptions on the relationships
between Base and perceptions of its economic determinants against Superstructure and its
cultural dimensions, and what was traditionally perceived to be a unidirectional dynamic that
privileged the former over the latter. For Zukin, the rise of the symbolic economy that
coincides with Western post-industrialisation has resulted in a postmodern urban culture that
is now a much greater factor in economic directions and outcomes in cities:

With the disappearance of local manufacturing industries and periodic crises in

government and finance, culture is more and more the business of citiesThe
growth of cultural consumption (of art, food, fashion, music, tourism) and the
industries that cater to it fuels the citys symbolic economy, its visible ability
to produce both symbols and space.

(Zukin, 2005, 282)

Although the symbolic operations and functions of the modern city have a long history, with
the decline of traditional manufacturing industries against the growth and advances in
telecommunications and proliferation of media and entertainment synergies, the symbolic
dimensions of the city have expanded in both scale and significance. What is new about the
symbolic economy since the 1970s is its symbiosis of image and product, the scope and scale
of selling images on a national and even a global level, and the role of the symbolic economy
in speaking for, or representing the city (Zukin, 2005, 283).

The re-conceptualisation of the relations between culture and capital identified as social and
spatial re-configurations of postmodern urbanism and discussed by urban theorists like
Sharon Zukin, Edward Soja, Allen Scott and Michael Dear amongst others, has not gone
unchallenged. In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) through to Spaces of Hope (2000),
David Harvey has challenged postmodern perspectives on the altered role and determining
functions of culture. Harveys sustained critical output since the 1970s has insisted that
despite capitalism entering an information age and globalising era that coincides or enables
more flexible capital accumulation and social mobility, traditional economic drivers, and

31
issues like class and labour relations maintain their dominance over and against the social,
cultural and spatial impacts associated with postmodernity.

Although Harvey is a promoter of a Marxist urban theory that is capable of keeping pace with
the post industrialisation of the late twentieth century his position on socio-economic factors
sees him at odds with theorists like Zukin, Soja, Scott and Dear. While Harvey maintains a
Marxist based economic model and approach, Soja and Scott and others like them, see the
shift from industrial production based economies to service and consumption systems as a
more thorough reworking of twenty-first century, post-industrial capitalism to which
Marxism can only offer a partial response.

As key proponents of the emergent discourse associated with urban theory, writers like
Zukin, Soja, Scott and Dear represent a re-invigorated intellectual engagement of the
relations between rapidly changing formations in production, consumption, exchange and the
cultural relations underpinning the rise of postmodernity. For these writers and those
associated with them, at the centre of their critical investigations is the city, and one city in
particular, Los Angeles. In the 1980s the approaches developed by these writers converged
around several Los Angeles universities and institutions and became known as The Los
Angeles School of Urbanism, and forming a key loci of urban theory.

Interpretative Approaches: Implications of the Los Angeles School of Urbanism

The Los Angeles School of Urbanism is comprised of writers and urbanists originating from
the University of Southern California (USC) and University of California Los Angeles
(UCLA). Its members draw from a cross section of departments and disciplines as diverse as
Urban Planning, Political Science, English, Education and Fine Arts. The work of scholars
like Allen Scott, Edward Soja, Susan Christopherson, Mike Davis, Michael Dear, Margaret
FitzSimmons, Robert Gottlieb, Greg Hise, Michael Sorkin and Darko Suvin pursues
understandings of the postmodern experience through analyses of postmodern urbanism.

Since the late 1980s scholarly and public-policy analyses of Los Angeles and its surrounding
region was firmly established and legitimized through the work of the Los Angeles School. In
publishing titles like; Postmodern Geographies (1989), Rethinking Los Angeles (1996), The
City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the end of the Twentieth Century (1996), and Ethnic
32
Los Angeles (1996), as well as through the establishment of centres like USCs Southern
California Studies Center, UCLAs Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and Loyola
Marymount Universitys Center for the Study of Los Angeles, the school has focused on the
city of Los Angeles and what was emerging as that citys tendency to be emblematic of
certain features of postmodernity.

With the publication of Edward Sojas critical tour of Los Angeles in the journal, Society and
Space in 1986, the Los Angeles School of Urbanism became indelibly associated with
analysis of the symbolic dimensions of postmodern urbanism. Urban theorists aligned with
the Los Angeles School pursue expanded critical approaches to the city by incorporating
texts, information and insights drawn from the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of the
city. These new sources are then often assimilated alongside more traditional and hard
quantitative sources and materials like demographic analyses and housing data. The Los
Angeles Schools urban theory approaches sees it performing critical analysis often
alongside social advocacy through the incorporation of cultural, critical and political theory
frameworks within studies on urban planning.

The Los Angeles Schools embrace of cultural and symbolic dimensions of the city within
urban planning logics has produced a discursive orientation towards the postmodern city that
unites aspects of predecessors like the Frankfurt School with the Chicago School of urban
planning and theory. Extending its influence beyond the city of its namesake and linking the
Los Angeles School with other urban criticism on other global cities is a view that the
experience of urban postmodernity is one that fundamentally manifests in terms of a spatial
consciousness. The schools spatial orientation builds on the work of Lefebvre especially that
of Edward Sojas.

The relationship between the Los Angeles School of Urbanism to Los Angeles and
postmodernity closely resembles the role played by the Chicago School in respect to Chicago
and modernity. The orientation of the Chicago School was exemplified by the primer, The
City (1925), a prototypical modernist analysis of urbanism based on a conceptual model of
concentric circles of influence, individual-centred understandings of urbanism and a linear
evolutionary view of progress from primitivism to technological advancement. For the
Chicago School, modernist cities functioned as command and control nodes predicated on
concentration and centralisation. The approach of the Chicago School reflected the built

33
reality beneath the emergence of Chicago itself; a concentric industrial metropolis ringed by
diminishing circles of density and influence that expanded in the nineteenth century that went
on to define key elements of twentieth century urban form, function and structure extending
into ideas of architecture, design and planning.

According to Michael Dear, in the final chapter of The City, contributor and urban planner
Louis Wirth, in a remarkably prescient way, identified two fundamental features of the
urban condition that would become dominant in the twenty-first century; satellite cities and
modern communications. Wirth had isolated the two elements that would alter the growth
patterns of the modern city which would reverse its role as a command node at the centre of
the concentric circles organising the regional hinterland surrounding it. With satellites cities
and regions exerting what Wirth labelled a determining influence and modern
communications turning the world into a single mechanism, the global and local would
intersect continuously.

Wirth anticipates the pivotal moments that characterize Chicago-style

urbanism, those primitives that eventually will separate it from an L.A-style
urbanism. He effectively foreshadowed avant la lettre the shift from what I
term a modernist to a postmodern city, and in so doing, the necessity of
the transition from the Chicago to the Los Angeles School. For it is no longer
the center that organises the urban hinterlands, but the hinterlands that
determine what remains of the center. The imperatives toward decentralization
(including suburbanization) have become the principal dynamic in
contemporary cities; and the twenty-first centurys emerging world cities
(including L.A.) are ground-zeroin a communications-driven global political
economy.

(Dear, 2005, 110)

As Dears discussion highlights, the Los Angeles School of Urbanism picks up where the
Chicago School left off and at a fundamental level each is a pragmatic and intellectual
attempt to account for its own urban context and city of its namesake. Whereas the Chicago
School anchored modernist ideas and approaches, significantly, the Los Angeles School is

34
defined against a postmodern context and positions Los Angeles as the exemplar city of
contemporary postmodernity.

Los Angeles has always stood in stark contrast to the modernist city and the development
ideas described by the Chicago School. As the great de-centred, indeed, centre-less city, Los
Angeles is the result of polycentric urban agglomerations that until the 1970s was argued by
every urban study to be the exception not the rule. By the 1990s, however, the Los Angeles
School of Urbanism had re-positioned and redefined the city as paradigmatic of the socio-
cultural and economic logic of postmodernity and effectively reversed all prior propositions
about the city.

The Los Angeles School exists as a body of literature. It exhibits

an evolution through history, beginning with analysis of Los
Angeles as an aberrant, curiosity distinct from other forms of
urbanism. The tone of that history shifts gradually to the point that,
at present, the city is now commonly represented as indicative of
new forms of urbanism augmenting (and even supplanting) the
older, established forms against which Los Angeles was once
judged deviant.

(http://college.usc.edu/la_school/key_articles/key_history.html)

(accessed 25/11/2009)

In the same way Paris was metonymic of modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, and New York functioned similarly to high modernity in the middle of the twentieth
century, the Los Angeles School of urbanism has contributed to Los Angeles occupying a
paradigmatic position in relation to postmodernity. Each city is seen to embody something
quintessential about its age and functions metonymically in relation to the various phases of
modernity - early, high and post. Supplanting other American cities, Los Angeles has come
from the far flung margins of a modernity prescribed by the Chicago School to now
epitomise and embody the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of postmodernity. In the
proceeding chapter, these postmodern dimensions of Los Angeles are examined in terms of
its history and how being at the centre of a century of industrial image making has effected
historicisation of the city, a history that has been significantly influenced, if not determined,
by the various impacts of Hollywood on the citys symbolic status.
35
Spatial City

Whether analyses are addressing modern or postmodern cities, beyond the physical and urban
geographical features defining each, a primary organising principal of the city remains the
notion of power. Much critical attention has been given to exploring Michel Foucaults
notions of the struggle for power across external political structures and internal
understandings of power relations. Contemporary urban criticism continues modernist
investigations into power and its influence on cities but then combines this with the growing
issue of difference. The impacts of these two vital factors, power and difference, are assessed
across the many spatial dimensions of the city and its physical and social structures. As
defining features of the city, the dialectics around power and difference are interpreted as
having translated into issues of space and spatial relations, gender and sexuality, race and
ethnicity. For urbanist, John Rennie Short, the issues and intersections between power and
difference in the twenty-first century are more pronounced in cities and their populations than
anywhere else; We are in a period of restructuring social differences, and the city is the eye
of this storm (Short, 2006, 9). By examining power and difference, urban theory sees them
combining to produce tangible social categories that are lived which then create some of the
key factors and conditions that contribute to social situations as much as economic ones and
the shaping of urban experience.

The recognition of such macro and micro factors where power and difference have
manifested has seen urban analyses generate qualitative and other experiential studies and
examinations that have expanded the scope of previously abstract and quantitative based
planning studies. Amounting to an assessment of the experience of postmodern urbanism,
urban theory represents an expansion in the methods and approaches by which this
experience can be catalogued, assessed and examined. It is in respect to experience that
textual renderings, fictional encounters and imagined depictions of the city are drawn upon
by scholars employing approaches associated with urban theory.

No single method or approach is able to capture the complexity of the new

urban forms. Complex phenomena require the use of varied and different
approachesQuantitative and qualitative methods, data analysis and
participant observation, and the employment of multiple techniques in a
variety of perspectives seem the only way to capture the flux and flow of the

36
 new cities. The urban condition needs to be seen from the social science
equivalent of the telescope and the microscope.

(Short, 2006, 226)

At the centre of all experience and often assaulted under modernity and postmodernity is
subjectivity. Through imaginary texts we gain insights or collect accounts that delve into this
level of experience, accounts which can shed light on the ontological and psychological
effects of the city. A clear example is the role and function of character in narrative which
sees imaginary texts from novels to films personalising and distilling many of the essential
aspects of modern and postmodern urban experience. Subjectivity, both imagined, as well as
perceived and actual, can be seen to provide one of the key perspectives of what Short
describes as the microscopic view of the city. A view so conditional and relative of course,
that regardless of its basis in fact, fiction, perception or fantasy, it is something that remains
speculative and beyond the reach of accurate measurement. It is only through various creative
renderings of subjective experience that it can be captured and fiction and narrative usually
dominate such accounts.

Cinematic Intersections

For more than a century, the cinematic arts have been preoccupied with the
swarming of memories. Filmmakers have long been struck by the way
image sequences can mimic but also stimulate associative trails of
reminiscences of viewers psyches. As soon as motion picture editing was
invented in the early 1900s, viewers were startled by the familiarity of the
process. It was clear that films resemble outward projections of the
phantasmagoria that are always unspooling inside our skulls.

(Gibson, 2003, 2)

37
Situated within the very complex dynamics operating between modernity and the city,
between postmodernity and subjectivity and the experience of urbanism, is cinema. The
encompassing views and accounts of the city from the perspective of film history, urban
history, human geography, sociology and other discipline bound studies amount to Shorts
telescopic views of the city or what Lefebvre described as the macro, view from above.
When taken summatively across genres, industries, years and decades, cinema can provide
accounts that function at this telescopic level and yet it is far from restricted to this
perspective. Through over a century of filmmaking that has left a legacy of countless
thousands of individual texts, cinema also offers multifaceted microscopic perspectives on
particular times, places and populations, providing unique image based accounts of the city.

The cinema then can be seen as spanning Lefebvres micro and micro levels, and similarly,
Shorts microscopic and telescopic views. As the repository of modern life it offers a unique
framework that enables a variety of perspectives on history, cities, populations and
modernity. For Short, some of the formalist dimensions of film can even provide critical
analysis with a spatial taxonomy through which to frame and view the city.

The modern city is intimately connected to the development of film and

cinematic culture. It is fitting then, then, that the variety of filmic
techniques can be used to tell urban stories: the long positioning shot that
sets the scene, the wide angle that contextualises the close-up, the
dissolved time sequences, the judicious cross-editing that connects people
and places separated by time and place. Utilizing the social science
equivalent of the film genres of action, documentary, comedy, fantasy,
film noir, magic realism and science fiction (and others) are just some of
the different ways that we can understand the city and tell its multiple
truths.

(Short, 2006, 226)

The cinema has expanded our experience of the city through the framing outlined by Short
and architecture in particular has been central ingredient linking both the city and cinema. A
key shaper of the spatial grammar of our cities and the built environment, architecture, since

38
the time of Fritz Langs Metropolis in 1927 has had significant dialogue with films through
their spatial dimension and production design. At a variety of levels films have enabled
architecture in our imaginations by mobilising its symbolic, narrative and other imagined
possibilities.

Particularly in the early part of the twentieth century when cinema was a new source of
inspiration, film and architecture have been linked and architects have drawn and
acknowledged the architectonics of film and its spatial dynamics as a regular source of
inspiration and innovation. Architectural discourse and movements are regularly informed by
ideas of narrative, subjectivity and juxtaposition, issues and areas that have been mined by
the cinema and film theorists for over a century. In The Manhattan Transcripts, the Swiss
architect Bernard Tschumi has speculated how an essential relationship exists between
cinema and architecture in the idea of a cinegramme, a pictorial composition that sees
something like an architectural promenade function according to the logics of cinema and a
sequence of spaces. For Tschumi, the repetition of certain architectural spaces is processed
by those individuals passing through it like a film. Tschumi argues that there is a need for
architecture to capture and activate all the events of daily city-life, in the same way the
imaginary landscape of cinema is able to (Lehmann, 2003).

Just as architecture and architectural theory has turned to the cinema, production design has
been engaged in a long standing, if somewhat informal dialogue, with the architectural
profession. Digital media and visual software technologies see cross disciplinary professional
exchanges and work practice skill sets between both filmmaking and the architectural
profession continuing to merge. Alongside digital technology innovations like CAD and other
virtual toolmaking skills and methods, digital media and the design practices of architecture
and the built environment are increasingly commensurate. What was once a theoretical
parallel between the collaborative and project management nature behind filmmaking and
architecture is now a practice based overlap in how both films and buildings are
conceptualised and realised through the mutual tools of digital media and shared applications.
The work of Francois Penz and Maureen Thomas has focused on examining digital media
technological convergences between film and architectural design in the collection of edited
studies, Cinema & Architecture: Melies, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (1997) and
Architectures of Illusion: from motion pictures to navigable interactive environments (2003).

39
The City as Image

By taking account of the increasing role played by the symbolic economy in the experience
of cities urban theory highlights how representations of the city interact with actual cities in a
dynamic fashion. As forms of mediated urbanism, representations of the city contribute in
unexpected ways to the experience of cities and their perpetual transformation. For Sharon
Zukin representations of the city over the course of the twentieth century have had a specific
impact on urban growth by promoting the metropolis as spectacle and colossus.

Images, from early maps to picture postcards, have not simply reflected real
city spaces; instead, they have been imaginative reconstructions from
specific points of view of a citys monumentality. The development of visual
media in the 20th century made photography and movies the most important
cultural means of framing urban space, at least until the 1970sas the
surrealism of King Kong shifted to that of Blade Runner and redevelopment
came to focus on consumption activities... .

(Zukin, 2005, 285)

By framing urban space visually, cinematic representation has seen urban space and its daily
dynamics given a form and predicated on growth. Imaginatively reconstructed through
narrative, what Zukin describes as the citys monumentality becomes defined by cinematic
representations which provides a host of spatio-temporal co-ordinates that temper the
experience of the modern city.

The spatial properties uniting film and architecture, spectacle and urban growth also sees the
cinema parallel the shocks of urban daily life and its assault on our perception and cognitive
processes with montage and editing. The early accounts of modern cities by Simmel and
Benjamin reveal how montage and the psychological experience of the city have perhaps the
closest of relationships. The series of shocks that both Simmel and Benjamin described urban
experience as consisting of, closely resembles the operations and experience of montage as
identified by Eisenstein and employed by filmmakers since the time of Vertov and
Constructivist filmmaking.

40
Constituting an essential formal aspect of cinema, montage was deployed to capture and
convey urban experience early in the twentieth century and most famously in the city
symphony films like Walter Ruttmanns, Berlin Symphony of a City (1927) and Vertovs,
Man With a Movie Camera (1929). Montage, and to a lesser extent, the processes of editing
in general, would seem predicated on Simmels description of the city and its impact on the
individual psyche:

The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in

the intensification of nervous stimulation [sic] which results from the swift
and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.Lasting impressions,
impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which
take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts
all these use upless consciousness than does the rapid crowding of
changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and
the unexpectedness of unrushing impressions. These are the psychological
impressions which the metropolis creates.

(Simmel, 2005, 25)

In this account, Simmel could just as easily be describing the processes of editing and
montage as the cognitive and psychological processes activated by daily life in the modern
city. As a key formal device, cinematic montage not only conveys, but perhaps more
importantly, precisely mirrors the dynamism and shocks that were intrinsic to urban
modernity. Uniquely calibrated, editing seems born out of the kinetics of daily urban life.

Cinema provided a means by which multiplicity and movement could be

negotiated, offering the potential for mapping processes and patterns which
resisted traditional forms of representation. In short, montage constituted
cinemas formal equivalent to the shock effect of the big city.

(McQuire, 2008, 75)

41
The Cinematic City as History

For Robert Rosenstone, even more so than other creative and imaginary texts, the cinema,
through its reliance on images is predicated on the particular in narrative. Because it operates
and is applied visually, cinematic narratives are uniquely equipped to bring into focus the
individual, or subjective experiences of a time, place and situation;

Unlike the word, the filmic image cannot abstract or generalize. The screen
must show specific images not the changing status of women during periods
of modernization but a particular Hindu woman, crossing the threshold from
the womens quarters into the world of men.

(Rosenstone, 1995, 8)

For Rosenstone, the specificity of cinema and visual narrative accounts enables opportunities
for historical revisionism. Typically, those explicitly historical films are denigrated by
professional historians and other custodians of what is perceived to be more accurate and
authentic histories. For Rosenstone the importance of these cinematic accounts is not in their
actual versions of history but in their simpler function, to contest history, to interrogate
either the metanarratives that structure historical knowledge, or smaller historical truths,
received notions, conventional images (Rosenstone, 1995, 8).

In terms of representation of the modern city the cinema has forged a discursive legacy which
can either reinforce the metanarratives of history as well as supply alternatives. In classical
urban genres like the musical and screwball comedy the city is often celebrated for its
emancipative qualities of class and gender roles where the confines and traditionalism of
small town life are often contrasted against the liberal cosmopolitanism of the metropolis.
What distinguishes the screwball comedies from dyadic narrative forms is that the woman is
never merely an item of exchange between two men; she is also presented as a desiring
subject (Shumway, 1995, 386). In musicals the city can be both utopia, On the Town (1949)
and dystopia with aspects of social realism, 42nd Street (1933) while in other genres like
science fiction, gangster, melodrama and film noir the modern city can be presented as
dystopia, a labyrinth of despair and anxiety dialectically structuring the urban as the opposite
to nature and subjugating its populations rather than liberating them.
42
Regardless of the ideological and cultural perspective of the multitude of individual films
unarguably the cinema has played a major role in historicising the many dimensions,
perceptions and experience of the modern city. The catalogue of films that can be drawn on
range from the earliest silent actualities that spanned the globe and captured turn of the
century metropolises from New York to Sydney to the countless fictional narrative films that
have often directly and/or indirectly recorded city life. In its historiographical functions two
dominant modes the cinema can be seen to be satisfying is popular history and memory.
Although each is closely aligned, fictional cinema seems particularly adept at fulfilling the
requirements of memory and evoking perceptions of an imagined and irretrievable past.

Fredric Jameson sees visual representation and aspects of cinema he labels the nostalgia film
as contributing to the profound waning of historicity in cultural life under postmodernity.
(Jameson, 1991) However, as a means of popular history and mobilising what Rosenstone
emphasises is its strong articulation of the particular, films and film history is equipped to
provide alternative, local, subjective and social history perspectives that can challenge formal
constructions of the past that see it arranged under the requirements of History proper. As
Paul Grainge has identified, notions of media memory are countering claims like Jamesons
that visual media under postmodernity is responsible for erasing cultural and social memory,
the impact of visual media on history may even prove to be quite the opposite.

Critics such as Andreas Huyssen, Vivian Sobchack and Jim Collins have
begun to look more closely at the bearing of postmodern representation on
contemporary memory practice. All three critics explore, in one form or
another, the impact of media technologies on structures of temporality and
how the quickening pace, and sheer magnitude, of electronic communication
has transformed, rather than dissolved, the experience of memory.

(Grainge, 2003, 204)

An innovative interpretation of the impact media has had on individual and collective
memory has been put forward by Alison Landsberg who argues the mechanisms of
subjectivity identified with cinematic spectatorship can lead to what she describes as the
development of prosthetic memory.

43
 What I find interesting in this work on spectatorship is that film is imagined as
a instrument with the power to suture viewers into pasts they have not
lived.The cinema, then, might be imagined as a site in which people
experience a bodily, mimetic encounter with a past that was not actually theirs.
In this sense, the cinema is the archetype of the new technologies of memory
created in the twentieth century. Like cinema, television and experiential
museums also provide the occasion for individual spectators to suture
themselves into history, to develop prosthetic memories.

(Landsberg, 2004, 14)

Landsbergs argument sees the cinema occupying one of the original spaces of where what
has been imagined and produced materially then consumed through the processes of
spectatorship can translate into what has been experienced. By arguing for cinemas ability to
generate memory Landsbergs argument locates cinematic consumption in the highest orders
of the symbolic economy. The implications of her position on the experience and ability to
remember facets of the modern city are also substantial given the amount of representation
that has been afforded to the modern city across a century of cinema. For a postmodern critic
like Jameson, Landsbergs claim would merely reinforce the problems around simulacra and
the increasing difficulty culture has simply orientating itself by differentiating between real
and reel experience.

In a recent study, Cinematic Urbanism, a history from the modern from reel to real (2006),
the architectural historian AlSayyad Nezar embraces the issues this kind of blurring between
mediated and actual experience presents. Zezars analysis does not accept the division of
space into real and reel but instead proceeds with the notion that reel space ceases to be
primarily representational and in fact turns generative [my italics] in its potential (Nezar
2006, xii).

In his study of cinematic cities that range from Berlin Symphony of a City (1927) to Los
Angeles in Pleasantville (2001), Zezar conducts an examination of modern urbanisation
solely through the lens of cinema arguing, urbanism cannot be understood outside the spaces

44
of the celluloid city (Nezar 2006, x). Nezars study view on the generative qualities of
cinematic representation of cities is compelling and leads him to conclude:

It is this changing relationship between the real and the reel that starts to
distinguish modernity from postmodernity, along a simple continuum. In
the cinematic realm, modernity and postmodernity are not historical
periods, but different political articulations of the relationship between
urban experience and its artistic representations. While modernity
attempted to reconcile these two forms of cognition, postmodernity
accepted their disjunction while allowing each to challenge the other.

(Nezar, 2006, 239)

Nezars position on the primacy of cinematic representations of the city in relation to modern
urbanism would be interesting enough if he came from a film studies quarter. The fact that
Nezar heads the Department of Architectural Studies at UCLA testifies to how within
contemporary critical contexts the influence of urban theory has focused attention on the
symbolic and imagined city seeing the cinematic city embraced across professional practices
unencumbered by pedagogical disciplinary thinking.

Conclusion

The textual insights garnered from writers, artists and creative representations of the city do
not prescribe to conventional notions of data. As information that is far from measurable and
quantitative textual material could once only supplement traditional urban planning studies.
By their very nature imaginary texts like films cannot conform to the demands placed upon
empirical data because the information offered by imaginary renderings is either, subjective,
fictional, impressionistic, emotive, or a combination of all four. The insights they are able to
offer are far from scientific, non-reproducible and often incalculable, and yet for all of these
reasons urban theory embraces these imaginary texts as a means to harness understandings of
transformations occurring in cities through the rise of their symbolic economies.

45
The interpretative discourses of urban theory have seen much wider disciplinary attention and
inclusion of fictional texts, signs and cinematic cities and representation when discussing
postmodern urbanism. New approaches to the city are pursued across associated disciplines
from architecture to sociology which draws on these vital representations in their efforts to
understand aspects of the lived experience of the city. Critical analyses informed by urban
theory have revised understandings of how creative and imaginary renderings of the city like
cinematic representations have recorded its development and are able to actively perform in
urban experience and interpretation.

Urban theory represents a considered approach to how the complex task of urban analysis and
interpretation is keeping pace with the rapidly changing fabric of twenty-first century urban
form. The cross fertilisation of interpretative methods by urban theory practitioners is
providing mutual frameworks for imagining, analysing and remembering the city.
Emphasising the growing convergence accompanying the unprecedented level of imbrication
between actual, imagined and symbolic cities does not deny the distinctions and divergences
that can continue to separate each. Where there is convergence, however, urban theory
identifies the significant alterations in meaning, economy and experience. By forging new
coalitions of understanding and expanding our perspectives on symbolic, imagined and
rational cities urban theory represents a sustained critical effort to narrow the gap between
representation of the city, its lived experience and our understanding of it.

46
Chapter 2 Film Noir and Los Angeles Imagining History in the Most
Contemporary City.

Introduction

In the previous chapter I outlined the vital context urban theory provides contemporary
investigations into the relationship between texts and cities. In this chapter I will shift the
focus squarely back to cinema and the role played by films in forging lived aspects of the city
and historicising city life. In order to see this relationship most clearly I analyse the history
of Los Angeles and the citys relationship to its film noir legacy and what amounts to its
screen alter ego, the Dark City, a term outlined below.

Analysis in this chapter is centred on ways in which film noir represents more than just a
filmic style in relation to Los Angeles. Film noir is discussed in terms of providing a
sustained ongoing expression to Los Angeles unique urban form. The combination of film
noir and Los Angeles enabled this filmic style to help generate place recognisability for the
city in the American and global popular imaginary. Informed by urban theory approaches
outlined in Chapter One, I emphasise how Hollywood and the corpus of film noir provided
specific renderings of Los Angeles that have helped record and shape vital aspects of the city
both physically and in the social imaginary. By exploring the relationship between film noir
and Los Angeles and combining textual with traditional historical markers and perspectives I
aim to forge an understanding of the city that takes full account of the role played by
cinematic representation.

A key development in Los Angeles physical development and history has been expansion of
the citys filmmaking industry. So in conjunction with examining the symbolic functions
supplied by film noir to the city, a more conventional history of the arrival of Hollywood in
Los Angeles first contextualises the citys unique relationship to the business of industrial
scale filmmaking practices. As the global and meta-frame for Los Angeles, Hollywood
provides the city with a conflicted and complex history, one that is manifest in the citys
representation in film noir and subsequent neo noir films.

Film history considerations of how Hollywood came to house the fledging movie businesses
focus on the restrictive Edison Trust and Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC) operating
47
on the East Coast in New York and how it forced film businesses West. Geographical
decisions about locating in Los Angeles conventionally revolve around its proximity to
Californias varied landscapes of beaches, deserts, snow capped mountains and cheap and
available land. There is no denying that both the Trust and the landscape were important
factors that drove the nascent movie businesses West. However, in order to expand on the
genesis of Hollywood we need to examine how the seemingly incompatible worlds of
filmmaking and what was a sparsely populated farming region managed to come together and
then transformed and sustained each other within such a relatively brief period of time.

The history of Hollywood and the history of Los Angeles are usually bifurcated. The former
has resided comfortably in film studies discourses with focus on the studio system and its
cinematic texts, while the latter, prior to the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, was
predominantly centred on conventional urban planning dictates. The citys filmmaking
industry, albeit acknowledged as a somewhat peculiarly idiosyncratic industry, is often
nevertheless treated like any other. Both film history and urban planning histories on Los
Angeles have approached Hollywood and its outputs as discrete industrial phenomena
separating Hollywoods film products, or textual software from the physical studio
infrastructure and their facilities hardware. By their very nature as textual software, films are
rarely interpreted as having a direct imprint on the city whereas the studio facilities have clear
physical impacts with attendant zoning and land acquisition appeal and interest under urban
planning logics. By combining a history of the Hollywood of geography and the Hollywood
of texts and signifying systems, the aim is to reinterpret their combined impacts on the citys
unique urban form and its place in the social imaginary.

In order to achieve such a perspective, it is necessary to integrate historical knowledge

obtained from urban and regional studies within the broader history of Hollywood. As a
starting point for such an investigation, this chapter draws on established histories that have
documented how Los Angeles was initially a non-place and then greedily constructed as a
place of opportunity at the end of the nineteenth century. The discussion then outlines the
problematic relationship between the city and Hollywood, but not in the conventional terms
of a provincial community colliding with a hedonistic film colony. Instead, attention is drawn
to the paradox of an industry that relied on the construction of far away cities while ignoring
its immediate and surrounding urban environment. In the first few decades of its arrival, I
argue that Hollywood both physically and metaphorically obscured Los Angeles. By setting
48
films in distant urban and exotic locales that were constructed on the two and three-
dimensional backlots of the studios cinema repressed rather than represented Los Angeles.
Film noir is then discussed in terms of the cinematic means though which Hollywood and
Los Angeles eventually arrived at an uneasy reconciliation.

Approaching a city and its history through the privileging of cinematic accounts represents an
unorthodox but also innovative approach to historiography. As a method it could quite easily
be applied to a number of cities that have generated a sizeable cinematic alter ego: New
York, London, Mumbai and Hong Kong amongst others. Inarguably, Los Angeles represents
the most appropriate city with which to begin such an exercise, as the host to Hollywood, the
sometimes rivalled but never quite usurped, centre of global filmmaking.

Los Angeles the Non Conformist

My proposition is that the information film is of undoubted but extremely

narrow value, and that forthe years before 1960, the most original
source is the fictional film.

(Sorlin, 2001, 30)

Despite occupying a most definite place in the American and global imaginary for over fifty
years, Los Angeles remains a city that is diametrically opposed to older American cities on
the East Coast and Midwest of the United States. As an actual city Los Angeles is
synonymous with the title, the home of Hollywood. The filmmaking capital for most of the
twentieth century and beyond, Hollywood symbolises the utopian Dream Factory, a place and
site of excess, a source of a distinctly American style of mythology, a place for creating
overnight wealth, success and celebrity. Surrounding Hollywood of course is another city, a
real Los Angeles of freeways and sprawling suburbs. This city has a long Hispanic history
and is now one of the worlds most multi-cultural cities a key twenty-first century
technological and economic node of the Pacific Rim. Finally, Los Angeles is also a city that
for several decades has been characterised as dystopia, a megalopolis filled with choking
49
pollution and growing social inequity giving rise to racial tension, ethnic gangs, drive-by
shootings and street rioting.

Los Angeles status as a problematic megalopolis contrasts with a recurring theme expressed
by film and television programs raging from Annie Hall (1977) through to LA Story (1991),
Grand Canyon (1991) Short Cuts (1993) Clueless (1995), Sex and the City (1998-2004),
Entourage (2004 - ) and Californication (2007- ), a city offering a horizontal life portrayed as
laid back against the truly urban pace arising out of the vertical kinetics of older American
cities like New York and Chicago. Regularly constructed from an East Coast perspective, Los
Angeles represents a sun, surf and beach capital driven by fads and fashion, an other to
established American cities of true industry, history and high culture, cities founded on
Protestant and Puritan work ethics and values, in short, cities of substance.

Los Angeles hedonistic reputation comes out of its long historical association with
Hollywood. Alongside its reputation as a city of excess, a Hollywood Babylon, Los Angeles
has been historicised as a city that refused to conform to accepted urban form propagated by
modernity. Los Angeles has always stood in stark contrast to the modernist city and the urban
planning ideals described by the Chicago School in the early twentieth century, as thoroughly
documented by the Los Angeles School of Urbanism. (Dear, 2005,110) The great de-centred,
or centre-less city, Los Angeles is the product of rapid development and internal US and
external migration. A population comprised of constant new arrivals dispersed across
asymmetrical networks of polycentric urban agglomerations that neither radiate out nor
depend on a central downtown like other American cities.

The defining characteristics of Los Angeles made it a stubborn misfit in terms of the modern
city described by the Chicago School and its primer, The City in 1925. Instead of density, Los
Angeles had sprawl; instead of an urban centre, it had a suburban de-centeredness; instead of
a sense of place, it was populated by migrants, both domestic and foreign who experienced
displacement; and instead of monuments, it had circulation and movement. It is precisely
these defining characteristics of Los Angeles which made it an anomaly in regards to
modernity and early twentieth century urbanism that have since gone on to make it
characteristic of late twentieth century and early twenty first century postmodernity.

What was recorded by the few urban planning histories that had been conducted on Los
Angeles prior to the 1960s was a city of contradictions, absences, and deviations from
50
conventional development patterns. In comparison to most other American cities at the turn
of the twentieth century, Los Angeles lacked many of the necessary ingredients for sustained
urban development. Los Angeles was subsequently maligned as the sub urban other to the
great nineteen and twentieth century American industrial metropolises of the Eastern sea-
board and Midwest; New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Los
Angeles stood apart from these other cities, mostly because, as Mike Davis has charted, it
emerged out of a unique set of geographical, political, cultural and economic tensions that
made it, in the words of one of its first historians, the great exception. (McWilliams, 1946)

Many of the development conditions effecting Los Angeles at the turn of the twentieth
century were the result of a regional dynamic operating more broadly across California. As
American capitalism advanced westward at the turn of the twentieth century, socio economic
disruptions followed but it was in Los Angeles that many of the effects and challenges facing
frontier development were most keenly felt. Recent studies on Los Angeles history conducted
by writers like Mike Davis and urban planner, William Fulton have traced how city
development in Los Angeles between 1850-1920 was controlled by a cabal of elite business
interests, or as Fulton describes them, growth barons. This influential group of business
leaders fervently pursued the development of Los Angeles by attracting imported East Coast
capital and were intent on Los Angeles eclipsing San Francisco as the West Coast centre of
East Coast investment.

A key strategy to advance Los Angeles over San Francisco was a widespread policy of de-
regulation across labour, planning and zoning laws. According to Fulton, the growth barons
were a small group of visionary (and greedy) business leadersNo challenge in (the) task of
city-building was too greatLacking an economy, they invented one (Fulton, 2001, 7).
According to urban geographers, Gary Dymski and John Veitch, this invented economy was
pursued through land speculation deals and fuelled by haphazard financing schemes which
saw the economic development of Los Angeles [emerge] through riotous bouts of
speculative excess (Dymski & Veitch, 1995, 35). For over forty years, between 1880 and
1920, the growth barons and their rhetoric labelled boosterism tirelessly promoted Los
Angeles as the next big thing in the narrative of American Manifest Destiny. A promotional
poster from the Los Angeles department store, Arthur Letts in 1913 illustrates the
pervasiveness of the booster rhetoric in the mercantile fabric of the city.

51
 Opportunity thy other name Los AngelesWith the thousands of acres
of available land, adjacent to Los Angeles, yet to be tilled and developed;
land, the productiveness of which California alone can boast, providing a
livelihood for the thousands of immigrants to comewith the
increasing investments of the thousands of dollars of Eastern and foreign
capitalWHO SHALL GAINSAY THE FACT THAT LOS ANGELES
IS THE VERY WORD OPPORTUNITY!

(Longstreth, 1998, 30)

The paradox belying Los Angeles boosterism at the turn of the twentieth century and masking
its proclamations of abundance and opportunity were in fact the citys many absences and
lack: The lack of industry, lack of population, lack of water, and fear of the cessation of
Eastern capital flowing into the city and across Southern California. A key absence, in terms
of the citys national identity, was its lack of conventional urban density, the corollary of
which was its sprawling suburbs. In the 1930s this led to the citys famous catch phrase, Los
Angeles suburbs in search of a city. As the place where American triumphalism and
westward expansion met its geographical limit the growth barons booster rhetoric ensured
Los Angeles had one thing in abundance abstractions. The abstractions of opportunity,
promise and the future all central ingredients of that ultimate abstraction which it was
claimed Los Angeles could realise for anyone, the American Dream.

The Historical Void

Throughout the early to mid twentieth century one of the most central absences in Los
Angeles was also the citys own sense of history. Prior to the middle of the twentieth
century, scholarly academic histories of the city were a rarity with only two major academic
publications between 1946 and 1967. When it was released in 1946, Carey McWilliams
Southern California: an island on the land was the first urban history study in over twenty
years. The significance of McWilliams study was the establishment of Los Angeles
reputation as the great exception. McWilliams historical analysis focused on Los Angeles

52
uniqueness describing it as a region which reverses almost any proposition about the
settlement of western America (McWilliams, 1973, 14).

After McWilliams study it took twenty-one years before the city would become the focus of
another scholarly historical account with Robert Fogelsons The Fragmented Metropolis in
1967. Fogelsons study was more comprehensive than McWilliams and represented the only
account of the regions urban evolution between 1850 and 1930, but like McWilliams,
Fogelson stressed the uniqueness of Los Angeles. The essence of Los Angeles was revealed
more clearly in its deviations from (rather) than its similarities to the great American
metropolis of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Fogelson, 1993, 28).

From the 1960s urban history studies of Los Angeles began to emerge with more frequency.
But as late as 1986, at the time the Los Angeles School of Urbanism was just gathering pace,
the urban geographer, B. Marchand observed New York City has been analysed in great
detailChicago in such detail that it is certainly the best understood city in the world. Los
Angeles, on the contrary, remains largely an unchartered land (Marchand, 1986, 2). The
studies that had been conducted, stressed like Marchand, how Los Angeles represented an
unparalleled growth machine, a city developing like no other American counterparts in the
twentieth century.

In 1912, Los Angeles had a population of 450,000 which was scattered across its five county
regions, comprised of Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernandino, Riverside and Orange
counties. Two or three generations later, the same five regions now constitute a megalopolis
with a population exceeding twenty million people. Up until 1920, central Los Angeles had
remained stubbornly resistant to the centralising or centripetal drivers of modernity, except
in the areas of political and municipal concentration of power. The key shapers of modernity,
those physical urban attributes that form the hard exoskeleton of other modern cities
railways, skyscrapers, trams, and the urban infrastructure of ports, and industrial zones, are
noteworthy more through their absence than presence in Los Angeles. As early as the 1920s
the citys built environment was renowned for the shopping centre and later, the shopping
mall and various regional centres. By 1930, this metropolis not only ranked among the
largest in the United States but also the began to be recognised as the harbinger of the modern
American cityNo better demonstration of this role exists than in the retail sphere, where

53
between the 1920s and 1950s Los Angeles functioned much as Chicago or New York had for
the development of the tall commercial building (Longstreth, 1998, xv).

By the 1950s, Los Angeles had become synonymous with its ubiquitous freeways, the very
agency of centrifugal dispersion that would actively counter density. In the second half of the
twentieth century, it was Los Angeles centrifugal forces that would see it develop and grow
at a record pace.

The resulting scale of Los Angeles in the 1960s was so staggering and
unprecedented that distinguished urban planners were left speechless.
This was no simple hub-and-spoke industrial city, with boulevards and rail
lines radiating outward from a central downtown core. It was, in the words
of one scholar of the period, a fragmented metropolis a multi-headed
beast with no center.

(Fulton, 2001, 9-10)

The centrifugal forces that shaped Los Angeles throughout the twentieth century eventually
gathered momentum in other American metropolises and produced the suburbanisation that
forever altered Americas urban fabric. As a harbinger of things to come, Los Angeles
actually managed to live up to some of its boosterism rhetoric. As it turned out, Los Angeles
was the future. The discourse of recent promotional materials continues to position Los
Angeles as the place where the future is now. An advertisement promoting Orange County
by the California Office of Tourism maintains boosterism hype albeit with a very postmodern
tone that eviscerates history.

Orange County - Los Angeles Its a theme park a seven hundred and eighty-
six square mile theme park and the theme is you can have anything you
want. Its the most California-looking of all Californias: the most like the
movies, the most like the stories, the most like the dream. Orange County is
Tomorrowland and Frontierland, merged and inseparable. 18th century
mission. 1930s art colony. 1980s corporate headquarters. Theres history
everywhere: navigators, conquistadors, padres, rancheros, wildcatters. But
theres so much Now, the Then is hard to find. The houses are new. The cars
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 are new. The stores, the streets, the schools, the city halls even the land and
ocean themselves look new. The temperature today will be in the low 80s.
Theres a slight offshore breeze. Another day just-like-yesterday in paradise.
Come to Orange County. Its no place like home. [California Office of
Tourism]

(Soja, 2000, 237)

Los Angeles Hollywoods Blank Screen

In the early twentieth century, despite the efforts of the growth barons, it was not a
conventional industry that arrived in Los Angeles but the beginnings of a new industry,
something that, initially, was as insubstantial as Los Angeles itself, a Dream Factory,
leading to the citys moniker of Tinseltown. In Celluloid Skyline (2003), architect and
historian James Sanders has recounted the impact California had on New York film
production once the nascent movie moguls with their soon to be brand names, Zukor, Fox,
Goldwyn, Lasky, Laemmle and Mayer, fled West in defiance of the Edison film trusts.
Evacuating the East Coast, the emerging businesses around moving pictures famously took
root in, a series of quiet Los Angeles suburbs called Glendale, Edendale, Culver City, and,
especially, one called Hollywood (Sanders, 2003, 36).

Moving pictures was not exactly the kind of industry the citys business leaders and boosters
had sought, but by the 1920s, from its scattered and disreputable beginnings, the industry had
grown on a scale that exceeded all expectations. The West Coasts film industry grew
explosively in the space of a single decade; no more than a tiny rival to New York in 1911, it
accounted for four-fifths of all American production by 1920 (Sanders, 2003, 36).

Aside from the associated industries and employment generated by filmmaking, the physical
footprint of the studios also literally filled the vacuum that had characterised Los Angeles
gaping built environment at the turn of the twentieth century. As Sanders describes them, the
studios were in fact veritable kingdoms, a hundred acres big or more, entirely self-sufficient
and literally walled off from the outside world (Sanders, 2003, 51). The studio complexes
comprised an essential part of the citys built environment forming part of the citys
horizontal imprint much like skyscrapers were New York and Chicagos vertical signatures.
55
In The Emergence of Los Angeles, the urban planner Marchand opens his analysis with a
1926 aerial photograph of the Pickford, Fairbanks Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard
featuring sets for Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The indistinct separation between the city
streets and backlots prompts this urban planner to subtitle the photograph with, Where is the
limit between stage and city? (Marchand, 1986, iv).

Despite its physical infrastructure occupying vast tracts of the city and providing the single
largest source of employment the urban materiality offered by Hollywood was always
considered a poor substitute for what other cities had. As a home grown, indigenous Los
Angeles industry Raymond Chandler observed how Hollywood provided Los Angeles with a
unique but under-appreciated infrastructure. Real Cities have something else, some
individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood and hates it. It
ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city.
Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else ( Chandler, 1995, 358).

If real cities have bones then Los Angeles has signs. The citys only icon is the literal and
material sign perched high above the city to promote the real estate sub division
Hollywoodland now reduced to HOLLYWOOD. Suspended above the growing city it was
not long before it ceased denoting a single locale and instead came to connote the global
image making industry.

When Hollywood was incorporated as a third-class city in 1903,

approximately 700 people resided within its limits; when it was annexed to
Los Angeles seven years later, the population was at 10,000. The increase
was more then sevenfold over the next decade and thereafter climbed at an
average of 10,000 people a year, the total exceeding 153,000 in 1930. The
rise of the motion picture industry to a position of national leadership
during the same twenty-year period helped transform Hollywood into one
of the fastest-growing parts of the region.

(Longstreth, 1998, 83)

Longstreth has documented how the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce was in fierce
competition with the downtown Los Angeles City Chamber of Commerce. As a commercial
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and retail hub, Hollywood functioned much like a metropolitan center in miniature, with an
array of mutually reinforcing commercial activities (Longstreth, 1998, 94). The film
industry was the Chamber of Commerces biggest weapon in this battle for development
investment against downtown Los Angeles. A three-day publicity event was organised but
the Chamber that fused the film industry with the retail trades in the 1927 Christmas season.
Mary Pickford inaugurated the event with the flick of the master switch that illuminated the
shops on Hollywood Boulevard and announced:

Much of the outside world is more prone to order things from Hollywood
than the average resident of the town. We havethe means of setting
fashions throughout the world. Many of the best people here realize this.

(Longstreth, 1998, 95)

The rivalry between the downtown city of Los Angeles and the incorporated city of
Hollywood reveals how Los Angeles early association with the film industry saw the city
displaced by its home grown industry in the manner of image subsuming place. As Mary
Pickfords promotional statement highlights up until the 1930s it was Hollywood and its
films that had captured the American and global imagination not Los Angeles.

In the Shadow of HOLLYWOOD

Embodying the disparities and tension between the Hollywood Dream Factory and the banal
background that was Los Angeles, were the studio backlots. As image factories built on
facades the studios with their backlots specialised in the constant manufacturing of other
real cities from as far a field as Casablanca to New York. As the largest American
metropolis, New York in particular contained what the Studios considered to be the essential
ingredients for urban narratives; density, skyscrapers, an iconic skyline and an immediately
recognisable and physical sense of place that could portray all manner of social drama,
comedy and tragedy.

By the 1920s, although Los Angeles was regularly proceeded by the line, - the home of
Hollywood, the irony was that this accolade diminished the citys sense of place and identity.
57
Despite hosting the worlds largest film industry which had become synonymous with one of
its own suburbs, Los Angeles itself rarely featured onscreen. While many silent films had
been shot on Los Angeles locations, the narratives were strongly centred in the foreground
action and the Los Angeles backdrop merely stood in for anywhere USA. In contrast, when
silent films were shot in New York they represented a distinctly American setting. In The
Immigrant (1917), when Charlie Chaplins tramp satirises American customs officials the
mise-en-scene features Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty anchoring these narratives firmly
in the hopes, fears and aspirations of European migrants seeking refuge in America. In
Chaplins film the New World is New York, the place that confronted migrants with hopes
and fears, a promethean city of soaring verticality that was unlike anything these new arrivals
had ever seen before.

With the advent of sound cinema in the late 1920s most studio writers were employed for
their dialogue writing abilities and most were drawn from New York with previous careers on
Broadway. Forever looking back East towards a real city, these artists and writers are
credited with creating an idealised New York, one that was filled with urban sophistication, a
place against which Los Angeles could never compete. Urban films were almost always set
in New York, which remained the city for Hollywood. (Sanders 2001, 55) In order to cater
to the number of films set in this real Metropolis every major studio maintained a
permanent New York street scene and set. Such was the scale of the New York genre of film
across musicals, dramas, screwball comedy and detective thrillers that Merrill Schleier has
identified a sub genre of skyscraper films in her recent study, Skyscraper Cinema:
Architecture and Gender in American Film (2009).

Up until the late 1930s, Los Angeles remained obscured by the very industry it supported,
something that prompted Pauline Kael to note Los Angeles itself has never recovered from
the inferiority complex that its movies nourished (Sanders, 2003, 59). Supporting Kaels
point are the observations of German geographer, Anton Wagner, in Two Million Streets in
Southern California. Writing in 1935, Wagner argued the principles of movie set design had
been incorporated into the faade landscapes of Los Angeles. The notion of facades as
opposed to a built environment and layers of slowly accreted architecture seemed an
inevitable corollary to the design logistics underpinning the citys dominant industry. Faade
landscapes and streetscapes describe architectural tendencies in the citys suburbs to

58
construct homes and juxtapose historical styles that range from Tudor to Neo Classical, from
Medieval to Frank Lloyd Wright.

By hosting Hollywood and providing acreage to vast studio complexes and backlots, Los
Angeles became the cinemas ultimate staging ground, able to construct elaborate settings
that could stand in for those other real metropolises from New York, London, Paris and
Berlin to the exotica of Casablanca or Rio de Janeiro. Los Angeles itself functioned as
cinemas blank screen, a place that could reify other real cities for cinema audiences around
the world, any place that is, except itself. The pre-eminence of Hollywood over Los Angeles,
of image over place sees Los Angeles become in effect, the hollowed out real, the first
physical place to be colonised by the sign. Displaced by the image and Hollywood, the city of
Los Angeles becomes the invisible lumpen Base to Hollywoods shimmering Superstructure.

Dark Crystal: Los Angeles and Reservoirs of Noir

It was not until film noir and the middle of the twentieth century that Hollywood finally
began noticing its own backyard and the unique urban qualities of the city that played host to
it. Behind the studios and the backlots dominated by New York street sets and fifty foot high
flats featuring painted New York skylines was a real city, the growing city of Los Angeles. In
place of soaring skyscrapers and kinetic density were sprawling, low lying suburbs and a city
that was sprouting a new kind of American urbanism, one that was capable of extending the
new American cinematic form of film noir.

In the 1940s it was the advent of film noir that enabled Hollywood to discover Los Angeles,
and it has since gone on to comprise a vital component of the citys screen generated
heritage. Los Angeles emerged through an indelible association as the city of film noir. In
relation to Los Angeles film noir comprises more than just a collection of films. Instead it can
be interpreted as laying the popular foundations of Los Angeles enabling the city to occupy
an acute place in the American imaginary.

Providing a context for Los Angeles unique urbanism, film noir finally gave form, texture
and meaning to those suburbs in search of a city. In stark contrast to the sunny image
portrayed by Los Angeles boosterism, the city that Hollywood discovered through film noir
was a dark city, a place that turned sunshine into chiaroscuro and hope into despair. Film noir
59
articulated Los Angeles styled American existentialism, the kind that could only be produced
by a city located at the terminus of Manifest Destiny where a constantly buoyed Westward
expansion folds back on itself, deflated and dismayed. In Los Angeles: the architecture of
four ecologies, architectural historian Reyner Banham articulated an uncharacteristic and
pessimistic subtext to the city and what had perhaps been some of the driving currents
flowing beneath Los Angeles film noir.

Los Angeles looks naturally to the Sunsetand named one of its great
boulevards after that favourite evening view. But if the eye follows the
sun, westward migration cannot. The Pacific beaches are where young
men stop going West, where the great waves of agrarian migration from
Europe and the Middle West broke in a surf of unfulfilled and frustrated
hopes.

(Banham, 1971, 6)

Transcending a mere collection of films and operating beyond film studies concerns of genre
and/or style, the corpus of film noir from the classic period, 1938-1958, serves as one of the
the most potent means through which to map, interpret and historicise the real city of Los
Angeles. In City of Quartz Mike Davis sees film noir fulfilling this historical function. In his
study Davis attempts to construct a project that could serve as a noir history of Los Angeles
past and future, arguing film noir has come to function as a surrogate public history
(Davis, 1990, 20).

In light of the gap in conventional scholarly histories between McCareys work in 1946 and
Fogelsons in 1967, the classic period of film noir that spanned 1938 to 1958, certainly offers
one alternative or de facto history of Los Angeles that could occupy these unaccounted
decades. But a central question that must be posed is exactly how vital can that history be
given it is one that relies on the imagination of filmmakers, the commercial dictates of the
studios and is overwhelmingly expressed through fiction? What kinds of insights and
functions can such unorthodox historical texts proffer? Given Davis association with Urban
Theory and the LA School of Urbanism, it is not surprising that he should view film noir in
such potentially historiographical terms. The problem is that Daviss project in City of Quartz

60
expands beyond the realms of the actual corpus of film noir. Despite the groundbreaking
nature of his study, Davis does not elaborate on specific ways in which film noir could
actually serve as a surrogate history nor does he extract many specific historical insights from
any of the films themselves.

Film Noir as Historiography: Inventing Place in Los Angeles

In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as

referent finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether,
leaving us with nothing but texts.

(Jameson, 1991, 18)

In order to address issues raised by positioning film noir as historiographical means for
approaching Los Angeles, it is necessary to canvass how history, cinema and the
representation of cities have been seen to intersect elsewhere. Recent film studies analyses
by Foster (2002), Landsberg (2004), Rosenstone (1995) and Sobchack (2004) have addressed
how the cinema and other audio visual sources are increasingly supplementing and expanding
the discourses around history and memory to forge a domain of collective memory.
Collective memory can be seen as something that is able to bridge a removed and public
history to an intimate and personal memory.

James Naremore (1998), Paula Rabinowitz (2002) and Edward Dimendberg (2004) have
specifically examined film noir within the context of American history and social memory
just prior and after World War II. Their analyses of film noir serve as a broader historical
account of shifts in American society across the middle of the twentieth century and war-
time. While each study has its particular emphasis, outlined below, together their findings
would seem to suggest that the corpus of film noir between 1938 and 1958 has chronicled the
impact of modernity not just on American cities but across American society. Their findings
reveal a culture that was struggling with a diminishing Gemeinschaft, a more community

61
orientated society, against the rise of a capitalist driven, Gesellschaft, a society based on self
interest.

The significance of Dimendberg, Rabinowitz and Naremores studies on film noir is the way
each have demonstrated how film noir can be positioned as a key mode through which to
interpret the wider experience of urban modernity in America across the middle decades of
the twentieth century. In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Dimendberg argues film
noir is a unique articulation of spatial transformations as well as an agent in the experience of
modernity. [F]ilm noirprovides a strategy for reading cinema and the built environment as
mutually implicated in the construction of common spatial fantasies and anxieties
(Dimendberg, 2004, 12). Just as architecture itself functions as frozen time, a linocut of its
moment in history and period of construction, Dimendberg, drawing on Lefebvre, argues that
film noirs representation of urban space has captured something far more than the city as a
narrative backdrop. Dimendberg suggests that the urban spaces of film noir

can be both a symptom and catalyst of spatial transformations. By

articulating a space of representation in the phrase of Lefebvre, film noir
simultaneously registers and inflects the psychic and cultural
manifestations of late modernity.

(Dimendberg, 2004, 12)

More than merely a series of representations that captured a time and a place, Dimendberg
uses Lefebvres approach to outline how film noir, as a textual response to the modern city, is
capable of conveying and perpetrating certain urban spatial reconfigurations that were
unleashed by modernity. Following Dimendbergs argument it is possible to see how the film
noir lighting technique of chiaroscuro functions more than a simple stylistic effect. As well as
mood, chiaroscuro provides an intrinsic formal dimension to aspects of American society and
its modernist cities defined by new forms of architecture, urban space and illuminations. At
night New York is filled with canyons of darkness that give way to towers of light, the city is
constructed along a vertical axis polarising street bound denizens and a new aristocracy of
lofty penthouse residing elites. The darkness, oppression, alienation and confinement of
certain urban spaces under modernity are played off against the mobility, affluence and

62
cosmopolitanism of the privileged in film noir. Light and its expressionistic possibilities, as
well as an essential stylistic ingredient to film noir carried with it the ability to manifest these
structures of thought, feeling and space.

It is important to recognise that the city flooded with light is in fact

irreducibly joined to its double, the shadowy night city at the heart of
Expressionism and film noir.

(McQuire, 2008, 123)

Dimendberg has argued film noir embodies the historical tensions that underpinned the pre
and post World War II American experience of a changing modernity. These aspects of
Dimendbergs reading of film noir are echoed by Rabinowitz in her study, Black and White
Noir Americas Pulp Modernism, (2002). For Rabinowitz, film noir constitutes a historical
mode of understanding and cultural sensibility that permeates Americas experience of
modernity and she interprets its effects far beyond the cinematic realm. Tracing the way in
which noir manifested outside of film and crime fiction, Rabinowitz identifies its workings
across such diverse areas as photography, feminist literature, documentary, labour films and
social work. Rabinowitzs discussion is less about film noir as a subject of study than as a
leitmotif running through mid twentieth century American culture (Rabinowitz, 2002, 8). By
inadvertently capturing history in the repositories of pulp culture, Rabinowitz attributes an
un-self conscious authenticity to noir that can challenge much of the dominant discourse
surrounding American history. A discourse preoccupied with winners, triumphs and other
imperial mythmaking narratives.

In several respects both Dimendberg and Rabinowitzs re-evaluation of film noir extends
Naremores study More Than Night - Film Noir Within its Contexts (1998). In contrast to
Rabinowitz however, and asserted by his subtitle, Naremore interprets film noir
symptomatically and much more as a product of its multiple cultural contexts. Rabinowitz by
contrast, sees noir causally, interpreting film noir as the context; its plot structure and visual
iconography make sense of Americas landscape and history. (Rabinowitz 2002, 20) Bridging
the two contextual perspectives offered by Rabinowitz and Naremore is Dimendberg who
sees the classical period of film noir paradigmatically, articulating a tension between a

63
residual American culture and urbanism of the 1920s and 1930s and its liquidation by the
technological and social innovations accompanying World War II (Dimendberg, 2004, 12).

Uniting each of Dimendberg, Rabinowitz, and Naremores approaches is the manner in which
each constructs noir as a methodological tool to fashion a specific historicisation of American
modernity. For Rabinowitz, noir is employed in the service of arguing for attention to
narrative history to the history of narratives as much as to the narratives of history found
in the trash of Americas popular and political cultures (Rabinowitz, 2002, 232). While for
Naremore it is a matter of seeking A fully historicised account [of noir] that needs to range
across the twentieth century imagination, one requiring comprehensive analysis (Naremore
1998, 39). Dimendberg seems to have directly responded to Naremores call, since he
deploys film noir to map the vast spatial reconfigurations unleashed by American modernity
across the early to mid twentieth century. Film noir enables Dimendberg to trace modernitys
impact on urban form by interpreting how the films collectively express a formal response to
the reconfiguration of American cities whilst simultaneously recording and perpetuating their
experiential effects.

In a similar vein to Davis, Rabinowitz pursues an expanded noir project leading her to areas
beyond the realms of cinema. Only Dimendberg and Naremore engage the historical foci of
noir, cinematic film noir itself. Despite the fact that Dimendberg often focuses on film noirs
set in Los Angeles in order to trace film noirs ability to register spatial shifts in the built
environment, he refuses Los Angeles any exceptional status.

Far from unique to Los Angeles, the transformation of urban structure and
the ensuing tension between centripetal and centrifugal spatial modes are
pervasive in both the post-1939 built environment and the film noir cycle.

(Dimendberg, 2004, 171)

Yet Dimendberg does acknowledge that Los Angeles, with its many absences and particular
lack of a spatial centre, devoid of icons, a skyline and the urban qualities associated with New
York or Chicago, was a city that became thoroughly conducive to the private eye and the
hard boiled detective fiction of writers like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell
Woolrich.
64
 As a private investigator, Marlowe is in a privileged position to grasp the
social and spatial structure of Los AngelesIn an environment
increasingly devoid of a single spatial centre, the private eye functions as a
vital surrogate for readers and film viewers, a kind of mobile perceptual
centre that links concrete experience with a social and political structure of
growing complexity.

(Dimendberg, 2004, 171)

Linking the spatial characteristics of Los Angeles with the mobility of the essential noir
convention of the private eye, Dimendberg does emphasise Los Angeles indelible
association with movement and absence. Crucially, aside from issues of movement,
Dimendberg raises the spectre of political corruption entering the frame as Los Angeles
social structure inevitably entangles the machinations underpinning public office in its noir
web.

Unmistakably, the defining features of Los Angeles are its de-centredness, the freeway and
its heavy reliance on the car, the combination of which can lead to disorientation and
isolation. Dispersed and sprawling, the city functions like no other as the quintessential noir
labyrinth, one that can conceal and fragment the truth. The citys unique urban form gives
rise to the abstractions that film noir is able to rally and then regulate through the convention
of the private eye as outsider. Neither police nor criminal, the subjectivity afforded by the
private investigator offers a figure outside of a system that, as it grows in complexity and
scale becomes predicated on moral compromise.

The Specifi-city of Noir

Prior to the 1940s American modernity pulsed to the vertical kinetics of New York and
improvisational jazz. The staccato energies of this early modernity manifested in cinema in
the rapid fire paced dialogue of screw ball comedies, the machine guns and screeching tyres
of Chicago gangsters and the dizzying energy and choreography of Busby Berkeley musicals.

65
None of these formal elements of cinema could easily be grafted onto Los Angeles or provide
expression to its sunbaked, languid and provincial lifestyle with its horizontal urban form.

By the 1940s however, a shift in modernity was occurring that was as vast as the
geographical separation between New York and Los Angeles. The two modernitys could be
characterised by the disparity between the contemporaneous paintings, Broadway Boogie-
Woogie (1942-43) by Piet Mondrian and Edward Hoppers Nighthawks (1942). With its jazz
inspired, buzzing abstract geometry, Broadway Boogie-Woogie signals the final exuberance
of an urban modernity firmly entrenched in a New York vocabulary of grids, skyscraper
perpendiculars and stylised metropolitan bustle. In contrast, Nighthawks with its isolated
figures trapped in an all night diner (suggested by the absence of a door in the fishbowl
design) stands as a harbinger of things to come. A noir world brought forth by World War II
and subsequent prolonged Cold War anxiety. Like Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Nighthawks
was also inspired by New York, a Greenwich Village diner frequented by Hopper and his
wife. Hopper commenced the painting soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Part of the
inspiration is also attributed to Ernest Hemingways short story, The Killers, adapted in 1946
by Robert Siodmak into a film noir starring Burt Lancaster.

As Dimendberg has charted, from the turn of the twentieth century, modernity in America
had been driven by centripetal forces that reconfigured and re-defined American cities like
New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and even Kansas City. Each city with their
bulging populations and skyscrapers represented the vertical sprouting of a new urban
topography and accompanying this was an entirely new phenomenological experience of the
city that was typically celebrated in cinema. By the time the forces of modernity began to
reshape Los Angeles in the middle of the twentieth century, not only had they been
transformed into centrifugal energies, but they were generating a modernity that was in a
considerably different phase, one characterised by scepticism, anxiety and uncertainty. Rather
than being reconfigured, the spatial qualities of Los Angeles were exacerbated by the
centrifugal energies of this later modernity, a modernity of cars and freeways which led to an
even greater de-centralisation and sprawl, across which noir would provide formal
expression.

Relative to other American metropoliss, especially New York, Los Angeles sat outside of
early modernity and its aesthetic forms. As a city it was not until the arrival of film noir that

66
the citys previous formlessness could be inscribed with a sense of place. Providing actual
and narrative possibility, film noir would spatially and narratively re-organise and extract
meanings from the citys previously nondescript suburbs. In Sunset Boulevard (1950) the
chiaroscuro of film noir transformed the citys characteristic Spanish Mission architecture
into gothic ruins concealing the vice and nightmares of life inside the Dream Factory. But it
was Bunker Hill that would become the epicentre of Los Angeles noir. The district was
memorialised and deified by film noir, functioning dramaturgically and at the level of
character in films like, Act of Violence (1949), Criss Cross (1949), Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
and latecomer, Angels Flight (1965). Today Bunker Hill is a site erased by urban planning
and development. Bunker Hill as it once was only exists in the memory of film noir and hard
boiled detective stories, Chandlers amongst them. For Mike Davis, Bunker Hill is inscribed
by film noir as a recurring topographical motif of the citys woes.

After the first adaptations of Cain and Chandler, film noir began to exploit
Los Angeles settings in new ways. Geographically, it shifted increasingly
from the Cainian bungalows and suburbs to the epic dereliction of
downtowns Bunker Hill, which symbolized the rot in the expanding
metropolis.

(Davis, 1992, 20)

By employing location photography film noir regularly utilised and depicted actual Los
Angeles locales. For the first time it was not the citys studio backlots that were being
featured on cinema screens but actual Los Angeles streets that were providing the mood and
physical texture to the new thriller narratives of film noir. From the Hollywood Bowl and
Schwarzs Drugstore in Double Indemnity to the citys piers, boulevards and bungalows, Los
Angeles locales could even headline a film noir title showcasing previously anonymous
districts and buildings and repositioning them as recognisable urban topography and eventual
iconography: Sunset Boulevard (1950), 711 Ocean Drive (1950), Southside 1-1000 (1950),
and Union Station (1950). Neo noir films continue this film noir trait deriving titles and anchoring
narratives in the physical Los Angeles of the real; Chinatown (1974), To Live and Die in LA (1986),
Miracle Mile (1988), Mulholland Falls (1996), 2 Days in the Valley (1996), LA Confidential (1997)
and Mulholland Drive (2001).

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The work of Alain Silver and James Ursini has tracked Los Angeles indelible association
with film noir. In contrast to Edward Dimendberg, Silver and Ursini argue strongly for place
specificity when interpreting film noir and have described Los Angeles as the requisite,
prenatal site for film noir. While various, oft-cited film and literary movements, from
German Expressionist cinema to home-grown detective fiction, may have helped shaped the
rough beast that is film noir, it slouched towards Los Angeles to be born (Silver & Ursini,
2005, 12). Like Naremore, Ursini and Silvers focus on the specificity of Los Angeles in
terms of defining film noir. As clearly stated by the title of one their studies, they go so far as
to argue that the city operates at the level of character in film noir, L.A. Noir: The City as
Character (2005).

Pioneering theorists of film noir, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, also identified
film noir within a very specific contextual relationship to Hollywood. As Naremore points
out, Borde and Chaumeton saw Somewhat surprisingly, that European cinema was a feeble
influence on film noir and that American noir should be understood chiefly within the
Hollywood professional context (Naremore, 1998, 40). At the heart of this Hollywood
professional context in relation to film noir was the B-movie structure of the studio system.
One of the few areas of consensus within film noir criticism is that the films originated out of
the smaller studios like Republic and RKO, and amongst the major studios, out of their B-
film system with low budgets, type casting and cannibalising of film genres.

Less acknowledged than the influence of production and studio processes in film histories of
film noir is the physical context surrounding their production. Hollywood and the studio
environment reside within several Los Angeles suburbs, so there are numerous site specific
aspects to Los Angeles which affected film production and which needs to be taken into
consideration when discussing a body of films so renowned for their location shooting.
Particularly between 1941 and 1945, during the United States involvement in World War II,
the physical conditions surrounding Los Angeles regularly permeated and impacted the
conditions of Hollywood production. The significance of the underlying role played by Los
Angeles in relation to film noir, along side, but separate to, Hollywood is only recently
being addressed by film history and film studies. Film noir history abounds in how
Hollywood affected film noir as both a production environment and as a system of signifying
systems. Identifying and acknowledging the influence of the physical production

68
environment represents a shift in understanding the noir aesthetic as partly derived from Los
Angeles unique urban and industrial filmmaking physiognomy.

Distinctions in the relationship between Los Angeles and Hollywood and the possible affects
on film noir are evident in some recent analysis conducted by Sheri Biesen in her study,
Blackout World War II and The Origins of Film Noir (2005). Biesen documents the specific
war time environment of Los Angeles and how it directly impacted filmmaking and
reverberated through Hollywood and the studio system. Biesen highlights how the city of Los
Angeles was subjected to constant blackouts and how resource rationing impacted in specific
technical and logistical ways on production processes.

As the war continued, wartime conditions and material limitations

significantly influenced filmmaking practices as Hollywood coped with
severe production restrictions by 1941 (escalating through 1942 and 1943).
Such constraints necessitated stringent rationing of supplies and film
stock, decreased use of lighting and electricity, war-related bans on
filming transportation and military facilities, elimination of daytime
location shooting in Los Angeles (for security and rationing purposes), air-
raid and civil defense drills, dimout and blackout regulations at night[.]

(Biesen, 2005, 68)

Budget and technical constraints limited formal and aesthetic choices, with economics and
affordability regularly determining directorial and cinematographic decision making.
Ironically, these same constraints and limitations fostered many of the filmmaking
innovations that led to film noirs wide appeal. The low cost visual and aural motifs
positively contributed to the style of film noir and its newfound expressionism and realism.
Biesens account of war-time conditions and the environment surrounding Los Angeles that
coincided with some of the peak years of film noir production, 1939-45, extends
understandings of how numerous factors contributed to noir aesthetics and form, some of
which lay further beyond the control of its filmmakers than previously thought. Biesens ,
analysis highlights how the hermetics of Hollywoods production methods, especially in

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relation to location shooting, could be constrained by the physical context of the city and its
operations under wartime restrictions.

As Naremore has demonstrated, even when it came to an A-budget film noir like Double
Indemnity, location shooting in Los Angeles meant working within wartime limitations which
directly manifested in what audiences were presented with onscreen. According to Naremore,
the exterior lighting of the Glendale train station scene in Double Indemnity was blacked out
in compliance with the citys lighting restrictions (Naremore, 1998, 2). So a key part of the
chiaroscuro in the mise-en-scene is neither a choice of director Billy Wilder nor
cinematographer John Seitz, and instead represents an edge of frame, documentary element,
pictorially recording a fragment of wartime Los Angeles at night. Clearly impacts like this
remain minor against an overall aesthetic that was controlled and determined by the
filmmakers or production logistics. But as Biesens analysis and Naremore noting of a
seemingly minor production detail reveals, film texts, no matter how fictional in nature, are
always produced in the work-a-day world of a particular time and a particular place and will
inadvertently record big and small details of their moment in time.

Whether in fiction or non-fiction filmmaking, aspects of reality directly and indirectly make
their way into and are captured by the processes of filmmaking. Exploring this phenomenon,
Pierre Sorlin argues that it will be fiction, rather than non-fiction, that will be most prized by
future historians. Developing ideas outlined by Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler: A
Psychological History of German Film (1947) as well as in Nature of Film: The Redemption
of Physical Reality (1961), Sorlin posits that fiction films are more accurate recorders of the
features surrounding their moment in history than any direct or documentary account.

In Nature of Film, he [Kracauer] tried to show that feature films are

realistic, in spite of their fictional character: Film is uniquely equipped to
record and reveal physical reality and, hence, gravitates towards it..the
only reality we are concerned with is actually existing physical reality- the
transitory world we live in. If we ignore plot and the characters, we
discover aspects of life which the camera has recorded all the more
accurately because the cameraman did not even notice them. Take a film
like The Servant [Joseph Losey, 1963]. Today we are interested in the
story and we think the setting unimportant, but in a hundred years time,

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 historians will find in it invaluable information about dress, homes, public
spaces, and relationships in London in the middle of the twentieth century.
This is what I have called the ethnographical aspect of the cinema;
Kracauer was right to draw attention to it, to show that it changes
according to the period and the director; and he points out that certain
social spheres are often shown while others, such as the country and
factories, are forgotten. Looked at in this way, films are only a series of
documentary illustrations; the frames remain, but the film disappears as a
system of expression with a specific character.

(Sorlin, 2001, 40)

Like Kracauer, Sorlin sees film providing historical insights out of those elements that have
been inadvertently captured by filmmakers, details of such quotidian insignificance that they
have bypassed all filters informing creative decision making. Amidst the constructs of the
fiction, this daily minutiae, captured at the moment of filming, now lies dormant and almost
invisible to our contemporaneous inspection but resides as the most genuine and authentic
artefacts of the real. For Sorlin this constitutes cinemas ethnographic ability, one that is not
compromised by a fictional text and approach. Sorlins viewpoint is echoed by Vanessa
Schwartz.

Films hold on the twentieth century has changed the kind of documents
historians have at their disposal, has enriched historiography, and has
redefined such elemental historical notions as temporality. Whatever the
twenty-first century may have in store, film and its allied new media will
be essential to its history and to our historical imaginations.

(Schwartz, 2008, 213)

Political and Cold Noir

By supplying an urban setting that, judging from all urban planning accounts, was unique in
the American modernist landscape and not in evidence anywhere else across North America,
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Los Angeles enabled crucial aspects of film noir form. In contrast to Dimendberg, Alain
Silver and James Ursini argue for a kind of Los Angeles exceptionalism. They see the citys
uniqueness, as both an ill-formed modernist city and home of Hollywood, sufficiently marked
in the corpus of film noir to constitute a differentiated subset they label LA Noir. The
question remains, however, if Los Angeles could play such a determining role in film noir,
then could film noir have played an equally determining role on Los Angeles through its
onscreen representations of the city? Through titles like; Double indemnity (1944), Murder,
My Sweet (1944), Blue Dahlia (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Killers
(1946), The Big Sleep (1946), He Walked by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Big
Heat (1953) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the template for representing mid-twentieth century
Los Angeles is film noir. As a group of films they construct Los Angeles as the quintessential
noir city, a place that exemplified the dark imaginary of film noir.

While there is little argument that the Los Angeles film noir titles listed above are amongst
the most poignant examples of classical film noir, just as significantly, they are also the films
that enabled Los Angeles to become a space of representation, and marked the city as the
locus of American urban experience in the middle of the twentieth century. By the 1950s,
defining features of the period were the tensions arising out of the Cold War, nuclear threat, a
rising consumer society, car ownership and highways. Each element of this new modernity
features in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) with Los Angeles functioning as the new epicentre of such
times. While the plot of the narrative engages the broader historical discourse surrounding the
Cold War the film also offers unique insight into much more local concerns like those arising
out of freeway construction, an issue that would go on to affect the majority of Los Angeles
residents, and before the 1950s decade was over, almost all Americans.

Los Angeles in Kiss Me Deadly is a city without pedestrians; instead, the

newly constructed postwar freeways and the broad boulevards stream, night
and day, with unending lines of moving cars, whose drivers and passengers,
without exception, are in shadow, invisible to us throughout the film.

(Christopher, 2006, 21)

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As indicated above by Christopher, in Kiss Me Deadly, freeways in Los Angeles are
represented not as efficient solutions to urban traffic and congestion but as promoting
anonymity amongst the citys inhabitants and increasing disconnection with potential street-
life. Kiss Me Deadlys depiction of the alienating effects of freeways is in extreme contrast to
the General Motors exhibit and ride, Futurama. Produced for the New York Worlds Fair
some sixteen years earlier in 1939, Futurama was designed to showcase the benefits of a
national American network of freeways and superhighways. Futurama is now a Robert
Moses endorsed relic of utopian modernity, while Kiss Me Deadly reflects and predicts the
reservations expressed in urban activist, Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities published in 1961. Both texts represent a questioning of the fervour and zealousness
with which urban renewal in America was being pursued from the 1950s. Futurama marks
how Americans were sold and marketed the promise of a utopian freeway future. Against this
promise stands a warning from Kiss Me Deadly, revealing not just Cold War anxiety but
scepticism on the utopianism of freeways long before many histories may have expected and
amidst what is traditionally presented as the era of Eisenhower induced slumber and
complacency on such issues.

Beyond the local issues surrounding freeway construction, Kiss Me Deadly is also significant
for shifting the milieu of film noir out of a traditional criminal context and into the wider
social domain of intelligence agencies and politics, an area that would be developed by the
proto neo noirs of the 1960s which are discussed in Chapter Three.

Los Angeles the Dark Mirrored Labyrinth

The urban labyrinths featured in film noir may have ranged across the American landscape
and featured cities from New York to Chicago, San Francisco to Kansas City, and while
some of these noirs, especially those set in New York, were periodically shot on location, the
majority were filmed in Los Angeles on Hollywood studio backlots. The cities of American
film noir have been collectively labelled the Dark City, a term that describes the modern
American metropolis as it convulsed under modernity and is overrun by crime, vice and
desire. But as the writer and film noir connoisseur, Eddie Muller reminds us:

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 Dark City, it should be evidentwas Hollywood. New York, Chicago, San
Francisco, and many other cities, large and small, provided the necessary
backgroundsBut the sense of desire and despair, the greed and alienation
and the unflinching take on the venal depths of human nature are the product
of a specific place, the Dream Factory, and a specific time the final days of
the once powerful studio system.

(Muller, 1998, 193)

Hollywood may have constructed dark cities, but they were always stand-ins for Los
Angeles, that real and even stranger place lurking in the shadows a place uniquely equipped
to enable countless realisations of the Dark City. Overlooked for decades by Hollywood
while it was busy manufacturing New York and other exotic locales, it was not until the
advent of film noir that a cinematic form could articulate the tensions and contradictory
aspects of the real Los Angeles. Through film noir Los Angeles could be configured to the
specific dictates of various narratives and scenarios but always resonating something of the
uncanny. In D.O.A. (1950), Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), as
Christopher states, All three are set in Los AngelesBut it is a Los Angeles that is different
in each of them respectively bizarre, seedy, and fantastical (Christopher, 2006, 10).

By the end of the 1950s, film noir saw Los Angeles travel a long way as a place in the
American and global imagination. As the classical period of film noir drew to a close, it had
been twenty five years plus since the city had been described as the great exception, and
stubborn misfit within American urbanism. Constructed as the ultimate Dark City and
providing film noir with its unique Hollywood and urban physiognomy, far from an
American oddity, in Naremores view, after its treatment in Double Indemnity in 1944 Los
Angeles had transcended even its hard boiled identity and was transformed into the terminus
of a ruthless American capitalism:

The city seemed less like the urban sprawl described by Cain, and more like a
dangerously seductive Eldorado - a centre of advanced capitalism,
instrumental reason and death[a] a grimly sardonic vision of a Taylor zed
or assembly-line America. (Naremore, 1998, 82-83)

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The advent of film noir affected Los Angeles unlike any other American city. It signalled Los
Angeles as a location city in its own right, not just the home of Hollywood and positioned
Los Angeles as a place, a city that could endow real and imagined settings and sustain
cinematic narrative. Identified and treated as a complex urban locale, film noir erased Los
Angeles one dimensional identity of an orange grove lifestyle destination, an identity
narrowly constructed to serve the shallow self interest of the boosters. In return, Los Angeles
provided film noir with its ultimate urban setting, a city that became defined by its
monochromatic renderings in the same way older cities are defined by periods in architecture.

Film noir performs as a heuristic, self-styled and very local means through which Los
Angeles came to know itself and came to function as the citys alter ego, the dark mirror
reflecting what is an essential psychogeography of the city, a phenomena detailed in Chapter
Three.

Conclusion

If any city is to be historicised according to its multiple cinematic representations is there any
better candidate than Los Angeles, the city that plays host to Hollywood, the global image
factory? As Alain Silver and James Ursini state [a]s the city that contains Hollywood, the
suburb it annexed in 1910, Los Angeles has a unique position in film history (Silver &
Ursini, 2005, 12). But perhaps even more poignantly, the reverse may also be true. As it is
history itself and the processes of historiography that become uniquely configured, opened up
and expanded when Los Angeles is viewed through film history and film noir.

Imbricated into the emerging fabric of the city, film noir constitutes far more than a corpus of
films in relation to Los Angeles, functioning instead as a home-grown, urban metanarrative
of Los Angeles and its history. Los Angeles film noir refracts the citys turbulent
syncopations to a transforming modernity, enabling the citys horizontal lived experience to
be rendered through a cinematic form that both catalogues and is catalyst in the expiration of
the modern metropolis in the middle of the century.

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Arriving at such an understanding involves deploying the cinematic city as the means for
innovating historiographical approaches without necessarily dispensing with older ones. It is
more a matter of how the intersections between the city and cinema can supplement
traditional historical knowledges, such as the well documented settlement patterns of
California at the end of the nineteenth century, with insights garnered from sources and
material beyond the purview of classical historiography, in this case, the corpus of film noir.
Whether it is a traditional or new approach to history, the object of all such inquiries is to
expand understandings of the actual city of Los Angeles in its here and now by understanding
where it came from and how. It is only through the expansion of historical perspectives
enabled in this instance by the prism afforded by film noir, that the fragments of an
unretrieved and previously unknowable past may be converted into knowable history.

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Chapter 3 Neo Noir the Postmodern Genre

Introduction

The corpus of film noir across its classical period, 19381958, has come to represent an
attenuated response to the modern American city. In the previous chapter I demonstrated
how in the case of Los Angeles, film noir can provide insight into how the city has been
historicized through film noir representation and how urban history and film history can
overlap. In this chapter, I trace how film noir evolved from a film style into a film genre and
by maintaining a focus on its relationship with Los Angeles, chart the rise of neo noir and its
relationship to postmodern representation.

By the end of the 1950s film noir and American cities were both being reconfigured through
the paradigm shifts that would later manifest in postmodernity and neo noir. Like the
relationship between film noir and the modern city, neo noir has gone on to constitute a
collection of films that display a similar symbiosis with the postmodern urban. In this
chapter the analysis charts how neo noir advanced the film noir style into a film genre and
provides the postmodern urban with a postmodern form. The operations of neo noir in respect
to Los Angeles articulate essential features and characteristics of representation from the
1960s onwards demonstrating key features of the altered landscape under postmodernity.

Outlining the development of neo noir and isolating aspects of its postmodern expression
requires a focus on two landmark neo noir productions, Chinatown (1974) and Blade Runner
(1982). Both films reveal complex relationships with real and reel Los Angeles. I have had
to focus on both films despite the fact that they have enjoyed extensive critical analysis. In
my comparative analysis I aim to prove how they stand as fundamental and key milestones in
the development of neo noir and illustrate some of the most vital elements underpinning
postmodern representation of the city.

By re-examining Chinatown and Blade Runner and comparing them in terms of postmodern
representations of a postmodern Los Angeles, the analysis highlights how each film activates
specific intertextual elements of the city that draw upon its film noir heritage. The neo noir
representation of Los Angeles in Chinatown and Blade Runner reveals how the citys screen
generated heritage as the Dark City is combined with actual history and production histories
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of the city. As neo noir representations of Los Angeles combine fictional and factual histories
the postmodern trope of intertextuality becomes a dominant feature in the citys
representation. At the same time the notion of intertextuality is extended upon in neo noir
representations of Los Angeles by employment of something that I identify as extratextual
associations. The elements in a text I label extratextual are specific historical events and film
production contexts of the city that are signalled but which are situated out in the Los
Angeles of the real. Although all representations signify certain real world associations,
extratextual sits somewhere in between intertextual and world at large associations by
remaining confined to specific film and visual production externalities. As both intertextual
and extratextual elements are rallied in relation to neo noirs development and especially in
the approaches of Chinatown and Blade Runner, neo noir as a genre reveals how boundaries
between the historical, imagined, factual and cinematic Los Angeles become blurred. These
semiotically ingrained processes of neo noir and the way it has become embedded in Los
Angeles echo aspects of Baudrilliards simulacrum which will also be discussed.

In this discussion I will outline some taxonomical considerations around neo noir and how
the genre functions hermeneutically in relation to developments in postmodern
representation. The aim of the chapter is to illuminate those postmodern qualities
demonstrated by neo noir that have determined how Los Angeles is represented
cinematically. By examining the Los Angeles of neo noir as a postmodern intersection of real
and reel cities, neo noir representations of Los Angeles are argued to be vital to the citys
status as paradigmatic of postmodernity.

By analysing neo noir within the contexts of urban representation and postmodern
representation this chapter identifies generic developments within neo noir. At the same time
I intend to locate intertextual and other meaning operations surrounding neo noir across a
broader framework than within a purely film studies approach and genre analysis. The wide
application of noir stylistics across so many films and eras sustains cinema studies debate on
genre and film noir and neo noir. As a category neo noir finds widespread cultural
appreciation, audience literacies and sophisticated practitioner understandings that are
convincing enough to see it satisfying the general requirements of genre from early in its
development. While I acknowledge that the issue of neo noirs generic status will remain
contentious against highly specific genre criteria as practiced within genre analysis, for the
purposes of this discussion, while not discounting the merits of detailed genre analysis, neo
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noirs precise and exact satisfying of genre is not the primary concern. While I wish to
establish its credentials as a working genre I accept there may be limits to its overall status
within the classification.

Film Noir Style to Neo Noir Genre

Neo noir has promoted sets of film noir motifs and conventions across a collection of films
over the past forty years that has seen the notion of noir widely understood. As often
discussed in film history, film noir was originally described as a film style, when identified
by French film theorists like Etienne, Chaumeton and others. Due to the restrictions imposed
by wartime distribution practices occurring in Europe, American crime thriller dramas were
retrospectively labelled film noir by the French theorists who coined and applied the term
several years after the films actual production. Well quoted within studies histories is how
the filmmakers of the original cycle of film noir productions between 1940 and 1958 had
neither heard nor employed the term, film noir, during the time of their actual production. The
taxonomical problems surrounding the status of film noir within cinema studies and debates
about its status as either a film style or a genre can partly be attributed to its uniquely
retrospective process of classification that divorce the term film noir from its production
context.

The same unfamiliarity with film criticisms notion of film noir certainly cannot be applied to
productions occurring from the 1960s and onwards during the emergence of what appears to
be proto neo noirs. Like its predecessor, debate surrounds the origins of a shift to a neo noir
consciousness, the specific characteristics of neo noir and the parameters against which it can
be clearly defined. One of the challenges confronting attempts at the taxonomy of neo noir
arises from its wide and discursive application, as neo noir films range from crime fiction to
science fiction, from nostalgic film noir recreations to future orientated tech noir.

By the middle of the 1960s proto neo noir productions can be seen advancing the previous
film noir form into what I will posit becomes a fully fledged, self conscious genre. As a
genre, neo noir took film noir into new and expanded territories both geographically and
formally. The generic features of neo noir arrived from a wide set of film noir conventions,
motifs and narrative themes. These range across its chiaroscuro visuals to desire laden

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characters and plots involving anti-heroes, outsiders and loners in narrative tropes of twists,
double crosses and betrayals, unhappy and tragic endings and all structured around aspects of
urban alienation and small and large scale crime. By the 1960s filmmakers could be assured
that audience understandings and literacy around film noirs was well established enabling neo
noir films to be conscious manipulations of its conventions in knowing, playful and ironic
ways. In Europe this enabled directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Luc Godard and others
associated with the French Nouvelle Vague to take film noir into a highly mannerist phase
through its treatment in films like, Breathless (1960), Made in USA (1966) and Le samourai
(1967).

Distinguishing film noir as a stylistic tendency from neo noir as a genre is the self conscious
manner with which by the 1960s the latter engages noir stylistics, motifs, settings, characters,
themes and narratives. By advancing film noir tropes and conventions neo noir is capable of
clearly relaying specific generic functions. As scholars on genre like Steve Neale, Barry
Keith Grant, Rick Altman and Thomas Schatz have established, fundamental to generic
logics and reading patterns is the way audiences are bound in two-way formal
communications with genre texts. In genre the pleasures of spectatorship are able to function
on the simultaneous experience of knowing, sameness and difference but operating
within an equation that contains an unknown quotient of each (Grant, 1995, 114-18).

Through the wider circulation and appreciation of a canon of film noir both within North
American and European film consumption and criticism as well as global filmmaking
practices, neo noir can be seen to be functioning and operating according to the logics of
genre by the 1970s. Reflecting the dynamics of genre, under neo noir, film noir themes,
characters, motifs, and plots that were easily recognisable conventions by audiences were
consciously employed by filmmakers who sought to either emulate or comment on film noir
traditions and what its moody stylistics had come to represent. For Neale, the contestations
in film studies around whether or not film noir ever constituted something akin to a genre do
not apply to neo noir.

Ifnoir is a fantasy, or if an attachment to the term can in Naremores

words mark a nostalgia for something that never existed, the phenomenon of
neo-noir itself vehicle for this fantasy is much more real, not only as a
phenomenon but also as a genre. (Neale, 2000, 173-4)

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From Out of the Past

By the time of classical film noirs demise in the 1960s, as a discourse on American
urbanism, crime and corruption, popular awareness of film noir had gradually shifted from
the margins of B productions to a much more central and widespread cultural understanding.
In the 1970s, the shift from minor B movie style to something else, according to John
Calwetti, can partly be attributed to how film noirs central ingredient, hard boiled detective
fiction, had transcended far beyond its pulp origins and was operating at the level of myth in
the United States.

If a myth can be defined as a pattern of narrative known throughout the

culture and presented in many different versions by many different tellers,
then the hard-boiled detective story is in that sense an important American
myth Chinatown evokes this myth in many ways.

(Calwetti, 1995, 228)

As Rabinowitz has detailed in her survey of noir manifestations across American popular
culture, any popular or low brow form required a sustained and varied output in order to
migrate from the margins of the pulps across to the mainstream, let alone into the level of
myth. Hard boiled fiction could not have attained such lofty and widespread heights as myth
without the enormous demographic reach of cinema. Prior to 1948 and the Paramount decree
ruling, the full of effect of which would not take effect on the Hollywood system until the
1960s, the five major studios (MGM, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, Warners and RKO)
remained fully vertically integrated and circulated their films and products across the United
States with oligarchic impunity. As the stories, characters and themes of hard boiled fiction
were adapted into screen based film noir the pulp form gained continental wide circulation
that extended far beyond the reach of minor pulp publishers like Black Mask and its rivals.
Cinema and the Hollywood studios system of distribution were inevitably central factors in
facilitating the deep social and cultural penetration that enabled a previously marginal pulp
literary form like hard boiled fiction to attain the status of myth in the United States.

Significantly, another pulp fiction come-film genre, that also attained the level of myth, is the
Western. Despite being widely disparate in their form, visual styles and narratives, both the
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Western and film noir find common ground as explorations of themes emanating from the
American doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The Western, by its very nomenclature addresses the
westward advance of European settlement on the North American continent and remains a
supreme, global and imperialist myth on the obstacles and heroics associated with new world
colonization. In contrast, film noir mythologises and resolutely documents, the more recent,
urban history of America. By the 1970s, like the Western, the myths generated by hard boiled
fiction and its cinematic expression in film noir, see both functioning as popular and
widespread refractions of a public memory, one structurally capable of standing in for an
entire period of American history.

Post Hollywood

Between 1957 and 1964, all the studios had shown a corporate loss in at least
one year, and there was no year in which at least one such loss had not been
recorded.

(Hall, 2002,15)

Leading up to the 1970s and Chinatown, film noir like its hard boiled fiction counterpart may
have attained the status of myth, but like many other film styles and genres in the 1960s, film
noir also lay amongst the ruins of the Hollywood studio system whose vertical integration,
theatre ownership and exhibition monopolies across the United States were gradually
dismantled after the 1948 Paramount Decree. During the 1960s seismic shifts in the industry
saw the studios purchased by industrial conglomerates and the entire studio system
overhauled. Histories of Hollywood conducted by David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and
Tino Balio, amongst many others, have charted in detail the fall of the classical Hollywood
studio system in the 1960s. The basis of film noirs production context, the industrys A and
B-movie conventions and structures, the institutional arrangements across production,
distribution and exhibition as well as the restrictive Hays code and the studio system of self

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censorship, either vanished or were reconfigured under Hollywoods post-Fordist era of
independent and outsourced production.

The demise of classical film noir parallels the demise of the classical Hollywood Studio
system and while initially Hollywood battled to retain its mass markets and exclusive profits,
the loss of its vertically integrated industrial structure saw its entertainment hegemony
disabled. The new era of filmmaking saw the targeting of specific cinema-going
demographics, an alignment with television, previously cinemas rival, and a whole new
generation of youth audiences that had markedly different film tastes and appetites than
previous generations. Against the cultural and industrial upheavals of the 1960s, both as a
mainstream and independent film form, film noir had decoupled from its production context
and had clearly fallen out of fashion in the United States. A survey of the production numbers
through the 1960s of titles that could be labelled film noir reveal a dramatic drop relative to
the period 1940-60. Given the conjecture over so many films and what can be relied on to be
classified as a film noir title, it is difficult to provide a comprehensive count on the exact
number of American film noir titles across the classical era. Based on a combination of film
noir anthologies and Internet Movie Database (IMDb) titles, however, an approximate
number of film noirs between 1940-60 suggests at least 600 titles were produced, averaging:

300 Film noir titles - 1940-1950

300 Film noir titles - 1950-1960

In stark contrast, the average number of film noir titles, often categorised post noir and neo
noir

22 Post Film noir titles - 1960-1970

(Duncan 2000, and IMDb.com accessed 20/11/09).

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Regardless of the criteria and its effect on the total figures the downturn in production across
the 1960s is clearly overwhelming. So just as the cultural currency of film noir was
approximating the status of myth by 1960 its popularity had waned in the face of the socio-
political and cultural tumults of that decade. By the 1960s, independent filmmaking had
escaped the shadow of the studio systems sub currents and production companies pursued
less formula based filmmaking as previous styles and classical genres like the musical and
Western languished. As the studios A and B-movie structure vanished, exploitation, arthouse
and independent cinema was rising and the influence of European styled filmmaking and
auteurism injected appeal into less formulaic and genre based filmmaking. Independently
produced films were epitomized by The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). While the
term Independent is always a point of conjecture because films like these were often
distributed by the studios they were developed and produced beyond the studio walls by
outsourced and independent production companies. The key decision makers in these smaller
start-up companies were more attuned to the changing counterculture and youth market often
because they were a part of it. A prime example by the early 1970s is the case of BBS
Productions, as discussed by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: how the sex-
drug-and-rock n roll generation saved Hollywood (1998).

The combination of changes in industrial, market and sociological urban contexts had taken
their toll on film noir at the end of the 1950s which is why histories on film noir so often
repeat the claim that the classical period ended in 1958 with Orson Welles Touch of Evil,
often labelled film noirs epitaph. But if there is consensus surrounding classical film noirs
demise right down to a precise end title, there is almost none when it comes to deciding on
the arrival or commencement of neo noir. Some critics see evidence of the arrival of neo noir
with Harper in 1966 while many have situated much later with the production of Chinatown
in 1974.

Following its predecessor, neo noir remains a contentious category, from its epistemology to
its current status. By acknowledging changes in the production, sociological and urban
environments of the United States and combined with a self awareness in the film noir style,
there is ample evidence to suggest neo noir commenced around 1961 with a series of titles
that reflect its altered contexts. Previously some of these titles have been labelled post-noir
but in light of the ascendant nature of neo noir it is now more useful to think of them as
proto-neo noirs. Titles like Underworld USA (1961), Man-Trap (1961), Cape Fear (1962)
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and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) The Killers (1964), Naked Kiss (1964), Brainstorm
(1965), Harper (1966), Seconds (1966), Point Blank (1967), The Detective (1967) Bullitt
(1969) and Marlowe (1969) all testify to the gradual resurgence of film noir but one which
was now more self conscious, explicit and reflecting the political anxieties of the Cold War
era.

Occurring simultaneously with European experiments in film noir, these early to mid 1960s
titles reveal something that is configured along substantially different lines from that of
classical film noir. For Naremore in the early 1960s film noir had entered, in his words,
Hollywoods cultural memory and films like The Manchurian Candidate displayed a new
engagement with the politics and events of the new decade.

The Manchurian Candidate can be bracketed formally with a group of

truly adventurous narratives operating on the margins of noir among
them, pictures such as Citizen Kane, Breathless, and La jetee (1963), It
also seems to predict a new stage in the history of mainstream crime and
espionage movies, brought on in part by the assassination of Kennedy, the
Vietnam War, the advent of postmodern visual technologies, and the
increasing liberalization of censorship regulations. Film noir had certainly
not outlived its usefulness, but its historical phase was ending; it was
now undergoing a sea change, or perhaps a birth into Hollywoods cultural
memory.

(Naremore, 1998, 135)

From B-Movie to Art Film, Godards Gun Play

European re-workings of film noir in the 1960s had revealed ways in which the dated film
noir style could be reworked and adapted. Films like Godards Breathless (1960), and later
examples like Made in USA (1966), Masculin-Feminin (1966), Antonionis Blow Up (1966)
and Melvilles Le Samurai (1967) revealed how, in foreign hands and foreign lands, film noir
could not only become mannerist in its expression but could function differently when
removed from its original North American context. As highly self-conscious re-workings of
film noir, European auteurs deployed film noir in a sophisticated and ironic manner. Applied
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to post-war Europe and emptied of its original signifiers, film noir conventions derived from
its American context were hollowed out enabling it to connect to, amongst other things,
European existentialism, and express very local and post war concerns about the threats
posed by a rising American cultural imperialism.

Godard employed film noir as a reflexive critique on American popular culture and its threat
of a new media-based imperialism. In film noirs like, Breathless (1960), Alphaville (1965)
and Made in USA (1966) film noir is treated in a highly mannerist fashion that sees the
conventions exaggerated, stylized and evoking a history of film noir approaches. Godard not
only referenced American cinema through intertextual associations with the classic period of
film noir but he also employed what I term a historical extratextuality. Extending beyond
intertextuality and what becomes a hallmark of postmodernism, intertextuality is when one
text derives heightened and uncontrollable semiotic meanings through references to other
texts. By extratextuality I refer to the way a text can denote the processes and histories that lie
beyond the text and are external although still confined to the connection to processes,
associations and knowledges of textual and visual production. In the case of Godard, the
intertextuality is aimed at Hollywood as a signifying system while the extratextuality is
squarely aimed at invoking actual production histories of Hollywood as an industrial practice.
Both functions correlate to the way the European noir hollowed film noir in their ironic and
mannerist approaches. The gaps that are created within the individual film text after this
hollowing out enables these kinds of other textual meanings and externalised associations to
circulate amongst its audiences.

In Godards mannerist film noirs he is not only referencing American cinemas particular
stylistics through film noir aesthetics but its historical dominance as a media industry. For
Godard and the French New Wave, operating in a period dominated by the ascent of
American mass media and the arrival of power as expressed through an empire of signs,
Hollywood and its relentless pursuit of global film distribution monopolies were targeted
because of the way they served an imperial function, one that expanded the role and influence
of the United States. So when Godard casts noir directors and actors like Sam Fuller and Jack
Palance to play themselves, an intertextual play with the history of film noir is combined and
extended into an extratextual denoting of Hollywood as an entire signifying system and
discursive set of industrial and textual practices. This is the limit of the intertextual and
extratextual denotative capabilities. Beyond the hermetic engagement of Hollywood,
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Godards uses these textual associations to connote, now much further, into the realms of an
American imperialism disseminated by media which becomes the object of his cinematic
critique. In essence, through the inter and extra textual play in his films, Godard fights
mediated-American-Imperial fire with French refracted, mediated-American-Imperial fire.

The Progeny of Film Noir: 1970s Neo Noir

Despite the mannerist, ironic and political way film noir was being deployed in Europe,
compared to the 1940s and 1950s, the levels of production output in the 1960s reveal how
film noir was struggling to maintain its broad appeal and mainstream cultural currency. In
contrast to the historical and contextual developments of the 1960s that were reducing the
currency of film noir, a fundamental textual development would assist in the rise and
departure of film noir style into neo noir genre. Advances in colour film processing and
celluloid technology from the 1950s saw the three strip colour filmmaking process evolve
into a single 35mm colour strip. Removing much of the economic burden associated with
colour filmmaking the single strip of 35mm film and its reduced costs would help film noir
be reinvented as neo noir.

By the middle of the 1960s the unquestioned popularity of colour filmmaking translated into
commercial viability of any genre and saw Hollywood embrace technicolour filmmaking for
the same reasons sound had been adopted forty years earlier. For film noir, colour initially
meant the loss of its signature visual style as low key monochrome and chiaroscuro lighting
(mastered by cinematographers like John Alton and John Seitz) was replaced by new
experiments and expressions in technicolour. In contrast to the European experiments in
mannerist noir, in 1966 the American proto neo noir Harper embraced colour
cinematography in an effort to revitalize the low key aesthetic of film noir and update noir
form for a new age and new audience. In the United States much more so than European noir,
colour would provide noir with a new visual vocabulary clearly differentiating this new noir
from its black and white past and film noir heritage.

While film noir may have struggled in the United States in the 1960s, offering up occasional
proto neo noir titles, the same cannot be said of the 1970s, when an environment
commensurate with film noirs cynicism, pessimism and despair resurfaced in its homeland.

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Strongly etched by the prolonged scandals of Watergate, the Nixon Administration and the
Vietnam War, oil shocks, inflation, rising unemployment and the energy crisis, the socio-
political culture of the United States was ripe for a resurgent noir. Resulting in a growing
crisis in American triumphalism and economic downturn, the first major one since the end of
World War II, the altered cultural landscape of the United States in the 1970s would assist
propelling film noir into the fully fledged genre of neo noir.

Responding to the post-1960s cultural malaise were influential neo noir titles and borderline
political thrillers like, Dirty Harry (1971), The French Connection (1971), Klute (1971), The
Long Goodbye (1973), Serpico (1973), Charlie Varrick (1973), The Outfit (1973), The
Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), Farewell My Lovely (1975), Hustle (1975),
Three Days of the Condor (1975) and All the Presidents Men (1976). These films were
responses to circumstances vastly different from that which produced classical film noir and
built on the directions taken by the proto neo noirs of the 1960s. Freed from the restrictions
of classical film noirs production code and photographed in colour, an enhanced realism and
often political emphasis begins to mark them out as resolutely neo noir. For Naremore,
another American war, this time the Vietnam War, was also a crucial factor in marshalling
neo noir as generic response to the cultural landscape of the 1970s.

In effect, film noir did not become a true Hollywood genre until the
Vietnam yearsWhether classic noir ever existed, by 1974 a great many
people believed in it, and American movie critics were regularly exploring
its implications. Some of the best directors of thrillers from the 1950s
returned to such films and adapted them to new styles of productionDon
Siegels Charley Varrick (1973) and Robert Aldrichs Hustle (1975). At
this point, noir had fully entered the English language, and it formed a rich
discursive category that the entertainment industry could expand and adapt
in countless ways.

(Naremore, 2008, 36-37)

Film criticism attention was also about to turn back and reassess film noir in the 1970s. In the
decade or so since its discovery by the French intelligentsia in 1948, film noir had been

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overshadowed by cinema studies focus on auteurism and a resurgent European cinema. As
an emerging discipline in the American academy, film studies looked to art house cinema and
auteur theory as the means to establishing its aesthetic credentials, not the B-movie
associations of film noir. But in 1972, critical recognition of film noir was also reignited in
the United States with the publication of Paul Schraders Notes on Film Noir. This influential
study, by an emerging American critic who had already established himself with analysis of
Ouzo, Kurosawa and Bresson, as well as being an aspiring auteur himself, cast new light on
the classical period of film noir and assisted its ascension into the serious discourse of
American film studies.

Centrifugal Neo Noir

Accompanying upheavals in the political landscape and Hollywood production context that
had affected the cultural currency of film noir were the paradigmatic shifts occurring in that
other central film noir context, the American urban environment. At the end of the 1950s the
centripetal American city of modernity once celebrated by the vertical apex of the ever
soaring skyscraper was being overtaken by a horizontally propelled suburban sprawl. In place
of the city skyline, that uniquely twentieth century American urban feature which served like
a cardiogram of urban progress, American cities were bisected by the horizontality of the
freeway.

As Dimendberg has charted, by the end of the 1950s, most American cities had undergone
the shift from an early modernity to late modernity. Characterised by centripetal forces,
early modernity concentrated American urban form into densely populated centres of
industry. In contrast late modernity was driven by centrifugal energies that saw the
American city explode, dispersed by an array of freeways, long distance communication
technologies and branch office corporatism.

The end of film noir also coincideswith the end of the metropolis of
classical modernity, the centred city of immediately recognizable
spacesOne might speculate that as spatial dispersal became ubiquitous
cultural reality, centripetal space began to appear excessively archaic.

(Dimendberg, 2004, 255)

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The open spaces of centrifugal dispersion are evident at the demise of film noir and become
dominant within neo noir. For Abrams Touch of Evil at the very end of classic noirmoves
the action out of Los Angeles and into another country, Mexico, and into the desert, giving
noir a new kind of danger. (Abrams in Conrad 2007, 8). Of course Mexico was only the
diegetic setting of Welles film, Los Angeles still stood in for this new open space by
shooting Touch of Evil in and around Venice Beach.

As the forerunner to the new and emergent urban form, Los Angeles was where each element
of a rising postmodernity coalesced and compounded by the key driver of centrifugal
energies, freeway construction.

The apex of twentieth-century modernist urban planning in Los Angeles is

perhaps best represented by the freeway-building era. Transit rationality was
replaced by a freeway rationalityas freeways and roads provided an
unstoppable impetus to a decentralization that existing rail lines had only
prefigured. The freeways ultimately created the signature landscape of
modernist Los Angeles a flat totalization, uniting a fragmented mosaic of
polarized neighbourhoods segregated by race, ethnicity, gender, and class.

(Dear, 1996, 97)

Highly attenuated to the tensions of an early to mid twentieth century American modernity,
film noir had chronicled and was symptomatic of its effects on American urbanism and the
built environment. By the end of the 1950s, however, film noirs essential urban backdrop,
the modernist city was transformed and emerging into postmodern urban conglomerations
premised on decentralization and sprawl. The dispersal of film noirs central ingredient, the
American city, cannot therefore be separated from the demise of film noir and for
Dimendberg, it was not until the 1970s that cinema began to reflect this notion of a
centrifugal urbanism, one that he argues represented, a vastly different set of spatial and
cultural referents (Dimendberg, 2004, 19).

From the 1970s postmodernity would manifest in the altered spatial co-ordinates of a new
urban experience marked by disorientation from the accelerated re-configuration of space.
For Jameson, global postmodernity resulted in a dilemma which is the incapacity of our
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mindsto map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in
which we find ourselves caught up as individual subjects (Jameson, 1991, 44). The
concomitant rise of neo noir may prove to be one of the earliest aesthetic and representational
responses to this disorientation, offered up by collective social imaginary of the cinema as
one means of reclaiming some temporal and spatial bearings.

Neo Noir as the Los Angeles Genre

As neo noir emerges into a genre, Los Angeles and Hollywood can be seen to become
inextricably bound by the new form with each helping to constitute the other under the
revised dynamics imposed by postmodernity. Through the industrial context of Hollywood,
film noir was transformed through the demise of the classical studio system, the self
conscious European renderings that refracted the form back to American filmmakers and the
technological developments of colour filmmaking that would rewrite the formal arrangements
of its visual signature, chiaroscuro.

At the contextual level, paradigmatic shifts in modernity had transformed American urban
form that saw film noir decoupled from its position as a formal attenuation and articulation of
the modern city. Finally, the role of cinema itself in the promulgation of history, myth and
memory was altering under the revised dynamics of postmodernity. Each transformation
effecting the currency of film noir were foregrounded in Los Angeles where, as the home of
Hollywood and the most centrifugally dispersed American city, each of the contextual and
textual developments were operating at an increased and heightened level.

As neo noir has continued to develop Los Angeles has come to represent a city unique in its
ability to register something about the present and how the world is. Providing unique
dramaturgical dimensions, Los Angeles becomes the postmodern setting, one riddled with
temporal and social dislocations and attendant disorientations. The condition of
postmodernity as Harvey labelled it, with its temporal disconnects and a-historical collapses
continues to be explored across neo noir films set in Los Angeles from Strange Days (1995)
to Memento (2000). As neo noirs that capture as well as anticipate aspects of the postmodern
everyday and its lived experience under postmodernity, Los Angeles can also embody the
social and political tensions arising out of contemporary globalization. Whether it is about

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representing the social issues arising out of class, race and ethnicity, Colors (1988), Boyz n
the Hood (1991), Menace II Society (1993), Falling Down (1993), or providing the
physiognomy to the increasing abstraction of criminal and global capital flows, To Live and
Die in LA (1986), Die Hard (1988), Heat (1995), Collateral (2004), to the depiction of
irredeemable moral and systemic urban corruption, Seven (1995), 2 Days in the Valley
(1996), The End of Violence (1997), Fight Club (1999), Training Day (2001) and Dark Blue
(2002), through a form like neo noir Los Angeles becomes the place that postmodernity
manifests most explicitly.

A feature of neo noir is how history can be contoured along the lines of a cinematic memory
indexed against film noir. Neo noirs set in Los Angeles can demonstrate how the city
becomes subsumed by a cinematic past over-determined by film noir. In the neo noirs Devil
in a Blue Dress (1995), Mulholland Falls (1996), LA Confidential (1997), Pleasantville
(1998), Hollywoodland (2006), Black Dahlia (2007), and Changeling (2008), much more so
than any actual history of Los Angeles, the central and defining referent is film noir and
Hollywoods fictional versions of the citys past. In these neo noir renderings Los Angeles is
constructed not so much out of nostalgia but as the place where a collision of representations
based on the past, present and future see temporality collapsed.

In neo noir representations of Los Angeles the city is approached through film noir stylistics
and references derived from cinemas representation of the past that can construct the city
along contemporary or future lines. Blade Runner (1981), Strange Days (1995), Pleasantville
(1998), Mulholland Drive (2001), Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005,) and Inland Empire (2006).
History as style testifies to how the actual contemporary city of Los Angeles is refracted in
the postmodern hall of mirrors where the prolifigate number of past representations of the
city compete with its actual and historical identity and register Baudrilliards simulacra.
According to the architectural scholar, Nezar AlSayyad, this postmodern tendency sees, the
reel emerge[] as the main frame of reference, where the copy replaces the original and even
negates its relevance. Here the reel becomes the only reality that is left (AlSayyad, 2006,
238).

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Los Angeles Noir the Frontdrop

In neo noir, like in its predecessor film noir, the city of Los Angeles continues to function
dramaturgically with the city providing narratives a context that functions much more than a
backdrop. In neo noir the city of Los Angeles can be seen to operate as a meta-frame across
the past, present and future. In the same manner New York accommodated and stood in for
an apex of urbanism under modernity, neo noir sees Los Angeles perform what AlSayyad
describes as a cinematic urbanism, wherein films like Blade Runner and Falling Down
become predicative treatises about the real, assigning the reel the principal function of
anticipating changes in real space (AlSayyad, 2006, 238).

Like the restricted dynamics behind the organisation of generic understandings, a similar,
albeit more discursive semiotic play surrounds the intersection of neo noir and a film noir
heritage derived from Los Angeles. As discussed above, an early generic development in neo
noir occurred through the intertextual play with the signified and signifiers of film noir
beginning with European cinemas development of a mannerist film noir. A similarly pivotal
moment in the development of neo noir occurred when the films engaged Los Angeles and its
cinematic heritage resulting in an intertextual as well as extratextual play with the city and
its representation.

Neo Noir Textual Play

The 1960s neo noirs set in Los Angeles rallied the citys film noir heritage embedded in the
physical and stylistic features generated by its alter ego, the Dark City, especially in films
like Harper (1966) and Marlowe (1969). But by the 1970s in Chinatown intertextuality was
combined with the European extratextual associations. Like Godard, in Chinatown Polanski
used casting as one way to evoke historical associations and meanings that operate at the
level of intertextuality and extratextuality.

In Chinatown intertextual and extratextual play and associations denotes film noir as both a
textual system and a period in Hollywood history. By casting John Huston, the legendary
Hollywood director to play the films antagonist, Noah Cross, Huston functions
intertextually, by conjuring up the classical film noirs he directed and is unmistakably
associated with like The Maltese Falcon (1941), Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle
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(1950). The casting of Huston also operates extratextually by also invoking production
histories of Hollywood. As a renowned director, dubbed a Hollywood titan, Hustons
celebrity reputation looms as large as any semiotically loaded star and like Godards
American actors who played themselves, Huston is able to stand in for Hollywood. The
two evocations, one textual and one historical, are two semiotic mechanisms that combine in
Chinatown to help position it about Los Angeles and its film noir heritage as well as its
central place within Hollywood filmmaking.

Blade Runner is a science fiction and neo noir hybrid echoing Godards Alphaville (1965).
Like Alphaville and Chinatown film noir intertextuality in Blade Runner is highly
pronounced and operates as a discursive semiotic throughout the film. In Ridley Scotts film
the private detective has become a Blade Runner, a sanctioned killer of the genetically
engineered slaves, Replicants. Like a private eye, Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, still
stands outside of a regular police force, doubly so, since at the beginning of the film he has
quit his position. In the original version released in 1982, in classic film noir tradition, the
trench coat wearing Deckard also provides a downbeat voice over.

In the Directors Cut of 1991, it is unmistakable that Deckard is now cast as a Replicant
himself. The shift in terms of the character is highly significant and alters entire meanings
across the film. It is also a significant shift in neo noirs racial representations given William
Coveys argument about the status of Black and White detectives in noir.

[T]he social origins of the white hardboiled detective hero-sometimes

working-class, sometimes a middle-class dropout; in either case, he is
deviant from the mainstream. While hardly oppressed like ethnic and
gendered minorities, white hardboiled detectives are usually men who
cannot fit into professional and conventional society. They are "losers" on
the ladder of success. Unlike the black man in films, the white male
encounters his social standing by choice. Yet both white and black male
hardboiled detectives share a similar economic and cultural standing, as
low-wage, dangerous outsiders who have only a sheen of respectability
because of their investigative skills.

(Covey, 2003, 59-72)

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In Blade Runner Directors Cut (1991) by insinuating Deckard is a Replicant, all choice
surrounding this previously empowered detective/Blade Runner is removed. Like much of
Blade Runner, the narrative has transcended noir conventions and the representational politics
surrounding race. Blade Runner makes a seemingly post-racial point about future social and
racial divides. There is only one category that Blade Runner suggests will count in the
megalopolis of the future, simply qualifying as human.

Like Chinatown, casting and the direction of performances plays a vital role in its film noir
intertextuality. Harrison Ford emits all the scepticism and world weariness of Humphrey
Bogarts Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Then there is the obvious casting of an actress like
Sean Young to be a tall, dark femme fatale in the vein of Jane Russell. On a more subtle
level, the actor William Sanderson is cast in the role of JF Sebastian. Although Sanderson is
not entirely convincing as a twenty-first century geneticist, regularly mentioned in the critical
and popular commentary on Blade Runner is his unmistakable resemblance to Elisha Cook Jr.
Sanderson evokes the many supporting and victimised characters Cook played as a fixture in
over twenty film noirs, amongst them, the iconic productions, The Maltese Falcon (1941),
The Big Sleep (1946), I Wake Up Screaming (1941) and The Killing (1956). Conscious or
unconscious, these casting decisions have played a key role in the many associations Blade
Runner generates amongst it large and loyal fan base and have structured the performative
aspects of its relationship to the classical era of film noir.

Extratextual play in Blade Runner can also be seen to operate in relation to actual Los
Angeles locales, and significantly, through the central theme of implanted memories. An
intertextual history of Hollywood film noirs and an extratextual history of Los Angeles
through film noir are evoked in Blade Runner through locations like the Bradbury Building
and Union Station. Each site has become iconic through film noir and is seen as hallowed
ground in terms of the citys Dark City history. Thematically, Blade Runner explores what
Landsberg has labelled prosthetic memory by exploring the notion of implanted memories
and its effect on human identity. In this sense, Blade Runner explores the whole notion of
something like cinema providing a collective memory.

Both Chinatown and Blade Runner support the notion that the 1970s saw the beginning of
cinema entering into a new dynamic with history and social memory. Each film bookends a
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distinct phase in the development of neo noir which, occurring simultaneously with shifts in
modernity, sees neo noir responding to postmodern articulations of memory and history that
increasingly rely on the cinema.

From its first beginnings, the temporal realities of early cinema what Leo
Charney equates with the shock and embodiment of modern space and time
has posed significant questions for the formation of modern memory.If a
particular moment can be identified where the connections between memory
and film become more tangible and self-conscious, it arguably begins in the
1970s. Discussing broad transformations in the history of American film,
Robert Sklar suggests that, since the 1970s, historical memory has become the
touchstone of a movies cultural power, replacing a traditional rhetoric of
myth and dreams.

(Grainge, 2003, 8-9)

Simulations and Simulacrum: Jamesons End of History, Baudrilliards End of Reality

Both Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrilliard have delved extensively into the distinctions
between postmodern and modern experience and representation and the unprecedented
dynamics with which postmodernity alters the real. As outlined in the Introduction, Jameson
has extensively mapped some of the contours that define postmodernity across a number of
studies most comprehensively in Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991).
Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is
complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than
the older one, but one in which culture has become a veritable second
nature.

(Jameson, 1991, ix)

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Jameson identifies conceptions and operations of history and historical discourse as an
element that is fundamentally altered under postmodernity. In his extensive mapping of
postmodernity Jameson argues that processes of authentic historiography have been erased
against our social and cultural immersion in the simulations of mass reproduced media. The
image based representations of history see it reduced to surfaces and styles and therefore
modernist history is the first casualty of the mysterious absence of the postmodernism
period (Jameson, 1991, xi).

In contrast to critics like Rosenstone who embrace postmodernitys challenge to modernist

history, Jameson sees a defining feature of postmodern reality as the erasure of history
through the privileging of past historical styles over substantive historical knowledges, a
feature that undermines historical appreciation and understandings. This notion of style over
historical depth is articulated in Hollywood remakes for Jameson and the reliance on
intertextuality. In discussing Body Heat (1981) which is a remake of Billy Wilders classic
film noir, Double Indemnity, Jameson argues.

The word remake isanachronistic to the degree to which our awareness

of the pre-existence of other versions (previous films of the novel as well
as the novel itself) is now constitutive and essential part of the films
structure: we are now, in other words, in intertextuality as a deliberate,
built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new
connotation of pastness and pseudo historical depth, in which the history
of aesthetic styles displaces real history.

(Jameson, 1991, 18)

Jean Baudrilliard expresses discontents with postmodernity similar to Jameson but rather than
history, it is reality itself that has waned under the notion of the simulacrum. Umberto Eco
has also employed the idea of the simulacrum under the banner of hyperreality. Both
Baudrilliards America (1986) and Ecos, Travels in Hyperreality (1987) are explorations that
explore its application across the postmodern landscapes of the United States. While the
concept of the simulacrum dates back to the time of Plato, Baudrilliard has applied its
meanings to the specific way postmodern culture is comprised out of images, texts, copies

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and representations of representations. Like a hall of mirrors Baudrilliard argues postmodern
reality is comprised out of recurring reflections based only on other reflections and so on and
so on. Whatever reality originally formed the substance of the thing that was once reflected
has long been erased under the relentless mass production and circulation of images and
representations.

Although discussions like Ecos Travels in Hyper Reality and Baudrilliards America have
provided engaging commentary on American postmodern (hyper)reality, the poetics of each
obfuscate many of the specifics of a postmodern simulacrum. Essentially an image based and
sign laden reality the simulacrum describes how the physical repository and accumulative
build up of signs and representations (simulations) have turned back on themselves and
become material again (simulacra). Disneyland is the obvious example and where the
simulacrum plays out in highly explicit terms. Cartoon characters have been reified,
converted from the two-dimensional representations of fantasy into actual physical objects
(simulacra) and populating an entire landscape derived from the same means and combine
into a simulacrum.

Limited to the confines of a site of excess like Disneyland, the phenomena could be
disconcerting enough. What disturbs critics like Baudrilliard and Jameson is how the process
of the simulacrum is perceived to be manifesting across our entire reality. In McLuhan and
Baudrilliard (1999) Genoko provides a succinct definition of both the simulacrum and
hyperreality its in the American context.

The mystery of American reality is that it is hyperreal: it reverses

European values and cultural categories, elevating the simulacrum over the
ideal and the materialization of utopia over its possibility.

(Genoko, 1999, 91)

But if we return to the relationship between film noir, neo noir and Los Angeles we can see
how the citys association with their signifying systems opens up physical sites to enable
representation and history to intersect in unique ways. By engaging the citys screen based
heritage as the Dark City and the original locus of film noir, contemporary neo noir
representations of Los Angeles may privilege past styles that have been generated out of the
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corpus of film noir and which can override competing visual articulations of the present and
the future. Emphasising Los Angeles identity on the terms of film noir does not necessarily
see the city reduced to something inauthentic and less than real as signified by the
simulacrum. Instead it may just connect the city to one of its most vital structures of
representation and socially imagined history.

Since the 1970s, neo noirs set in Los Angeles have indicated the way cinematic renderings of
the city can exploit layers of fictional and film noir understandings of the past. History
becomes a series of associations and knowledges that have been experienced through media
and audio visual representation. In Landsbergs term, these mediated experiences of the past
comprise the prosthetic memories that reside within each of us amidst our mediated lives.
In contrast to the position taken by Jameson, Landsberg, along with a growing number of
other critics, argue these mediated and prosthetic memories do not necessarily negate an
authentic history but instead can have positive effects by extending our historical
knowledge and empathy with distant populations and eras.

Like Landsberg, Andrew Hoskins is more open to the possibilities offered by media
technologies in shaping something between history and memory. In Hoskins view we live in
an age of, new memory something the cinema plays an instrumental role in.

Fundamental to the process of both individual and collective memories is that

they are increasingly mediated. In this way our understanding of the past is
manufactured rather than remembered. At the same time, our sense of
collective memory or history is also much more of an electronically mediated
one, or, rather reconstructed, from the ever more manipulable global image
banks of television and film.

(Hoskins, 2001, 336)

Temporal Twin Cities: Chinatown and Blade Runner

In 2007 either through coincidence or convergence, both Blade Runner (1982), twenty five
years after its original release, and Chinatown (1974), thirty-one years after its original
release, each received preferential DVD marketing treatment. Re-released in the expansive

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DVD market as Special Collector Editions with extensive extras and accompanying
making of documentaries, these Special Editions could easily be dismissed as opportunistic
marketing exercises. Yet they also testify to the continued popularity of each film evidencing
how both have secured a firm cult status with dedicated fan groups that studio marketing and
distribution strategies target for revenue potential. In the case of the Blade Runner Special
Collector Edition, aside from a feature length making of documentary, there is the long-
awaited four versions of the film, dating from the original in 1982, the 1991 Directors Cut, a
rare release print and the latest, 2007 Final Cut.

The making of and behind the scenes documentaries in these special editions can often
reveal previously undisclosed aspects of productions and offer information on the enormous
amount of web based material often accompanying particular films that provide expression to
the fan base sitting behind many films. New and valuable data can be drawn from these fan
based sources for the purposes of film scholarship, indeed, the scope and detail provided by
fan sources on Blade Runner has led Matt Hills to describe academic sourcing from such
groups as poaching(Hills, 2005, 124).

It is undisputed that both Blade Runner and Chinatown, like many of the original Los
Angeles film noirs outlined in Chapter Two have a particular relationship to the city. In the
case of Chinatown, it is Los Angeles partly fictional, part factual past that is at the centre of
the film, while in Blade Runner, it is a vision of the citys dystopic future, one that has been
shaped by the citys imaginary, cinematic past. Each film poignantly illustrates the primacy
maintained by Los Angeles as film noir gave rise to neo-noir. With the citys screen-based,
film noir heritage, Los Angeles has been specifically employed in each film to construct an
imaginary temporality. In Chinatown factual elements from the citys actual history have
been interwoven with its imaginary, film noir past. In Blade Runner, the city is projected into
a not too distant future that is steeped in the aesthetics and style of a bygone classical film
noir era. Each film reveals an early postmodern tendency to engage temporal dislocations that
are driven by textual and imaginary accounts more than any single or dominant factual or
historical record.

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The Anti Nostalgia of Chinatown

It was against the turbulent backdrop of 1970s America that Chinatown (1974) reconfigured
film noir into a postmodern, neo noir genre. A highly accomplished and scathing critique of
American capitalism as it manifested in California in the 1930s, as discussed in Chapter Two,
Chinatown consolidated the relationship between Los Angeles, neo noir and film noir
commenced by the early proto neo noirs that preceded it in the 1960s. At the very centre of
Chinatown, is its relationship to Los Angeles and the corpus of film noir. In opposition to
some of the other neo noirs of the 1970s it also reconfigured film noir in relation to nostalgia.

At either side of Chinatown occupying the two extremes of a neo noir nostalgia spectrum
stands Farewell My Lovely (1975) and The Long Goodbye (1973). Farewell My Lovely is an
adaptation of the classic Chandler hard-boiled detective novel. With its sepia cinematography
it operates as more hermetically sealed world of noir conventions in an attempt to faithfully
recreate the classical mode of film noir. In stark contrast, The Long Goodbye, is another
Chandler adaptation, but transposed to present day and the time of its production in the
1970s. In the hands of Robert Altman, nostalgia is erased through a sophisticated and ironic
deconstruction of film noir. In opposition to these two extreme reworkings of film noir, is
Chinatown. Based on an original screenplay by Robert Towne it is highly allegorical with
tragic dimensions and represents a formal and aesthetic reconstruction of film noir that
reconnects the cinematically configured film noir heritage of Los Angeles as the Dark City to
the cultural climate of 1970s America.

Similar to other emerging neo noirs of the 1970s, Chinatowns most obvious and immediate
departure from film noir was the dispensing of black and white chiaroscuro cinematography.
Originally the look of the film was going to be highly classical technicolour as lit by a
veteran Hollywood cinematographer, Stanley Cortez. But producer, Robert Evans removed
him from the production because he took too long to light the scenes. In his place came John
Alonso, younger and faster and who like, Polanski, was satisfied to be shooting with
Panavision and keeping all sepia tones out of the lighting. (Polanski interview, Chinatown
DVD extras, 2007)

The Chinatown mise-en-scene dramatically illustrated how neo noir could transcend film noir
once it had learned some lessons from its European forays and returned to its original North
American context. Just as black and white chiaroscuro developed out of the realist aesthetics
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of 1940s film noir, colour could now extend noirs realist strategies more forcefully into the
present. Embracing contemporary colour cinematography, however, did not just mean
eschewing black and white but also rejecting the sepia approach that was fashionable all
around Chinatowns production, notably the other Los Angles situated neo noirs of, The Day
of the Locust (1975), and Farewell My Lovely (1975). The sepia approach was also adopted
by Robert Redfords The Great Gatsby (1974), famously turned down by Robert Towne to
adapt the screenplay so he could concentrate on Chinatown (Robert Towne, Chinatown, DVD
Extras 2007).

While the colour palette of Chinatown is limited to the tones of a desert palette and is
relatively subdued, it is far from sepia and registers something distinctly different. In
Chinatown colour is used to connect the narrative to the time of its production, 1973, and
thematically to the core issue of water. As a visual aid to the narrative, colour is pivotal from
the first frame. The desert tones of Chinatowns spectrum illuminate the opening title
sequence and go on to become central to Chinatowns topos. The variety of tan hues that are
employed across costume, landscapes and interiors visualize the theme of Los Angeles as a
dry desert awaiting watery abundance ensuring colour delivers a subtle and complex motif
into the narrative. Meanwhile, by eschewing the fashion for a nostalgia denoted sepia, at the
insistence of Roman Polanski, the colour cinematography in Chinatown depicts Los Angeles
as crisply as if it was set in 1974 instead of 1938.

Colour in period films according to Jameson is part of their essential postmodernity and
contributes to their celebration of period surfaces and as a means of getting lost in the
faithfully recreated details of a bygone era. Although Chinatown is not discussed in detail by
Jameson, he does discuss noir as a nostalgia mode in connection to Body Heat (1981) and the
way it is more than just a remake of Double Indemnity (1944) but a reconstitution of a past
that has been reduced to film noir stylistics. According to Jameson, these nostalgia films
use past styles to avoid their present, and in the case of Body Heat, bypass the 1980s. By
effacing their present, nostalgia films like Body Heat retreat into a kind of hall of mirrors and
series of representations which un-hinges film from its historical context and positions it in a
play of signifiers, a hermetically sealed world of cinema, stylistics, and, with Body Heat, film
noir conventions. For Jameson, the treatment of history in postmodern texts like Chinatown
is about the resurrection of the image of an era rather than anything deeper or more
substantial from that era (Jameson, 1991).
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Naremore appears to follow Jameson in consigning Chinatown to the level of nostalgia.
Seen in retrospect, Taxi Driver belongs in company with several major Hollywood
productions of the decade including The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), and
Body Heat (1981) which were made with a nostalgic idea of film noir in mind (Naremore
2008, 36-37). But to reduce Chinatown to an exercise in nostalgia ignores the way it
negotiates its film noir heritage. The visual surface of Chinatown like other nostalgia films
is indeed beguiling and it employs an intensive production design and cinematography in an
effort to conjure up an entire world drawn from particular representations of the past but not
necessarily at the expense of what that actual past may have consisted of. In Chinatown,
rather than empty, hermetically sealed nostalgia, when viewed in relation to both Los
Angeles and the corpus of film noir, something far more nuanced is occurring than a simple
play with surfaces. As a fully fledged neo noir, Chinatown constructs a complex dialogue
with the history of Los Angeles, as well as the history of film noir enacting acutely
postmodern features in its system of representation.

If Chinatown were indulging in the kind of empty nostalgia Jameson and Naremore describe,
it would have no more cultural resonance today than Farewell My Lovely (1975), made just
one year after Chinatown. Yet the legacies and functions of Chinatown and Farewell My
Lovely, could not be more disparate. As Calwetti argues, The basic difference between
nostalgic reincarnation of an earlier genre like Farwell, My Lovely and the more complex
ironies of Chinatown and Robert Altmans The Long Goodbye is considerableIn the case of
Farewell My Lovely, nostalgia is the basis and end result of the film. In The Long Goodbye,
nostalgia is often powerfully evoked, but as a means of undercutting or ironically
commenting upon the generic experience itself (Calwetti, 1995, 238).

It is the history behind the actual city of Los Angeles that is front and centre of Townes
screenplay and Polanskis direction remains faithful to this emphasis by composing the films
visual landscape out of location cinematography that sees the Los Angeles basin transformed
into sunshine noir. Darkness along with cityscapes in the film is mostly absent. Conventional
noir motifs have been subsumed by a new visual language constructed out of colour,
intertextual and extratextual referencing and where absence is as vital as presence. An aerial
view of the city or its busy streets are never actually seen like in a classical film noir, instead,
because it is the Los Angeles of film noir, the city is omnipresent in the details and locales
like the dry bed of the Los Angeles river and Echo Park, orange groves, Spanish mission
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architecture, and of course the Chinatown district itself. Each locale situates the film in the
Real of contemporary Los Angeles. At the same time, film noir themes and conventions like
the private detective, a mystery, murder and the consequences of unbridled desire ensure its
deep connections with hard boiled fiction and film noir. Playing off the mythical aura
generated by the vast body of classical film noir, Chinatown enters into a complex exchange
with the corpus of noir, and by default, the cinematic heritage of Los Angeles.

Chinatown stands in stark contrast to the empty nostalgia of Farewell My Lovely, by rejecting
many of the myths that arise out of the narrative conventions of film noir. Chinatown
presents a scathing critique of American power politics, urban vice and corruption in the
1970s, and its antecedents clearly lay in the original but latter cycle of film noir from the late
1940s and 1950s; Force of Evil (1948), The Big Combo (1955), Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and
Touch of Evil (1958) with their emerging political emphases.

Historical and imaginary Los Angeles is merged and constantly intersects in Chinatown
effacing any simple nostalgia. The real of Los Angles is captured through location
cinematography, colour, urban history, semiotic excess and an extratextual historical
indexing through the presence of Hollywood icon and Maltese Falcon director, John Huston.
The combination provides degrees of representational verisimilitude that sees Los Angeles
urban fabric colliding with a noir topography based on the hard boiled tradition, but also with
expanded and updated noir aesthetics, themes and conventions. The combination sees
Chinatown evoke something more than the real and more than myth, something Calwetti
describes as generic transformation.

[T]he presence of colour, along with increasing deviations from

established patterns of plot, motive, and character give us an eerie feeling
of one myth colliding with and beginning to give way to others.

(Calwetti, 1995, 228)

Rather than indulging in nostalgia and perpetuating the mythical functions surrounding film
noir, Chinatown engages in a peculiarly postmodern exercise of reconstructing the history of
an imaginary Los Angeles, not because it offers nostalgic escape but because it is able to

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reveal entrenched dimensions of the city captured by the corpus of Los Angeles film noir,
aspects that have been marginalized or excluded by conventional histories.

Los Angeles Reel

Like many of the most striking classical film noirs, Chinatown was directed by a European,
Roman Polanski, who in the 1970s was enjoying growing auteur status. Producer, Robert
Evans stated he hired Polanski not only on the basis of his impressive track record but in no
small part simply because he was a European and an outsider who could see America
differently (Robert Evans, Chinatown, DVD Extras 2007). Complementing this European
outsiders perspective, was a native Californians, and Hollywood insider, Robert Towne.
The combination of Townes meticulously researched and constructed script and Polanskis
European vision and eye, resulted in a film that transcended many of film noirs previous
limitations. In the words of one film noir social historian, it is the film Raymond Chandler
should have made. Townes script laid the foundations for this transformation by rejecting
conventions that see the detective achieve anything remotely resembling a personal victory or
delivery of justice. Instead, the private detective Jake Gittes is confronted with a web of
greed and evil far beyond his comprehension and ability to contain it. The inability to redeem
his own failings leads to the tragic ending that sees the innocent destroyed and the incestuous
Noah Cross escape and continue familial rape. The rape serves as the ongoing metaphoric
rape of the city that was occurring through the citys urban redevelopment in the 1970s.

Through Chinatowns intertextual and extratextual functions, the citys complex layers of
noir topography are exploited in an early postmodern approach. In the same way the narrative
myths of hard-boiled fiction are deployed then dismantled to service more tragic, realistic and
enigmatic truths about society, the traditional representation of the noir city is overhauled and
re-imagined by Chinatown. At the centre of Chinatown is a deconstruction and reconstitution
of Los Angeles the real place and Los Angeles the Dark City. The city forms the very basis
of the films narrative and self conscious exploration of the history and myths surrounding its
urban origins and power elites.

Chinatown was conceived through Los Angeles mythical associations that make the city
synonymous with film noir. Robert Townes account of how the elements of the script came

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together relay how in the 1970s Los Angeles remained a place semiotically loaded by film
noir. According to Towne, a key component of the scripts gestation was a chance encounter
with an article titled, Raymond Chandlers Los Angeles which was accompanied with present
day photographs of the places and settings that had been featured in Chandlers stories. For
Towne, the article highlighted how it would still be possible to create the Los Angeles of
that period (Robert Towne, Chinatown DVD Extras, 2007). The opportunity to reconstruct
cinematically this vital era in the citys history was in Townes opinion only available for a
limited time before the citys rapid expansion and development erased these quintessential
noir locales.

The second key influence on Townes gestation process for a detective story set in Los
Angeles was the historical study by Carey McWilliams Southern California: an Island on
the Land, (1946). The element of Los Angeles history chronicled by McWilliamss study
that caught Townes attention was the role played by water in the development and expansion
of Los Angeles and the citys chief engineer, William Mulholland. As the central figure
behind the Owens river aqueduct project Mulholland is attributed with transforming the city
boundaries and altering the water rights that led to the 1940s property boom in the San
Fernando Valley. Finally, for Towne, a chance encounter resulted in his meeting a Los
Angeles vice detective who mentioned his duties in Chinatown were governed by the
principal of doing as little as possible. The candid admission alerted Towne to the logics
surrounding the futility of good intentions, which would become a central theme of the final
script.

Each narrative element was fused and combined within an Oedipal theme of power and incest
shaped within a detective narrative. But it was not just to be any kind of detective story.
Again, according to Towne, he wanted a detective movie not about those things that had
traditionally been done in films but about something that is in front of your face everyday like
water and power and to make that a mystery, make a mystery out of the fact the reservoirs are
being emptied - its something you can follow through the city (Robert Towne, Chinatown,
DVD Extras, 2007).

From its very conception, Chinatowns 1937 noir landscape was one derived from the
combination of historical events and figures re-combined and re-imagined through a noir lens
that extended all the way back to what has been described as the first ever detective story,

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Sophocles Oedipus Rex. Mining historical fact for the raw materials for narrative is nothing
new and there is a strong literary tradition exemplified in the United States by E.L. Doctorow,
for imaginatively reconfiguring historical events and persons to form the basis for the
historical fiction genre. The significance of Chinatown in relation to this tendency is not just
in the way it weaves and rewrites history into fiction but the way it reconstituted Los Angeles
the Dark City derived from the pervasive sense of noir, or what Calwetti describes as the
temporal-spatial aura which film noir provides Southern California settings (Calwetti, 1995,
228).

While on the surface, Chinatown is composed out of the traditions, conventions and stylistics
of film noir, it clearly does not function on the terms of simple nostalgia. Instead it marks the
turning point that sees remnants of a film noir style, transformed into something distinctly
neo noir. By dispensing with noirs conventional plot elements and replacing them with
tragic ones, employing colour in place of black and white, and imprinting real Los Angeles
locations with a sunshine noir, Chinatown produces a contemporary, multidimensional, neo
noir prism. The view constructs Los Angeles as a place infused by an unofficial noir heritage
and capable of allegorizing the crises of American politics and capitalism in the turbulent
1970s. As a cultural product of the early-mid 1970s, that looks to its here and now through
an allegorical and cinematic there and then, merging fact, fiction, real and imagined
temporalities, Chinatown inaugurates neo noir proper creating something out of deep
intertextual and extratextual dimensions that is definitive of postmodern expression.

Blade Runner: The Los Angeles of Past-Present-Future Tense

If Chinatown has a privileged position in relation to both Los Angeles history and its
imagined noir past, then Blade Runner has come to define the citys dystopic future and
bookends neo noirs final ascent into something classical. After Blade Runner, neo noir would
fracture and splinter into Tech Noir and a host of competing contemporary noirs. As the
culmination of generic developments that had been occurring since the 1960s, Blade Runner
and the early 1980s functions like Touch of Evil in 1958, as a kind of epitaph to a classical
phase of the neo noir genre.

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Few films in recent history have been embraced by fans and academics alike and analysed
both popularly and critically to the extent of Blade Runner. Along with its cult status, the
film has become synonymous with postmodernism and its aesthetics, and it enjoys continued
popular and critical reception. As mentioned above, in 2007 director, Ridley Scotts Final
Cut, was released ten years after his Directors cut and twenty six years after the original cut
and release. In 2005, the film was also the basis of a collection of fifteen essays in a single
critical compendium, The Blade Runner Experience, the legacy of a science fiction classic.
The collection is an attempt to chart Blade Runners impact across the popular and academic
landscape and revisits some of the vast textual analysis generated by the film. Both recent
critical and popular outputs testify to the ongoing cultural currency that surrounds the film.

As testified to by its vast body of textual analysis Blade Runner is a seductive text and lends
itself to interdisciplinary interpretations from urban theory to film studies. My intention here
is not to revisit or remap its central themes but to account for the films continued cultural
currency by interpreting it in light of the development of neo noir throughout the 1970s and
as the inheritor of a particular postmodern noir legacy effecting Los Angeles since its
reinvention through Chinatown.

With its themes of human and non-human cyborg identity contained within retro aesthetics
and generic hybridity, and set against a narrative that explores urban proliferation and
dystopia, Blade Runner is widely acknowledged as one of the defining texts of the
postmodern era. Dominating the analyses of the last twenty five years has been the films
exploration of identity and the role played by memory. While there is no discounting the
primacy of these themes, the focus here is on how the film embodies and negotiates a Los
Angeles reconstructed under a fully fledged neo noir and the significance of its connections
to Chinatown.

At the outset, Blade Runner was unique for its mixing of film noir stylistics and aesthetics
with a science fiction narrative and setting that saw it form the basis of the term, Tech Noir.
At the time of its production in 1981, the future as styled by the past was a new and bold
vision and little in the original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K.
Dick, loaned itself to this interpretation. All manner of science fiction noirs have arrived
since Blade Runner and now form sub genres like cyber punk but prior to 1981 there was
little if any evidence of the kind of retro science fiction pioneered by Blade Runner. The

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future in conventional science fiction had mostly been imagined very differently. The
previous cinematic template for design and aesthetics in science fiction had been 2001: a
Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977) with polished whites dominating the production
design palettes that inferred a brisk, streamlined, technological future signalling uninterrupted
progress. To approach a science fiction film through the recycling of a noir aesthetic, mood,
lighting and design was not only a major departure from the conventions of the science
fiction genre, but the beginning of an entirely new perspective on the future. Like the
expiration of modernity itself, the future in Blade Runner was cast not as the beginning of a
new and ever expanding horizon of possibility, but unrealized progress, the future as a
calamitous terminus of technology and the end of history.

Set in 2019, forty years ahead from the time of its production, Ridley Scott from its inception
envisioned a future city that would break with all science fiction conventions. In his first
science fiction feature Alien (1979), Scott had incorporated the gothic style of the illustrator,
H.R. Giger, which gave the production and the design of the alien itself, a haunting and
grotesque distinctiveness that drew more from medieval Bosch than contemporary
Hollywood monster animatronics. For Blade Runner, Scott employed similar innovation and
approached the design of the future city as something that would look both different and
familiar at the same time. I insisted that Blade Runners look be authentic, not just
speculative. For instance, take clothes and carswhat if you could take someone, a
contemporary man, and whisk him back to the Times Square of forty years ago? He
wouldnt, I think, have that many shocks in store for himFashion is always cyclical
(Sammon, 1996, 73-4).

The key design motif in Blade Runner is one based on resurgent retro styles and cyclical
fashions. In Blade Runner, the future belongs, and is inextricably linked to, the past. Old
cars, fashions and architecture permeate the mise-en-scene and are re-styled through
technological add-ons, generating an aesthetic and process dubbed retro-fitting. Ridley
Scott developed the retro aesthetic concept with Syd Mead, the industrial designer and
futurist Ridley first employed to design the flying spinner police cars. Mead is adamant that if
future objects are to offer any level of authenticity, the designs mingle and comprise
elements drawn from existing and previous styles (Mead interview with author, Brisbane,
March 22, 2010).

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As a director renowned for his visual emphases, Scott is unabashed in his prioritizing design
over other cinematic elements, according to Scott, sometimes the design is the statement
(Sammon, 1996, i). One of the original seeds for the noir aesthetic of Blade Runner was
Edward Hoppers Nighthawks (1942). As discussed in Chapter Two, the painting signalled a
dramatic shift in American modernity in the lead up to World War Two and its continued
currency and circulation as an iconic poster into the postmodern era would see Scott use the
painting as a design signpost to orientate the production design team. I was constantly
waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the
look and mood I was after in Blade Runner (Sammon, 1996, 74). The atmospheric painting,
detailing the urban denizens of an all night diner in the 1940s, conveys moody urban
alienation highly evocative of film noir and is as far removed from conventional science
fiction renderings as one could imagine.

As the various design elements were brought together to create Blade Runners Los Angeles
of 2019, Scott ensured a technological future was synthesized with a very specific past as
opposed to an explicit historical era. Like the Hopper painting, this was the past as captured
in representational terms and the imagined past provided by the Los Angeles of film noir.
While a film noir aesthetic was guiding the production design a neo noir sensibility was
driving the scriptwriting and re-writing process. The original screenwriter, Hampton Fancher
was replaced by David Peoples. Hampton had had a terrific sort of chase/adventure thing
going, in which Deckard was in a lot of jeopardy, but Ridley was sort of heading toward the
spirit of Chinatown (Sammon, 1996, 59). By the time the final script was delivered, the
narrative, characterizations and design were a collision between film noir, neo noir and
science fiction. Scotts direction then ensured all performances were similarly aligned. The
unmistakable film noir underpinnings led actress Sean Young, who played Rachel, to state in
the 1982 press kit; I didnt approach it as science fiction. Its a romantic thriller, like
Casablanca. But instead of Africa, were in the future (Sammon, 1996, 125). Youngs
comments are revealing not just for the insights they provide for her processes regarding
Blade Runner but for the likely unintended meanings generated by intertextuality. By
referring to Casablanca, Young clearly intends to signal the all time Hollywood classic with
its film noir undertones more than any actual city in Africa. The problem is she then seems to
confuse geography with temporality because she states the film she is in shifts from Africa
to the future, equating temporal displacement with a geographical one. Simply an example

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of an actor being an actor or a confused observation that is indicative of the condition of
postmodernity?

Quiet on the Set of Simulacra!

The actual production process of Blade Runner represents a convergence between Los
Angeles history and it cinematic past. The distinctions between Los Angeles and Hollywood
that were outlined in Chapter Two, those disparate histories between the real Los Angeles
and its studio backlots, were fused in the production of Blade Runner which saw reel and real
historical artefacts and sites merged. While Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles it is the Los
Angeles of film noir that is the milieu of the films physical and semiotic topography. The
film not only draws on the film noir heritage of Los Angeles but also its ability to conjure up
a cinematic version of other metropolis, specifically New York. Initially the production was
to be set and shot in New York, where it would be represented as a megalopolisthe kind
of city that could be where New York and Chicago join (Sammon, 1996, 75). Faced with
budget constraints, the production eventually abandoned location shooting altogether and
settled on constructing its megalopolis in Los Angeles Burbank Studios backlot. The
narrative was also set back in Los Angeles, but the old New York street backlot was still
chosen to conduct exterior photography. Of course a backlot is the site where New York and
Chicago can actually be joined along with any other city that Hollywood chooses to construct
and merge in the representation of these real cities.

The old New York street had a long and venerable history. It had been built by Warner
Brothers in 1929 and witnessed the original filming of such detective classics as The Maltese
Falcon and The Big Sleep along with other classics like Hustons Treasure of the Sierra
Madre. Therefore the epistemology of the Blade Runner set goes something like this; a
classic Los Angeles Hollywood studio backlot, one rich in Hollywood Dark City heritage as
the site of iconic film noirs where New York settings have been regularly constructed, is
reconstructed then retro-fitted to create a Los Angeles of the future, but one based on the
imagined New York of cinema as much the real New York.

By retrofitting the Burbank Studios backlot and applying new technological add-ons to the
old sets, the original and pre-existing architectural facades were redressed to convey a

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twenty-first century urbanism. Upon completion of the retrofit the backlot was referred to as
Ridleyville, and according to Sammon, the Old New York Street/Ridleyville set comprised
recognizable (although considerably altered) characteristics of Hong Kong, New York,
Tokyos Ginza district, Londons Piccadilly Circus and Milans business area (Sammon
1996, 101). In short it was a place where all cinematic cities could converge. Off the backlot,
real Los Angeles locations were also used that had deep film noir histories and had
previously featured in Chandlers fiction. The actual Union Station of Los Angeles was used
to house Blade Runners police headquarters and the set design aimed to evoke the art deco
lines of the Chrysler building. Meanwhile the exterior of the headquarters and other
surrounding buildings reference Langs Metropolis with its central pyramidal structure.

Union Station had previously featured in Chandlers novels The Little Sister and Playback as
well as the film noirs, Criss Cross (1949), Union Station (1950), Cry Danger (1950) and
Marlowe (1969). The Bradbury Building at 304 South Broadway, where the final showdown
occurs between Deckard and the replicant Roy, has been featured in film noirs like D.O.A.
(1949) and M (1951) and again in Marlowe (1969). Another location, the 2nd Street Tunnel,
has been used since The Big Sleep (1946) and is a regular Los Angeles location appearing in
another retrofitted science fiction film, Gattaca (1997).

Celluloid Materiality and Reality

An unmistakable element that defines the Los Angeles of Blade Runner is the analogue
nature of the representation. Blade Runner represents one of the final, large budgeted,
Hollywood productions that was dreamed, designed and imagined using models, miniatures,
sets and backlots refracted through a vast array of cameras, lenses and camera based visual
effects. The processes and effects employed by Blade Runner would be rendered obsolete
within a few years through the steady advance of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), and
the digital based special effects upon which the science fiction genre would quickly become
dependent.

The impact of the technological advances digital filmmaking made on the representation of
the city is significant and represents the continued shift in cinematic representation from the
Real to the Virtual. The shift in the aesthetic and audience interpretation of CGI as opposed

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to physical cinemaphotography could be paralleled to the transformations location
cinematography brought to classical film noir and broader representations of the city.
Indexically bound to the physical world, the optics and photochemistry of analogue
filmmaking is fundamentally different to digital effects. Contemporary digital filmmaking
and CGI bears a quantitatively different relationship to physical realities and its constraints,
comprised as it is out of binary numerical code rather than anything physically and photo
chemically captured by light on celluloid emulsion drawn from the real. As Grainge has
stated, Digital technology has raised new questions about the ideology of cinematic
representation and referentiality and the status of memory is embroiled in these cultural and
critical transformations (Grainge, 2003, 216). Motion, temporality and the digital city
reconfigures space and time beyond anything pursued by the final analogue cities of the
1980s, as the Matrix series of film evidence with their bullet time and its impossible
physical manoeuvres and boundless cityscapes.

The analogue physicality that was captured in Blade Runner is essential to the urban
spectacle created by Scott and no doubt comprises a component of the films continued
allure. The city created in Blade Runner led Philip K. Dick upon seeing some pre-release
footage to comment It isnt even science fictionthis is a new art form. Its like time
travelIt isnt like anything that has ever been done (Meehan, 2008, 168). Ironically, the
forward time travel that impressed Dick, now situates Blade Runner back in time to a period
when the cinema, in Bertoluccis terms, was an artefact of reality, able to convey the
language through which reality expresses itself to create the language of the cinema, more
than any other form of expression, you have to put your camera in front of reality, because
cinema is made of reality (Nowell-Smith & Ilona Halberstadt, 2000, 248).

The analogue distinctiveness and saturated film noir quality of the urban vision brought
forward by Blade Runner is evident when contrasted to the city rendered and imagined by
Luc Bessons The Fifth Element (1997). Bessons future city is a digital reworking of Blade
Runners Los Angeles of 2019, set back in its cinematic origins, New York. Like Blade
Runner, it is a vision of New York in overkill. While it is highly derivative of Blade
Runner, complete with flying police vehicles and skyscraper super structures, the vision, like
other virtual metropolises, The Matrix amongst them, is one that is boundless courtesy of the
possibilities wrought by virtual renderings and CGI. The Fifth Element presents a city that is
about boundlessness, a boundless technological future, albeit but one that is tempered by the
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fashion of dystopias and where the threats are extraterrestrial. The Fifth Element is pure
action, the narrative based on a medieval quest that sees the city returning to pre-modern
dynamics and characters, something the revived Star Wars films would also later exploit.

The verticality of New York in the Fifth Element is so extreme it sees the city float against a
limitless horizon, described by Vivian Sobchack as a city that is a dizzying and densely
layered labyrinth of architecture and motion: it has neither skyscrapers (there is no visible sky
as such) nor ground. This is a city that seems to have no boundaries and yet, at the same time,
is peculiarly hermetic (Sobchack, 2004, 86). Blade Runner, with some of its analogue
contemporaries like, The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987) and Batman (1989) represents
some of the final moments in Hollywood science fiction and fantasy film where spectacle and
visual effects remained camera based rather than computer generated. Blade Runner has a
particular uniqueness in this regard. Not only is it exemplar of the possibilities of analogue
filmmaking and camera based effects, but its neo noir vision and representation of the city
also offers a multi-layered rendering of the city that is directly descended from the physical
and textual noir heritage in which Los Angeles is immersed. The bricolage that comprises
the Los Angeles of 2019 in Blade Runner is uniquely historical and why the future, Los
Angeles and Blade Runner remain inextricably bound.

Los Angeles and the Psychogeography of Noir

As the locus of film noir the real Los Angeles continues to have the contours of its built
environment topography resonating and defined by the subliminal frequencies emitted by
film noir.

To the informed touristreal places in Los Angelesseem bathed in the

aura of noir [my italics]: the Alto Nido residence hotel at Franklin and
Ivar, just up the street from where Nathaniel West wrote Day of the
Locust; the Bradbury Buildingmost of all, the Glendale train station at
night

(Naremore, 1998, 2)

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In a similar vein to Naremore, Calwetti in his discussion of Chinatown describes film noir as
infusing Southern California with a certain aura. In order to expand upon this notion of
aura, the concept of psychogeography offers a clearer understanding of how aura may
operate. Psychogeography is somewhat more specific in addressing how certain texts become
embedded in certain places and can then affect those places in very tangible and experiential
ways. Outlined by Guy Debord and the Situationists in the 1950s in his Introduction to a
Critique of Urban Geography (1955), Debord employed psychogeography initially as a
deliberately vague concept, something he used as part of a strategy to keep academics at bay,
in the same vein as his decision to use sandpaper on the cover of his books. As a concept,
however, it was picked up in the 1970s, and again in the 1990s, enjoying a revival amongst
urban theorists as a means of describing alternative urban histories, narratives, and sites of
meaning for individual urban dwellers and visitors.

For Debord, psychogeography described the study of the effects of the geographical
environment, consciously organized or not, in the emotions and behaviour of individuals
(Baker, 2003, 323). According to Baker, as a result of its increased use by urban theorists
throughout the 1990s, psychogeography expanded into four central ideas; the emotional
effects generated by environment; the behavioural effects generated by environment; the
ambiences generated by particular locales; and the process of cognitive mapping, that is, the
way individuals construct and assign particular meanings to specific places. The appeal of a
term like psychogeography in more contemporary urban analysis is summed up by Baker for
the way it is not interested in the objective panoptical mapping, but only in the private
cognitive maps of our customized cities (Baker, 2003, 324).

What these private cognitive maps challenge is the omniscience of a postmodernism of

repression and surrender, something AlSayyad sees films like Blade Runner and Falling
Down representing. If we return to the notion that noir and hard boiled fiction imbues Los
Angeles with some kind of aura and beginning with the central role played by Raymond
Chandler and his writings, then it may be more useful to interpret these effects along the lines
of psychogeography and understanding the layers of meanings and semiotics of film noir as
highly constitutive of meanings which infuses the experience of this city. As a structure of
meaning, film noir and neo noir facilitate specific, non-institutional ways of reading Los
Angeles that resonate with individuals depending on the texts they have consumed in relation
to it. Commencing with Chandler and hard boiled fiction and then into film noir, neo noir
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folds each previous form into itself and lays down a vital substrata onto the psychogeographic
contours of Los Angeles. In much the same way Dickens is a cornerstone to certain literary
genres and histories that combine to provide the cultural contours of a city like London,
writers like Chandler and Cain have become core sediments of Los Angeles upon which the
topography of film noir and neo noir has gradually accumulated.

European cities in general have a heritage derived from the gradual accretion of history and
culture that predominantly revolve around literature, painting, sculpture and architecture.
Forms that predate the twentieth century which have recorded the many periods and
transformations experienced by the European capitals. American cities on the other hand, and
Los Angeles, in particular, attained the level of metropolis in the twentieth century,
coinciding with cinema and the mass circulation of popular forms. A bedrock and substrata
of American cities urban identity is therefore bound up with and composited out of cinema,
images and media comprised out of popular and mass pulp genres.

It is particularly in relation to the third and fourth functions of psychogeography that we can
see Chandlers fiction in particular operating in respect to Los Angeles: the ambiences
generated by particular locales and the process of cognitive mapping, and how individuals
construct and assign particular meanings to specific places. In the thirty-four years since
Towne encountered the article, Raymond Chandlers Los Angeles, which appears to have
alerted Towne to what could be identified as the psychogeographical dimensions of the city,
and which he desired to resurrect, a veritable industry has grown up reconstructing
Chandlers Los Angeles and provides the basis for experiential tourism. Meanwhile,
Chinatown itself now plays a central role in eliciting the first two functions of
psychogeography, the emotional and behavioural effects generated by an environment. As an
IMDb blog reveals, the affect Chinatown is able to generate in this particular cognitive
mapping of the city is considerable.

I saw this movie first in Chicago and heck, back then I knew nothing about
LA, though I've since moved to and lived in the area for years. Once relocated,
I quickly discovered the historically interesting side to the story and then
appreciated the movie from yet another compelling angleGeez, I'll never
forget that first confrontational scene at the Albacore Club! The study in
absolute raw and evil power as masterly portrayed by John Huston. In the very

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 same scene Jack Nicholson skilfully paints the subtleties of his cautious,
cynical, small-time hustler character. The air crackles! I must have played this
scene in my mind a thousand times. When I visited Catalina Island for the first
time in about 1985, not knowing its significance to the movie, I walked by the
Albacore Club (The Tuna Club in real life) and froze transfixed. I recognized
it instantly of course, and I must have stood there gawking for 20 minutes not
saying a word. I could literally HEAR the Chinatown theme - the memories
were that clear and fresh!

Author: attitudeadjustment from Orange County, California

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/ IMDb website accessed 29/04/2008

The IMDb blog account clearly demonstrates the impact generated by the third and fourth
functions of psychogeography, one that extends into memory, sensation, affect, as well as the
interpretation of place and history. The significance revealed by psychogeographical
understandings of place lies in the way texts can be understood as the means to forge highly
individual relationships between place, meanings and history, amounting to something that
transcends tourist consumption of such sites. As Townes account of how Chinatown was
conceived and the bloggers account testifies, psychogeographical dimensions of a place can
affect consumers of texts as much as their creators. Through psychogeography, the
interpretation and experience of place takes on highly personal and idiosyncratic dimensions,
experiences that can run counter to formal and abstract histories as well as tourist clich, but
it seems a far cry from merely constituting empty postmodern simulacra. This is a
simulacrum crammed full of personal and individual significance, something that connects
individuals to places and experiences through exposure to vital and meaningful texts.

It is also more fully psychogeographical if there is a sense that history affects

ambience, and that the character of a place inheres and affects feelings and
behaviour, or if it challenges the mainstream contemporary reading of a place.
In that sense it can be an alienated and recalcitrant form of history, and one
that resists being recuperated into heritage.

(Baker, 2003, 325)

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Chandlers hard boiled fiction and film noir can be seen as providing Los Angeles with
psychogeographys recalcitrant history, one that produces an essential pastness that defines
the city more along the lines of subjective memory than abstract history. At the creative core
of the dynamic operating in Chinatown and Blade Runner is a play on these official and
unofficial histories. Actual historical events, the corpus of film noir, hard boiled fiction and
the psychogeography of place jostle in Chinatown to construct an imaginary and discursive
history of Los Angeles. Interlacing fact and fiction in this way sees Chinatown sinuate a
history of Los Angeles with its dark imaginary, the dark city as invented by film noir, while,
Blade Runners Los Angeles stands as a cinematic memorial to film noir and this particular
citys vital role in its creation.

Constructing a vision of the citys future out of a composite of cinematic cities across the
twentieth century on a Hollywood backlot and across actual Los Angeles locations, Blade
Runner operates intertextually and extratextually, through being comprised out of the
historical artefacts of Hollywood, Los Angeles most distinct and enduring industry. If
Chinatown marks the moment of film noir transformation into neo noir formation, then Blade
Runner marks a similarly crucial development, one that sees neo noir as a genre able to be
configured across the entire temporal spectrum, beyond visions of the past and present and
out into the future. In doing so Blade Runner created a new horizon for neo noir and ushered
in the neo noir hybrid of Tech Noir and subsequent variations.

The development of neo noir as postmodern genre marks a turning point in the reception of
cinema and the ability of film to use its own histories of representation as a central reference
point in constructing new textual and teleological meanings. By merging history and fiction
within the heightened context of Los Angeles and its Dark City identity films like Chinatown
and Blade Runner make explicit some of the key phenomenological functions of cinema and
its ability to forge the sense of a collective past comprised out of memory and history.

The relationships between Chinatown, Blade Runner, Los Angeles and the corpus of film
noir also mark a significant postmodern moment and one which has gone on to be
emblematic of the way postmodern texts function intertextually with other texts as well as
extratextually with aspects of production histories and the real. Both films reconstruct film
noir according to the logics of postmodern representation where the signifier of the corpus of
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film noir is as important as the signified, the actual events, characters and setting of its
particular narrative.

If New York was the Celluloid City of modernity, a city composited out of location
cinematography and Hollywood backlots, then Los Angeles is the Cinematic City of
postmodernity and the distinction between celluloid and cinematic is worth noting. As a
celluloid city, New York was dreamed and imagined and finally rendered on screen to
emulate its lived excess under Modernity. As a celluloid city under modernity the 35mm
sprockets clearly delineated where celluloid New York finished and concrete and asphalt
New York commenced. Los Angeles on the other hand is the postmodern cinematic city. It is
the city that is as sometimes as tangible as all of the combined material components of
cinema: Studio production facilities, sound stages, backlots, cameras, lights, cinema theatres,
projectors, actors. But cinema is also the intangible and the immaterial, those elements that
structure its psychological and psychoanalytical dimensions: Desire, the imaginary, the
subject, the sutured experienced, the gaze, the gendered, the Oedipal. Competing and
circulating amidst all this are all the consumable elements, the signs, the symbols, the brands,
the franchise, the genres, the celebrities and stars. All things Cinema may seem disparate yet
they can so easily all come together in the form of a memorabilia object like a Batman mug
or Charlie Chaplin impersonator who may reach out and shake our hand. If we encounter
something like this on the Gold Coast in Australia is it different to experiencing it on the
Universal Studio tour with the Norman Bates house in the background? Where now do we
draw the line of what is real and what is reel? What was once confined to Los Angeles
simulacra is increasingly global simulacra and yet Hollywood still operates as an industrial
and geographical headquarters that positions Los Angeles as the nadir of a global, image-
based superstructure.

Conclusion

Charting how the film noir style moved into a neo noir genre has identified a key shift from
film noir representations of the modern city to neo noir representations of the postmodern
urban. By exploring the historical circumstances under which neo noir emerged the analysis
has charted how film noir transitioned into a fully fledged genre. The critical identification of
film noir and its conscious exploitation in the 1960s during an extended foray in Europe and
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the French Nouvelle Vague saw it return to home soil in the United States in the 1970s. Neo
noir manifested most significantly in Chinatown, by representing a robust and colourised
incarnation of Los Angeles noir.

Through a detailed analysis of Chinatown, neo noir as a genre can be seen in terms of a
highly layered composite that employs cinematic intertextuality with the corpus of film noir.
A hallmark feature of postmodern expression are various semiotic registers which are
compounded in neo noir through the genres cinema specific extratextuality. Both features,
inter and extra textuality, position neo noir as a postmodern genre and see it functioning as
one of the earliest cinematic expressions of postmodernity.

While neo noir is clearly aligned to film noir and has built on and developed many of its
predecessors traditions and conventions, it is the genres ongoing relationship to the city of
Los Angeles that illustrates its most poignant postmodern aspects. The dynamics between
Los Angeles the Dark City of film noir, Los Angeles the city, Los Angeles, the home of
Hollywood, and crucible of neo noir, are all uniquely configured by both Blade Runner and
Chinatown. No two films have demonstrated the citys varied functions in relation to
postmodern representation as Blade Runner and Chinatown due to their deeply immersed noir
qualities.

Blade Runner constructed a city out of both real and reel cities, an ode to an imaginary Los
Angeles comprised out of textual references, location photography and Ridleyville, the
backlot steeped in film noir heritage. Rivalling Disneyland, the backlot set produced one of
the ultimate sites of Los Angeles simulacra. Derived from a veritable pastiche of past, present
and cinematic cities, an intertextual and extratextual montage of real and imagined places, the
set as simulacrum resides in the ultimate location, nowhere physical anymore but forever
pulsing across the deeply layered surfaces of the film.

Through its intertextual and extratextual functions postmodern representations negotiate our
stored knowledge and experiences with past representations, history, and the real. By
recombining textual elements with new subject matter both old and new are retrofitted. In
Chapter Two the late modernity of Los Angeles saw the city provide the urban physiognomy
to film noir. What this chapter has illustrated is that under postmodernity neo noir reverses
the real-reel equation of modernity. Through a postmodern reel-real dynamic neo noir
provides one of the definitive textual layers of substrata of Los Angeles simulacrum.
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Postmodern representation reconfigures our indexes to the real and our experience of it. Far
from hollow the simulacrum can generate psychogeographical relationships that enable re-
imaginings of our postmodern temporality and geography. The textually based experience of
psychogeography assists us in finding meaningful and shared co-ordinates that express
something authentic in the processes of commodification that drive symbolic economies. In
postmodernity, if to consume is to experience, then to experience is also to remember.
Amidst all the textual traffic of postmodernity meanings continue to flow between actual
people and their environments and it is these processes that forge new connections to the time
and place we find ourselves.

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Chapter 4 The Brisbane Line and Creative Practice Research

However one tries to define or explain noir, the common denomination

must always be the city. The two are inseparable.

(Christopher, 2006, 37)

Representation is not some vague bourgeois conception of reality and

also a specific sign system it must now be defamiliarised not by the
intervention of great or authentic art but by another art, by a radically
different practice of signs.

(Jameson, 1999, 122)

Introduction

The following chapter outlines in a reflective manner the processes and influences that
shaped aspects of the creative practice which resulted in the twenty-eight minute film, The
Brisbane Line. As outlined in the Preface, this thesis had creative practice as part of its design
from its inception and the research that followed always had a film figured into it. Just what
kind of film it would be was undecided at the beginning and identifying its form and
approach was part of the process of the overall research.

To contextualise the production and the creative processes that resulted in the final film this
chapter contextualises aspects of Australian film culture and its occasional forays into film
noir and neo noir.

Critical and Creative Pathways

The film, The Brisbane Line, is the creative practice component of the research. A twenty-six
minute narrative film it constructs an Australian neo noir out of historical, archival and
fictional elements. The film is designed to negotiate several modes ranging across

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documentary, drama-documentary and fiction. The narrative of the film excavates aspects of
Brisbane history by alternating between fact, fiction, rumour and myth.

In a similar manner to the approach taken to Los Angeles in Chapter Two, David Foster has
taken an approach to the history of Mexico City specifically through its cinematic
representations. For Foster, Mexico City in film constitutes a system of signs that extends
beyond any simple image of the city and cumulatively these cinematic renderings reveal
something about;

how the city is created, enacted, and interpreted as part of the process of
producing cultural meaning through semiotic textsIn this sensethe city is
an integral part of these films, not just some place for the narrative of the film
to take place. The city is not a setting, but part of the overall effect of
meaning for the film, and as such it is brought into being as much as the
characters and plots. Of course, there is a real Mexico City, but that real
Mexico City has no meaning in and of itself. It has meaning only to the extent
that its materiality is inserted into a semiotic process for the substantiation of
meaning.

(Foster, 2002, x)

Like Foster, in Chapter Two, I applied a similar constructivist approach to the relationship
between Los Angeles and its cinematic alter ego in film noir. The many films set and
produced in Los Angeles affords such a constructivist approach, but to conduct a similar
investigation in relation to Australian cinematic representations and Australian cities presents
an entirely different set of issues and challenges.

At the outset, any analysis of the Australian city in film has to contend with how the
representation of Australian cultural life sees the Australian urban play second to Australian
nature. The uniqueness and vastness of Australias natural environment ensures it looms large
in the collective imaginary, both nationally and internationally. Popularly referred to as the
Australian bush and outback, Australian nature continues to dominate Australian cultural
expression from painting, poetry, literature, theatre and music extending into tourism
marketing and national branding. As a result, Australian cinema has traditionally, and to a
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large extent remains, a natural landscape cinema, bypassing representation of Australian
cities and its suburban counterparts.

Since the re-birth or renaissance of the Australian film industry in the early 1970s, even when
it ventured into overt generic and exploitation areas, the outback, the bush and natural
landscape have dominated Australian film narratives and settings. Nature and the landscape
continue to provide an easily identifiable national signature, a strong referent denoting what
is conventionally labelled Australian-ness. Often when the Australian urban is featured it is
presented as a much maligned aspect of national life dismissed as sub-urban and aesthetically
and architecturally denigrated as Australian ugliness.

In spite of Natures dominance in the Australian imaginary, over the past two decades,
similar to movements in other Australian art forms, there has been a gradual re-discovery of
the Australian urban and suburban in Australian filmmaking. Commencing in the 1990s with
the rise of the so called, glitter cycle with films like Strictly Ballroom (1992), Priscilla,
Queen of the Desert (1994) and Muriels Wedding (1994) a revival of sorts has engaged and
represented aspects of the Australian urban and suburban experience. Across film, television,
and the fine arts the nascent Australian urban has begun the process of re-emergence, albeit
intermittently.

Australian Noir?

Functioning as the great corrective to American optimism and triumphalism, film noir and
neo noir have provided a resolute NO against the otherwise relentless YES associated with
the rhetorics of the American Dream and American Imperialism. As the previous chapters
and their discussion on recent film noir scholarship by Dimendberg, Rabinowitz and
Naremore have outlined, the themes of noir and the noir city, from its motifs, tropes and
characterizations to its aesthetics and plots, is mired in a cultural scepticism and post World
War II malaise increasingly interpreted beyond its traditional filmic boundaries of genre and
questions of style. The analyses by these scholars see noir manifesting across various forms
and modes of expression ranging across photography to feminist literature and expressing the
cultural anxiety surrounding transformations in modernity.

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Film noir and neo noir have never taken root in Australian cinema anywhere near to the
extent they have in the United States, nor European cinema. While there have been
occasional forays into the narrative possibilities offered up by neo noir, to locate a corpus of
Australian film noirs is a problematic undertaking. Considering the dominant themes of noir,
particularly the emphasis on the anti-hero and defeatism, the scarcity of noir narratives in
Australian cinema is surprising given that the themes and narrative tropes of noir permeate
aspects of Australian culture, popular and otherwise. Since the Australian film renaissance
of the 1970s, Australian heroism in Australian cinema has what ORegan and Ryan have
referred to as a battler logic where narratives are peopled by characters who are governed
by forces beyond their control, and who are shown in a position of defeat at the close of the
film (Ryan, 1996, 235).

In both film noir and neo noir there is an inherent scepticism in the style and the genre and a
pessimistic outlook that ranges from the coolly ironic to outright despair. As cinematic forms
film noir and neo noir would seem to be tailor-made to articulating many aspects of
Australian cultural experience. Yet despite these many offerings, film noir has only
occasionally been taken up in Australian cinema. Some strong examples of Australian film
noir and neo noir are certainly present and extend across documentary and drama. But
charting an Australian film noir and neo noir filmography reveals a spasmodic and occasional
history rather than any continuous and concentrated offerings. Nevertheless, across four
decades of Australian filmmaking, examples can be found that do manage to span the gamut
of the noir spectrum.

When noir has been employed in Australian film it has been applied at the level of the police
procedural right through to fully fledged neo noir. Noir stylistics and approaches can be
identified in films dating from the time of the Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit. The
Hungry Miles (1955) is a film celebrated for ostensibly employing neo realist filmmaking
techniques, but there are also distinctly noir hues informing its location cinematography,
lighting and occasional atmospherics. During the Australian film renaissance neo noir
flourishes as well as more concentrated offerings can be seen in; Wake in Fright (1971), The
Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and in the prototypical Tech Noir, Mad Max trilogy (1979-85).
In the 1980s there were also neo noir forays appearing in docudramas like The Scales of
Justice (1983), fictionalized true crime stories like The Killing of Angel Street (1981) and
Heatwave (1982). Neo noir feature narratives punctuated the 1980s with Goodbye Paradise
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(1983), The Empty Beach (1985), Ground Zero (1987) and Grievous Bodily Harm (1988). A
similar pattern emerges in the 1990s through to the present with Blue Murder (1995), Two
Hands (1999), Risk (2000), Dark City (1998) [Tech Noir], Getting Square (2003) and the
Matrix (1999-2003) trilogy.

Two neo noir Australian feature films were contemporaneous with the production of The
Brisbane Line, Alec Morgans Hunt Angels (2006) and Jonathan Ogilvies, The Tender Hook
(2008). Hunt Angels, along with Goodbye Paradise, and The Killing of Angel Street are
Australian neo noir films that resonated most deeply in the creative process surrounding The
Brisbane Line. Described as Australian beach noir by timchuma at www.nofreelist.com,
(accessed 10/03/2009). Goodbye Paradise (1983) was directed by Carl Shultz and co-written
by Denny Lawrence and Bob Ellis. Lawrence intended to set a Raymond Chandler story in
Australia and to a certain degree succeeded with Goodbye Paradise. Set on the Gold Coast,
there are echoes of Chinatown in terms of the scale of the cover up that drives the narrative.
Satirical excess in the third act severely compromises this otherwise very accomplished film
that is not only rare for its use of a contemporary Gold Coast setting but by the way Shultz
employs noir conventions and renders the Australian setting in full blown neo noir colour.

Released in 1983, Goodbye Paradise was produced seven years before the Fitzgerald Inquiry
into police corruption in Queensland, and is a prescient evocation of the tensions and malaise
operating under the Premiership of Sir Joh Bjelke Peterson. While there is little doubt the
satire becomes too untenable by far and undermines the films potential, it stands as both a
potent harbinger of the Fitzgerald Inquiry and fictional reminder of the history and culture
surrounding Bjelke-Petersens controversial nineteen-year reign as Premier of Queensland.

Goodbye Paradise also provides the basis for a historical and structural dialectic in
Queensland social and screen history against the boosterism of The Coolangatta Gold (1984),
a high profile Queensland feature produced just one year later. For many, The Coolangatta
Gold stands for the excesses of the 1980s and the discredited Division 10BA era. The
Coolangatta Gold is also a significant text in relation to the media and policy discourse at the
time that sought to position Queensland as the potential Hollywood of Australia, something
strenuously advocated by the Queensland Film Corporation in the 1980s.

Virtually, from its inception to its death throes, the Corporation actively
pursued the studio concept, and sponsored original surveys and
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 consultancies regarding viability. A press report in 1979 quotes retiring
chairman, Syd Schubert, as saying that the QFC supported a 5 million
dollar film studio for the Gold Coast, and, furthermore, that he believed
the States locations, climate and the availability of this studio would
combine to make Queensland the logical base for the Australian film
industryQueensland appeared to be the only State with major film
activity planned for the next three years.

(Yeates, 1990, 85)

In The Coolangatta Gold, the excesses of the Gold Coast are simply marshalled as a
backdrop providing sunshine spectacle in the service of an Australian narrative on
competitive masculinity. In Goodbye Paradise, meanwhile, the semiotic excess of this
beachside conurbation provides an inward turning point for the narratives exploration of
darker neo noir subcurrents that construct Queensland as the centre of rogue nationalism and
political corruption. The Coolangatta Gold, while exemplar of much of the 10BA era and
policy directions of the Queensland Film Corporation, also demonstrates how Australian-
ness was negotiated and internationalized in the 1980s. Other examples at this time would
include The Man From Snowy River (1982), Phar Lap (1983), Starstruck (1982) and Mad
Max series of films (1979-85).

Goodbye Paradise stands in stark contrast to Coolangatta Gold as an ironic and cynical neo
noir rendering of Queensland and the Gold Coast. According to Stephen Croft, it features a
psychological darkness of the oedipal drama[that] investigates the glitz of Surfers
Paradise nightclubs, real estate hype and political rallies in ways that are barred by
[Coolangatta Golds] generic foci on sunny beach settings, on wholesome youth dancing and
loving (Croft, 1990, 117).

Coolangatta Gold and Goodbye Paradise are two Australian films that represent the
dichotomies behind Queenslands cultural identity in the 1980s. Goodbye Paradise contests
the public relation images of a tourism branded Queensland while Coolangatta Gold extends
the tourism franchise and trades off its excesses. Although the two films could not be more
disparate from one another, they are nevertheless historically and culturally intertwined. The

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Gold Coast, whether it is loved or loathed, occupies a firm place in the Australian imaginary,
one that overshadows Brisbane and which clearly has a stronger hold in terms of a broad
international and national appeal when it comes to Queensland settings.

Coolangatta Gold has long since joined the list of Australian films that that have been
admonished as symptomatic of the failings of the Divison 10BA policy and filmmaking era.
While the significance and prescience of Goodbye Paradise has almost been forgotten despite
the fact that its fictional claims around corruption in the State would partly be borne out by
reality in revelations exposed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry at the end of the 1980s in Queensland.

Built Environment Shadows

In the 1980s, three other Australian films chronicled claims of corruption amidst the struggle
for inner city preservation of heritage architecture precincts, this time in Sydney. The Killing
of Angel Street (1981), Heatwave (1982), and the documentary, Rocking the Foundations
(1985). Both The Killing of Angel Street (1981), directed by Donald Crombie, and Heatwave
(1982) directed by Phillip Noyce, draw on the unsolved murder of Juanita Nielson, a Sydney
anti-development campaigner in the 1970s. Crombies film in particular represents a
fictionalised version of the issues surrounding Nielsens campaign for the preservation of
inner city heritage. By directly referencing Juanita Neilsens disappearance and murder
Crombies film makes explicit the parallels between the real life characters and the films
fictional scenario. As neo noir political thrillers, The Killing of Angel Street and Heatwave
interweave true crime with historical and fictional elements that capture this pivotal moment
in the struggle for heritage preservation of Sydneys built environment.

The actual history of this period in Sydney has been chronicled by Pat Fiskes landmark
documentary, Rocking the Foundations (1985). The documentary celebrates the Builders
Labourers Federation (BLF) campaign to preserve large swathes of Sydneys heritage
precincts through the enacting of the famous Green Bans that saw the BLF refusing to work
on some thirty-six construction sites worth an estimated total of three billion dollars in
development in 1973. (http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article94) (accessed
12/02/2010).

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Together these three films have engaged this tumultuous period in the history of Sydney and
the political machinations that operated between the unions, developers and State and Federal
politicians. Due to the success of the BLFs Green Bans the jewels of some of Sydneys
nineteenth century inner city heritage like The Rocks district and Woolloomooloo were
spared the developers wrecking ball. The combination of these three films sees this crucial
period in the history of Sydney not only chronicled but perhaps more importantly,
cinematically memorialized. The fictional and documentary accounts in these films together
with the actual surviving built environments serve as timely reminders of how precarious
urban planning logics can be and the knifes edge upon which urban history, as the site of
collective urban memory, often rests.

Sydney Simulacrum

Alec Morgans, Hunt Angels (2006), stands as a postmodern response to the intersection
between Sydneys remaining mid-century modernity and urbanscape and images of the citys
heritage as captured in newsreels and archival photography. Hunt Angels is an innovative,
feature length drama documentary that chronicles two unsung pioneers of the early Australian
film industry, Rupert Kathner and Alma Brooks. Detailed digital treatment of archival
photography of Sydney provides the film with a richly textured foreground that sees the
vanished built environment of 1930-1940s Sydney resurrected. Morgans approach animates
and stylizes Sydneys built environment past which is literally, as well as, digitally
composited out of historical imagery and photographs.

Hunt Angels is a testament to how much of the citys early modernist architecture now only
resides in photographic stills, newsreels and archival records. Morgan has marshalled
countless images in the service of a narrative about Australian filmmakers whose lives were
devoted to Australian storytelling and capturing Australian images. The film sees this
important period in Australian modernity not only chronicled through archival imagery and
stills but by recombining old media with new it reconfigures historical imagery to supply its
formally layered deep intertextuality. More so than any other recent Australian film, Hunt
Angels is literally comprised out of postmodern digital materiality. In Hunt Angels, despite
being a live action docudrama, according to Rose Draper the lead compositor, fifty percent of
the film is constructed out of visual effects and animation elements, and all sourced from
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1930s archival material. (Draper, 2010) The extensive digital alteration of photographic
imagery sees a frozen past transformed and reborn as three dimensional and animated, the
past as representation come to life.

In Hunt Angels, the digital manipulation of images sees archival photography subsume its
original function as a sign that serves as a particular referent to reality. In Hunt Angles,
through extensive digital compositing, images are used to stand in and replace the very thing
they once represented. Morgans innovative approach, similar to techniques employed in
films like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), reveals the possibilities afforded
by digital technologies and how archival imagery can now function beyond the role of
supplementary material and instead fulfil the very substance of the filmmaking fabric.
Through digital manipulation, archival imagery is now capable of having live action
sequences shot against green screens and literally embedded into and sinuated within the
dramatic narrative like never before. Digitally overhauled through software like Photoshop,
After Effects, Flame and many other applications, archival photography and imagery can
become three dimensionally layered and capable of providing a sustained mise-en-scene for
an entire narrative.

The past is no longer simply just signified by archival imagery or confined as it once was to
indexing an actual and previous time. Instead, digitally altered historical imagery sees the
past reified and physically relocated to provide a contemporaneous environment. Like
Barthes semiotic model of myth, the image sign in Hunt Angels has shifted in its relation to
the real. The first order signifier and signified become elevated, denoting yet another sign,
history as image and image denoting a spatialised realism. This approach seems a direct
response to Jamesons call for, a radically different practice of signs albeit one he would no
doubt find objectionable (Jameson, 1999).

Historical Research as Textual Resonance

Aside from Australian neo noir, many other Australian sources and textual influences were
canvassed beyond the cinema that formed part of the background research that went into The
Brisbane Line. Initially, historical studies were sought in order to obtain the all encompassing
perspective of Queensland history like Ross Fitzgeralds two-volume, study, A History of

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Queensland and, Jonathan Dawson and Bruce Molloy (eds) Queensland Images in film and
television (1990). In order to grasp how Queensland resided in the imaginary of not just
Australian artists, creatives and audiences but specifically local writers, artists, readers and
audiences I first turned to fiction and short stories, amongst them Hot Iron Corrugated Sky
edited by Robyn Sheahan-Bright and Richard Glover (2002) and perhaps most significantly,
Brisbane born author, David Maloufs semi-autobiographical novel, Johnno (1975).

Johnno is a coming of age story set in Brisbane after World War II and offered a historical
and personal perspective on this unique time in Brisbane history. Johnno piqued my interest
in this time of the citys history when it seemed to be entering a transitional phase that saw it
moving away from a lifestyle and pace indicative of a large country town, into something that
was expanding into an urban metropolis. After reading Johnno I then began seeking out
actual and personal histories of this time, and encountered books that spanned popular and
amateur historical studies as well documented oral history accounts of Brisbane residents
during World War II. Several of these focused on the impact of the arrival of American GIs
into South East Queensland who served under Macarthur in 1942 as part of the war in the
Pacific.

As I continued research into Queensland history I encountered the ABC Four Corners
program Moonlight State (1984) produced and reported by Chris Masters. As a pillar of the
ABC investigative journalism division, Four Corners has a long standing tradition and
reputation for agenda setting journalism and media expose. Moonlight State was a ground-
breaking investigation that greatly contributed to the Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption in
Queensland in 1989. This was one of the most important pieces of reporting in Australian
political history. It led to the Fitzgerald Commission, and hence to the end of the Bjelke-
Petersen era and over 30 years of National Party government in Queensland (Tiffen, 1999,
216).

Moonlight State is not only an example of corruption busting investigative journalism but
very unexpectedly is delivered through some highly crafted filmmaking. Employing noir
atmospherics and lighting, location cinematography, and over ten dramatic recreations, as
much care seemed to go into the filmmaking as the journalism. Shot mostly at night on
16mm film, the forty minute report conveys a seedy Queensland full of illegal brothels, cops
on the take, of corruption, vice, drug trafficking and unchecked police power.

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A Four Corners investigative piece was the last place I expected to find any inspiration for a
neo noir film set in Australia. After watching Chris Masters report, however, I was
immediately aware I had not just witnessed a criminal justice and investigative milestone in
Australia, but a cinematic one. I was also confronted with Paula Rabinowitzs argument
detailed in Chapter Two, that noir represents an approach and signifying system that
articulates cultural aspects far beyond the conventional parameters of Hollywood cinema,
permeating and giving meaning to a whole host of cultural expressions and dimensions, and
in this case, investigative journalism.

Various films orbited my creative practice and resonated across the writing of the script.
Several functioned as more foreground influences that helped shape the narrative approach
and visual style taken in The Brisbane Line. The three most influential films were The Thin
Blue Line (1988) by Errol Morris, LA Confidential (1997) by Curtis Hanson and Chinatown
(1974) by Roman Polanski.

Chinatown has already been discussed in detail in Chapter Three which outlines the pivotal
role Polanski and Robert Townes film played in the resurrection of film noir and its
transformation into something we can recognize as fully fledged neo noir. The relationship
between Chinatown and Los Angeles is multi-layered and it has consolidated much of what
was discussed in Chapter Three as the psychogeography and simulacra existing between film
noir, neo noir and that city.

As a now all-time classic text, Chinatown continues to garner new audiences with whom it
forges deep and profound relationships, as is evidenced by the IMDb.com reader review
quoted in Chapter Two which illustrates the films continuing role in the citys evolving
psychogeography. Its growing popular reception has done nothing to diminish its critical
acclaim. In writing a study guide for the film, Hunter Cordaiy advises, In Chinatown it is
often difficult to distinguish between these elements [lust, ambition, psychological flaws], so
intricately are they interwoven. If there is one conclusion that students should consider, it is
this sense of totality. It is almost a perfect film (Cordaiy, 2009, 124). For these reasons
as well as the positioning of Chinatown in relation film noir and neo noir outlined in Chapter
Three, it remains a text that any filmmaker attempting a neo noir has to take into the most
careful of considerations.

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It is not a far cry to assume that without Chinatown there may never have been an LA
Confidential (1997). Curtis Hansons film, adapted from the James Ellroy novel retreads the
territory Chinatown explored twenty-three years earlier. Like Chinatown, LA Confidential is
an attempt to excavate the murky history of Los Angeles by mining the themes and imagery
of the citys alter ego as the quintessential Dark City promulgated under the classical era of
film noir.

Set in the 1950s, LA Confidential fuses fact, myth, fiction and the corpus of film noir into a
seamless blend of stylistic neo noir. Similar to classic film noirs like The Bad and the
Beautiful, (actually featured on a cinema marquee in one scene), LA Confidential is set
against the backdrop of Hollywood. The image promoted by Los Angeles and the disparities
with its reality is a leitmotif throughout the film. From wide-eyed budding starlets who end
up as prostitutes that impersonate Hollywood stars and become sexual simulacra, to a crime
free city where it is the police who fill the void of organized crime, LA Confidential exposes,
celebrates and participates in the citys complex relationship with its image based veneer.
Forming the third instalment of a quartet on Los Angeles, James Ellroy set out to write, an
elegy to a big, expanding city on the make. My essential design was to cram real-life events
and established historical characters into a series of complexly structured storylines, add
fictional protagonists and antagonists, and rebuild and rewrite my hometown (Helgeland
& Hanson, 1997, xv).

Curtis Hansons film remains faithful to Ellroys objective. Commencing with LA

Confidentials opening titles, historical Los Angeles is drawn out from newsreels, archival
stills, through to postcards, television programs and classic film noirs, a mlange of real and
reel Los Angeles history. If Chinatown was essentially about historical elements of the city
that hid a level of corruption and evil that could outstrip anything the classical era of film noir
offered up, LA Confidential reveals how Hollywood and the citys competing signs have
determined and overtaken the citys lived reality. The foundations are laid for what Umberto
Eco characterizes as the citys hyperreality and for Baudrilliard is the basis of its real
becoming simulacrum, the city submerged and lost amongst its multiple images. Picking up
where Chinatown left off, LA Confidential evidences the potency of neo noir when it is
constituted out of a careful consideration of film noir reflections of Los Angeles. LA
Confidential functions as both cause and effect of how the image of Los Angeles has

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transposed the real and continues to forge a dialectic that binds the city in a triple helix of
spiralling simulations and semiosis.

Errol Morris Thin Blue Line (1988), and its docu-noir approach is a film I was familiar
with yet it was not a film I was immediately drawn to in the early stages of the research. I
revisited it when I decided documentary would form a key component to the approach of the
creative practice in the middle of the second year of the research. Extending and innovating
documentary conventions, Thin Blue Line engages aesthetic strategies to foreground the
complexities surrounding cinematic representation of true events and eyewitness accounts.
It remains a benchmark for innovation in documentary form and while it is renowned for its
stylistics, these aesthetic innovations far from compromised its social justice impact,
achieving what many documentary filmmakers aspire to by providing an astounding outcome
for its central participant who, as a result of the film was famously granted a re-trial and
removed from death row.

The Thin Blue Line served as a poignant reminder of the formal and aesthetic innovations that
can be unleashed within documentary. So despite initially rejecting a documentary approach
in the creative practice, after re-examining the Thin Blue Line and other highly expressive
documentaries like Guy Maddins My Winnipeg (2007), and Terry Zwigoffs Crumb (1994), I
became keenly aware of the links between documentary, film noir and neo noir. I also saw
how the divide between Australian representation of cities and American representations
through film noir and neo noir could be bridged through a documentary approach, especially
a postmodern hybrid along the lines of documentary-noir.

Four Social History Influences

Death Scenes, (1996) edited by Sean Terrachi is a photographic compilation of actual death
and crime scenes in Southern California as captured by police and forensic photography
between 1920 and 1950. The collection of forensic photographs that forms the basis of the
book was found as part of the deceased estate of a retired Los Angeles police detective who
served in the LAPD between 1920 and 1952. The detective, Jack Huddleton, kept personal
copies of forensic photographs out of what the publishers assume was a hobby and reveal a

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thirty-plus year history of Southern California and its crime scenes seen through the eyes of
the Los Angeles homicide squad.

The crime scene photographs provide a striking photographic archive that documents aspects
of the true crime noir landscape of 1940s Los Angeles. An unintentionally curated
photographic archive it serves as a factual accompaniment to the corpus of film noir and
alternative noir-history of Los Angeles. Death Scenes chronicles both the city and an era
further supporting claims like Rabinowitzs that noir is something that transcends the cinema.
Death Scenes conveys how noir details a much wider form than cinematic film noir, and is
representative of a lived style and particular historical sensibility accompanying the
immediate post war period. It captures what Rabinowitz describes as a population on the
make, an expression also used by Ellroy in relation to the novel LA Confidential. Death
Scenes reveals how on the streets of Los Angeles, behind the facades of the studio backlots
and post card images, the real shadowlands of noir lifestyles played out and expired. Death
Scenes is a catalogue of unnatural deaths, revealing the truths behind the fictions, truths that
eventually permeated the public consciousness through their popularisation as film noir.

At an Australian level, police photography supplied the basis of the NSW Police and Justice
Museums, City of Shadows exhibition guest curated by Peter Doyle between November
2005 and February 2007. The accompanying publication covers a range of police
photographs from 1912 to 1948. The exhibition and book provided poignant, documentary
insights into Australian urban life in the 1930-40s. The photographs for City of Shadows,
were retrieved by chance, housed in boxes that were marked to be destroyed by Sydney City
Police. Like Death Scenes, City of Shadows is a serendipitously salvaged archive, one that
captures an indirect, unintentional and darkly unsentimental urban history of Sydney.

These images remind us that the past is not really the place we often
comfortably imagine it to have been, but is rather a terrain as
problematically layered with tension and complexity as is our own moment
in time.

(Doyle & Williams, 2005, 17)

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The ill gotten gains and ultimate price many paid as a consequence of the desire to live a
certain lifestyle, is brutally captured in both City of Shadows and Death Scenes. Men,
women, families, migrants, working and middle class, the guilty and the innocent, are all
shown in their final moment. Far from resting places, the photographs detail places of
abandonment, the confined spaces of private apartments, industrial wastelands, lonely
highways and overnight hotels, the true-noir landscapes of the 1930s and 1940s that formed
the basis of film noir. But the documentary and forensic aesthetic of City of Shadows and
Death Scenes could not be further from Hollywood style recreations, even in some of the
grittiest noir treatments. A certain banality is omnipresent, and in sharp contrast to noir
chiaroscuro these real death scenes are often harshly white, overlit and deliberately on the
brink of overexposure, as part of forensic techniques designed to reveal as much detail as
possible through shadow reduction.

Both Death Scenes and City of Shadows had profound effects on the creative vision and
aesthetic approach taken for The Brisbane Line. Both books provided invaluable research and
references for make-up effects and the mock-up photographic crime stills I designed and
photographed for The Brisbane Line. The true crime forensic photographs featured in each
book served as the blueprint for my fictional death scenes for Madeleine Campbell and
Martin White. The shot arrangement of each fabricated crime scene photograph used in The
Brisbane Line adheres to the description of forensic photography techniques used from the
1920s until the 1940s as outlined in City of Shadows;

in crime scene photography there are three general positions or views

which are necessary. Those views consist of overall photographs showing
the entire scene, mid range photographs showing a relationship of items,
and a close up photograph of the items of evidence themselves.

(Doyle & Williams, 2005, 19)

The crime scene photographs of the fictional murder scene of Madeleine Campbell adhere to
these guidelines and enable the fabricated forensic photography to blend seamlessly with
actual Australian crime scene photography that often brackets them.

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Three Australian social history texts, Battle of Brisbane Australians and the Yanks at War
(2000) by Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin, The Bagman Confessions of Jack Herbert,
(2004) by Jack Herbert and Tom Gilling, and Bloody Brisbane, Murder in the River City
(2005) edited by Jack Sim, were instrumental at either end of the creative process. At the
beginning of the script stage I turned to The Battle of Brisbane, a popular history text I had
read several years ago prior to my arrival in Brisbane. Once I committed to formulating a
Brisbane narrative I returned to this study and the events it detailed during World War II. The
premise of the book, the actual uprising of soldiers at the centre of The Battle of Brisbane was
never going to be foregrounded or comprise a core element of the narrative. Instead, what I
identified as a key element was the essential World War Two context for The Brisbane Line,
a period that supplemented what was chronicled by Malouf in Johnno.

The actual Battle of Brisbane highlights a momentous period in Brisbane history in 1942
when the city was at the centre of national and international affairs. In 1942, World War II
had entered a critical stage for Australia, the US allies and South East Asia. Queensland had
become the staging post for Macarthurs assault on Japanese forces and with the influx of
American GIs, Brisbanes population more than trebled, from 300,000 to over 1 million
(Thompson, 2000, 26). As the war in the Pacific encroached on mainland Australia, Brisbane
experienced major civilian and military upheaval with inevitable unrest mounting in the city.
According to Thompson and Macklin, within a few months of their arrival tension was rife
between the American GIs and Australian diggers. Racial tensions also mounted as African
American GIs flooded into Brisbane and were segregated across the metropolitan area
leading to a black and white divide that separated North and South Brisbane. While the
fighting that reached its climax in the actual Battle of Brisbane on the corner of Adelaide and
Creek Streets was a PR and propaganda disaster for Australian and American forces it was
just one eruption amongst many in an atmosphere of tension and violence across the city.

Echoing LA Confidential, Thompson and Macklins account of Brisbane in 1942 details an

enormous discrepancy between the image of happily co-existing allied forces in the city
propagated by the Australian and US armies, and the reality on the actual streets of Brisbane
as GIs and Diggers who fought and clashed over everything from rations and cigarettes to the
affections of Australian women. Like Chinatown, this period and its events revealed a city
undergoing an enormous transition from a eucalypt scented backwater to an urban cauldron
fuelled by a sexually potent and militarized masculinity. If ever a cinematic form could give
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expression to this period in Brisbane and the history surrounding its development as a city, it
is noir.

film noir and the city will always be inextricable. There is never one
without the other. Quite simply, noir is, and always will be, a reaction to
eruptive events tears in the social fabric, war, political turmoil that
often originate in, and forever alter, the city.

(Christopher, 2006, xv)

In conjunction with the all encompassing context of World War II, at the centre of many of
the tensions in wartime Brisbane was the availability of women and libidinal desire.
Australian Churches condemned the behaviour of Australian women who sought the
company of cashed up American GIs and the competition posed by the Yanks raised the
ire of their Australian counterparts. Violence and assaults abounded in the city and the
conflict between Australian and America servicemen threatened morale that had the potential
to fuel Japanese propaganda. More effective than the ability to contain such violence were
Australian and American military efforts designed to suppress its reportage in the press and
the Australian publics awareness of such events.

In conjunction with its verified historical accounts, The Battle of Brisbane also provided a
vital detail that formed the basis of the plot idea in The Brisbane Line narrative. Although it
is only mentioned as rumour, The Battle of Brisbane raises the subject of the Curtin
Special. Speculative, contentious, and often dismissed as baseless, the Curtin Special
referred to a government and military sanctioned train service that delivered prostitutes from
Sydney and Melbourne up to Brisbane to cater to the swollen demand for sex created by the
influx of American GIs. The authors of The Battle of Brisbane, Peter Thompson and Robert
Macklin, highlight that no substantive evidence has ever been brought forward confirming
the reality of the Curtin Special and its existence remains hearsay.

Despite its conjecture in official history, the implications of an undertaking like the Curtin
Special are clearly enormous and it represents a unique opportunity for any narrative and
fictional treatment of the era. The prospect of a Government sanctioned arrangement like the
Curtin Special offered the possibility to employ a narrative element seldom exploited in
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Australian cinema, that of myth. Just like the power machinations behind the control of
water in Chinatown, and the LAPD assuming the role of organized crime in LA Confidential,
the Curtin Special provided the opportunity to draw on something lurking in the shadows of
official history, unclaimed, unacknowledged and subsequently consigned to rumour and
unsubstantiated myth. With its marginal historical status, the Curtin Special offered a perfect
narrative ingredient ripe for fictional and cinematic excavation through neo noir.

Cinematically of course, this period in Brisbane and Australias history has largely been
missed. Its absence is remarkable given the scale, significance and the dramatic nature of the
events that unfolded. So as part of the research I continued to search for what else had been
unofficially historicised, celebrated and anecdotally captured about Brisbane. The most
prominent aspect of the city and the State in local and national affairs was undoubtedly the
Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen Premiership. Although historical references to the period abound
increasingly it is a period that is being consigned to the margins and threatens to function as
an unmistakable repressed in the State and citys history. Although I had been impressed by
Fours Corners, Moonlight State, initially I was mainly impressed by its visual style and
could not see how its subject matter could figure into the 1940s landscape detailed by The
Battle of Brisbane, an era that seemed so ripe for noir excavation.

The links were then forged through two publications, the first from the social history account,
Bloody Brisbane, Murder in the River City, edited by Jack Sim, and the second, The Bagman,
Confessions of Jack Herbert. As it was never my intention to make a straightforward
documentary on an aspect of Brisbane history, even if it was as intriguing as the Curtin
Special, my narrative approaches were at a stand-still until I encountered Jack Herberts
memoir and the true crime book edited by Jack Sim. Always on the look-out for narrative
ideas that could deploy the kind of noir conventions evidenced in American film noir and neo
noir, upon encountering The Bagman, I knew immediately I had a character that could draw
Brisbanes disgraced, celebrated and forgotten histories all together in one seamless blend.

Jack Herbert was convicted as a corrupt Queensland Police Detective and had played a
central role in the 1989 Fitzgerald Inquiry. Herberts account elaborates on many of the
details of corruption exposed in Moonlight State, and Chris Masters program itself features
significantly in Herberts memoir. Through Herberts confession, readers are given an
insiders account of the Moonlight State, and journey into the dark heart of Queenslands

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thoroughly corrupt police force that ran amok for more than thirty years. Throughout
Herberts memoir and despite his many admissions to all kinds of crimes and guilt, he
remains unrepentant, showing little remorse for his many corrupt and illegal actions. The
position taken by Herbert is striking given he is fully cognisant of the many implications,
violent and otherwise, of his morality and dubious career choices. For any dramatist, Herbert
is a compelling character whose attitudes and actions illustrate many of the contradictions
that lie at the heart of human behaviour.

Other information supplementing Herberts account came from Ray Whitrod, the honest
Police Commissioner in Queensland who provided insights on former QLD Police
Commission Frank Bischof, the inspiration for the character of Harry Mitchell in The
Brisbane Line.

Bischof was a very astute operator and he had selected three young
detectives to be his bagmen, who went around to the brothels and ... and to
the gambling joints and to the SP bookmakers and extracted the levy from
them. I never knew who'd channelled the country money in to Bischof.
Who did that? There must have been somebody else in a fairly senior
position who co-ordinated that money trail. I never found out, neither did
Hiley and neither did Fitzgerald. But Frank Bischof got this little group of
very good operators, smart operators, who were given the ... the ... the
nickname of the rat pack, and they were known as the rat pack.They
were a very powerful group in Brisbane and elsewhere. They were given a
great deal of freedom of movement.

(http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/whitrod/interview8.html)

(accessed 29/11/2007)

Finally, in Jack Sims true crime compendium, Bloody Brisbane, Murder in the River City, I
encountered the unsolved murder of a young woman, Betty Shanks, in the Brisbane suburb of
The Grange in 1952. In a strange coincidence I was living in The Grange and had
unknowingly passed the crime scene many times when I encountered Sims book and read
the account of this unsolved case. Brisbanes greatest murder-mystery remains the case of

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Betty Shanks. Unsolved after more the fifty years, it sadly seems increasingly likely that it
will remain so (Sims, 2005, 49).

The Betty Shanks murder shocked Brisbane and served as a grisly reminder that the city was
no longer the sleepy town it had been prior to World War Two. In the popular imaginary, the
unsolved murder of Betty Shanks served as a marker of Brisbanes loss of innocence and
contributed to the perception that now it was a city it faced inevitable moral decline. The
brutality of the crime also bears an uncanny resemblance to the Black Dahlia case of 1940s
Los Angeles which consumes neo noir writer, James Ellroy, author of LA Confidential. The
Black Dahlia case looms large in the true crime folklore of Los Angeles and recently
provided the basis for Brian De Palmas neo noir, The Black Dahlia in 2007.

So like the process pursued by Robert Towne in relation to Chinatown, detailed in Chapter
Three, I have drawn on and selected various historical inputs and approaches from these eight
key texts. Through combining fact, fiction, rumour, history, hearsay and myth, The Brisbane
Line screenplay forges a neo noir allegory of Brisbane and its history. Applying the thesis
that cinematic representations can provide a citys past with an alternative, expressive and
stylistic evocation of its history, though The Brisbane Line, I have constructed a neo noir
rendering of some of Brisbanes overlooked, but nonetheless engaging and poignant history.
By incorporating documentary and archival elements within the fictional narrative, The
Brisbane Line is a film deliberately seeking to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction,
history and myth and keep its audience guessing as to where the lines are drawn.

Like Chinatown, the title of the film is both literal and deliberately metaphoric suggesting the
city is the site of transgressions across lines of morality and legality, innocence and
corruption, honesty and dishonesty, desire and guilt. The behaviour of the characters in The
Brisbane Line parallel Chinatowns in the manner described by Cordiay.

The depths of behaviour to which characters sink in Chinatown is in direct

proportion to [the] sense of brutalisation. The city as shown in the film is
totally corrupted in all personal and commercial relationships. There
seems to be no pause between anger and murder, no line that cannot be
crossed

(Cordaiy, 2009, 123).

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The objective of The Brisbane Line is to construct a truly neo noir narrative permeated with
dark places filled with remorse and regret and little hope of redemption. To register the dark
subcurrents of neo noir, similar to Chinatown, The Brisbane Line had to negotiate this classic
noir terrain and atmosphere of foreboding in technicolour, albeit de-saturated. But the many
black and white still photographs, archival and recreated, also connect to the monochromatic
history elicited by film noir and the visual landscape of the 1940s. To provide the tragic
ending, the final act of the central character, Martin White, had to be sufficiently dramatic to
conjure up an interminable career of corruption and deceit which could be escaped only one
way.

As research that employs creative practice, The Brisbane Line has functioned both as applied
theory as well as a simultaneous driver of ideas. As a drama-documentary, The Brisbane Line
represents a postmodern and hybrid narrative form. Comprised out of factual and fictional
elements the drama-documentary form reflects the poststructuralist tendencies identified by
Roscoe and Hight which they see appearing in recent documentaries and mockumentaries, a
trend that is intent on challenging binary oppositions between fact and fiction.

Rather than conceptualizing fact and fiction as distinct entities,

poststructuralism points instead to a continuum on which fact and fiction
leak into each other.

(Roscoe & Hight, 2006, 182)

A key concern of the research has been how cinematic cities are constitutive of aspects of the
urban experience and experiential understandings of the city. Australian urban history is
overdue a creative excavation that can mobilize its symbolic dimensions. While there is no
Australian city that has a cinematic archive or legacy of imagined renderings as remotely
dense as the film noir history surrounding Los Angeles, or celluloid New York, from which
we can draw on, there is the dormant presence of Australian history itself. Something that is
able to offer the secondary data and visual media for narratives that can re-imagine our urban
past through our postmodern present.

The catalyst to revealing, treating and excavating Australias history and transforming them
has in this instance, proven to be where history meets myth. With The Brisbane Line, the
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intention is to excavate history out of mainstream, and repressed, marginal histories as well as
unsubstantiated hearsay which circulate like myth. By employing various dramatic and
documentary modes, the film folds some irreconcilables together, the past and the present,
memory and history, fact and fiction. As Michael Dear has argued, the cinema, like
architecture, is where these impossible configurations can be played out.

Social process operates at different scales (from global to local), and is

mediated through interactions of deep seated structures, their institutional
forms and the actions of individual agents. There is also a time space
dimension, since place is a complex amalgam of past, present and emerging
forms coexisting simultaneously in a single landscape. In a most fundamental
sense, therefore, the central task of what I term the geographical puzzle is to
understand the simultaneity of time and space in structuring social process;
human geography is the study of contemporaneity of social processes through
time and space. By extension, one purpose of architecture (plus urban
planning) and filmmaking is to forge new time-space relationships.

(Dear, 1994, 14)

By forging links between two key periods in Brisbane history, World War Two and the Sir
Joh Bjelke Petersen era, periods not previously associated with one another, The Brisbane
Line is a creative response to Dears challenge. Aided by archival imagery and some of the
conventions drawn from documentary, the film collapses history in this fashion by aligning
its form with notions of memory, biography, fiction and narrative.

The City in Australian Film Imaginary or Imagined?

As the research in the thesis has explored, a corpus like film noir and its relationship to Los
Angeles enables intertextual postmodern engagements and negotiations that set in motion a
play of signifiers and signifieds that opens up relations between the real, the imagined and the
remembered. In contrast to many American and European cities, the Australian urban
landscape, while far from unchartered, certainly remains under represented. Beyond their

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primary existence in the real, representation of Australian cities stands in stark contrast to a
city like New York, where, according to Stephanie Donald and John Gammack;

the imagination is already prying into stories, the resonance of which gives
narrative substance to buildings and streets that might otherwise be
impenetrable. This may be in part because of a long-term financial
commitment on behalf of New York to sponsoring filmmakers and locations.
It may also be because New York has a contour that draws on both known
actual and also imagined paths. The city is full of specific bravura based on
stories that travel across time, and of landmarks which refer to them in their
various iterations.

(Donald and Gammack, 2007, 103)

If any Australian city comes close to a level of representation that has seen it enter a symbolic
realm and an imaginary dimension beyond the real, it is Sydney. Films like Suburban
Mayhem (2006), Dirty Deeds (2002), Lantana (2001), Risk (2000), Erskineville Kings (1999),
Idiot Box (1996), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Muriels Wedding (1994), Sum of Us
(1994), going back to Emerald City (1989), The Empty Beach (1985), Heatwave (1982) and
The Killing of Angel Street (1981) all testify to the city abilitys to play host to a diversity of
narratives that inscribe the city with symbolic dimensions. Yet even this highly represented
Australian city has been described by Donald and Gammack as constituting more a series of
exquisite fragments that hardly constituted a shared story, and were certainly not
sufficiently well-known to amount to the layering of place and image that might let us escape
the flatlands of the international imagination (Donald & Gammack, 2007, 103). In terms of
narrative cinema designed for national and international consumption, they conclude that
Sydney is a city without a strong cinema. Musically contoured, but filmically flattened,
Sydney is still waiting for its great films (Donald & Gammack, 2007, 91).

Based on either national and international perceptions the history and meanings generated by
the dense layers of urban representation in the United States find no real equivalent in an
Australian context. As Donald and Gammack argue, An American cinematic city becomes
the cinematic city, setting a standard that other cinemas must consciously ape or eschew

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(Donald &Gammack, 2007, 15). Comparisons like these with American cinema have to be
qualified with an understanding of the asymmetrical position all national cinemas face against
the dominance of Hollywood.

An often overlooked dynamic operating within the context of the Australian industry are
implications flowing from dependency theory. As Stuart Cunningham has highlighted, It is
necessary tostep back and consider Australias status as a Second World, semi-
peripheral or dominion capital nation in the global economy (Cunningham, 2008, 33).
While not strictly a model that advocates the unilateral inhibition of second and third tier
economies and cultures, for Cunningham there remains complex relations of dependency,
which cannot simply be posited as relations of domination and inhibition but informs fields
of cultural production, such as the cinema, at every level (Cunningham, 2008, 33).

Perhaps more than being overshadowed by New York and other American cities there are
contestations in the representation of Australian cities domestically. For example, Sydney and
Melbourne dominate in Australian cinema over every other Australian city. More local
competition also stems from arenas of surrounding national cultural production like tourism,
sport and the high commercial end of the symbolic economy like advertising. In these
surrounding arenas the proliferation of images of natural landscapes and lifestyle driven
imagery of sunny Australian beachside environs dominate.

Australian cities will always have their own specific frames and have to compete on a variety
of domestic and international levels. Within this context perhaps Sydney is the one
Australian city that, despite Donald and Gammacks assertions has risen above the
international flatlands with immediately recognisable sites and imagery from the fusion of
international advertising campaigns, iconic architecture like the Opera House, and enviable
beachside lifestyle offerings. Often classified as a second-tier international city, perhaps
Australias national cinema has afforded Sydney its due consideration. However, its
continued place in the competing symbolic economy of cities requires, at the very least, to be
maintained, if it is continue to register in the international social imaginary and perhaps make
into the league of a first-tier international city. It we can sustain one Australian cinematic
city then perhaps the others may also follow.

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Studio Cities

Sydneys Fox Studios complex and the Gold Coasts Warners Brothers and Village
Roadshow Studio play host to production complexes that are the result of contemporary
operations of a globalised Hollywood. Each complex represents contemporary Hollywood
outsourcing and the dissemination of feature and long format drama production that has
helped maintain Hollywoods continued globalized market dominance. Yet, as outlined in
Chapter Two, in a remarkably similar way to the 1920s and the way Hollywood studio
complexes were situated in Los Angeles but ignored their host city, these globally aligned
Hollywood outposts rarely engage their Australian host cities or mount productions that are
set in and capture their local backyard. The reasons for this are manifold and involve
fundamental dis-connects between the local, heavily subsidized Australian film industry and
the role played by these Hollywood satellites studios that primarily assist in the outsourcing
of Hollywood productions through runaway (from Los Angeles) production.

Since the time of its inception in 1988 when the Gold Coast studios were set up by Dino De
Laurentis, these international outposts have become an important component of the
Australian filmmaking landscape and industry. The first production to use the Gold Coast
facility was a remake of the television series, Mission Impossible. Toby Miller has discussed
the series both in terms of its economic contributions and its internationalism over Australian
and Queensland cultural specificity. The physical location of this region was subsumed or
negated by other icons: footage edited-in of other cities, American accents and place names
and the cultural register of memories and rhetorics surrounding the new/old series (Miller,
1990. 123). Further in his discussion Mission Impossible: How do you turn Indooroopilly into
Africa? Miller questions the basis of the perennial cultural criticisms about the disguising and
supplanting of Australian production contexts for imagined and international locales. Miller
points out that programs such as [Mission Impossible] do not represent Queensland and
Australia. They represent investment patterns. Should we moralise about either of these
realities? (Miller, 1990, 131).

Of course Miller was correct to problematise expectations surrounding the representation of

Australian content coming out of this international production studio and highlight the
globalizing tendencies that would inevitably continue to develop and immerse Australian
content production. But the issues surrounding the undeniable tension arising from

146
international productions and studio complexes like the Gold Coast facility will inevitably
simmer in the Australian production environment if Australian filmmakers and productions
are economically prevented from passing through their gates.

In the Screening of Australia Volumes I and II, Elizabeth Jacka and Susan Dermody urged
resisting a them and us attitude towards international production, advocating an approach
that embraces localism in place of nationalism and one that would sit more comfortably
alongside internationalizing trends. Jacka and Dermodys position is echoed in the findings of
a 2003 study into globalizing studio trends conducted by Tom ORegan and Ben Goldsmith
Cinema Cities Media Cities, the contemporary international studio complex. The local, in its
many contexts - industry, physical location and community; is something that these
complexes ignore at an enormous cost to Australian cultural production.

Studio complexes are dream factories. What they produce is the stuff of
entertainment, so they and their products (films, television programs and so
on) enter the public imagination. But they are also the site of policy dreaming.
Studio complexes and filmmaking symbolize glamour and celebrity; they help
design or define the intangible property of individuals, firms and places: that
is, their image or reputation. They are valued for their stimulation of the
imaginary, for their fit with the culture of their own location, for their effect on
the culture and mindsets of individuals and communities.

(ORegan & Goldsmith, 2003, 18)

When these entities fail to connect to their local contexts there are significant implications for
the local industry on economic terms and in relation to cultural representation. In the case of
Australia the psychogeography that is not generated or fails to be contributed to by these
absences particularly impacts the representation of the Australian urban environment. As
these production powerhouses turn their back on Australian cinema which in turn prevents
them from engaging and representing the Australian cities that host them, they join historical
and local industry oversights that perpetuate an inability to construct Australian cities as vital
components of an Australian international social imaginary.

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When the Fox Studios complex was granted a ninety-nine year lease for one-dollar by the
Keating Federal Government to induce News Corporation Chairman, Rupert Murdoch to
locate the complex in Australia, it hardly seems unreasonable in the face of such taxpayer
largesse for some quid-pro-quo assistance via a public policy framework that could assist
access for Australian productions to utilise these prized international studio facilities.
(Watson 2002). Should an internationally graded sports stadium have been built under the
same tax payer generosity but then, due to costly local access, turn around and prevent
Australian competitive sports and its host of teams from utilizing the facility, the Australian
media and society at large would undoubtedly riot in the streets until the decision was
overturned. Needless to say, disproportionate industrial practices that obstruct Australian
cultural production rarely warrant such outrage, concern or interventions.

At an economic level, the continued oversight that prevents Australian cities from
functioning at all levels in the imaginary will hinder its potential to perform in the ever
expanding symbolic economy of the twenty-first century. The Australian built environment is
inarguably as unique as our renowned natural environment and it faces the same relentless
demands from development imperatives. The continued absence of the Australian built
environment on Australian screens and in the Australian social imaginary mirrors its physical
absence and continued erasure in our cities. Both are direct consequences of its continued low
priority as both physical heritage and symbolic value.

Archival Memory

Heritage, through architecture and precinct preservation arrived exceedingly late to

Australian cities. In Brisbane, the first building to receive a fully ratified heritage listing, Old
Government House, did not occur until 1978. Only occasionally, when there has been
dramatic interventions like the Green Bans enacted by the Builders Labourers Federation
(BLF) have heritage values in the built environment been in the foreground of the public
consciousness.

Architecturally, Australian cities have seen layers of historical substrata erased through
demolitions servicing boom and bust economic and construction cycles that pay little regard
to the value of urban heritage and what is simply seen as old buildings. Queensland has a

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particularly unenviable reputation in this regard with the city of Brisbane suffering a
wholesale erasure of periods of architecture. Comments made by Bjelke Peterson reveal the
former Premiers contempt for architectural heritage and preservation, recently made public
through the release of the Bjelke Peterson governments cabinet papers. On the majestic
Bellevue Hotel in Brisbane that dates from 1885, Bjelke Peterson is on the record stating;

Its just a heap of rubble really theres no way in the world you could do
anything other than demolish it.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/01/2783762.htm

(accessed 10/01/2010)

The protracted vandalism wrought on Brisbanes built environment during the Bjelke-
Peterson era was responsible for the destruction of a number of the citys iconic sites; the
original Cloudland Dance Hall and the Bellevue Hotel amongst many others. The infamy of
the Dean Brothers demolition business, whose wrecking balls dominated Brisbane during
Bjelke-Petersons reign was heralded by their notorious catch-phrase, All We Leave is
Memories. The irony of course, is that this is precisely what has been lost too as the social
and cultural memory of such places are erased especially when cinematic and other creative
and textual renderings are as equally absent as the structures themselves.

The one domain where Australian cities have left traces of themselves on a par with other
international cities is through an extensive archival record of still photography and in some
instances, archival newsreels stored in State Libraries and the National Sound and Film
Archive. As a store of architectural memory that preserves renderings of the built
environment these factual sources would seem to lend themselves to documentary
appropriation much more readily than fiction. For McQuire, [I]mages produced by the
camera have become significant historical sources and resources, they have also transformed
historys image, affecting the way in which historical evidence can be produced, mobilised
and legitimated (McQuire, 1998, 132). The archival store of images, like the museum has
been part of the modernist project to contain and reference the world. At the same time they
offer a wholesale view of history and past events, something that can be retailed by almost
anyone operating within digital visual media production to their own ends. McQuire

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summarises the situation that is available to filmmakers and producers of visual media who
are willing tread in discursive and choppy representational waters:

While the accumulation of images into a visible archive carries the

powerful, culturally embedded, assertion that this has been, simply
establishing the existence of what is shown has never satisfied questions as
to its significance. Sekula argues that archives constitute a territory of
images, adding, Not only are the pictures in archives often literally for
sale, but their meanings are up for grabs. This situation creates both
possibilities and risks. John Berger suggests: All photographs are possible
contributions to history, and any photograph, under certain circumstances,
can be used to break the monopoly which history today has over time.
Photographs can interrupt dominant narratives by providing other views of
historical experience. Or existing photographic archives may themselves
be changed by being opened to new historical frames of referenceIf the
cameras evidence has never been self-evident, it can often be made to
seem so, by the use of a caption, a text, a voice-over, or merely as a
function of the design and layout, which selects from a penumbra of
potential meanings to produce an authoritative interpretation.

(McQuire, 1998, 133-4)

Up until the 1960s, classical documentary attempted to adhere to a verifiable account of

events and history. Documentary filmmakers approached their narratives through a faithful
fidelity to the real and a discourse of sobriety. The John Grierson ideal of audio visual
technologys ability to render verisimilitude was generally pursued through an ascetic formal
vigour, excluding the work of Humphrey Jennings. For over fifty years now documentary
has been undergoing radical processes of change and development. In the era of reality
television both in terms of its production and audience reception, documentary has been
negotiating and re-negotiating its relationship to, and representation of, the real. The
experiments in documentary form that gathered momentum in the 1960s with the advent of
observational cinema and direct cinema has continued apace in the digital age. Some forty
years after the direct cinema movements, documentary continues to be a form that is
150
responding to a changing textual and technological landscape, audience interpretations of the
real, historiography and the rise of subjectivity in culture more generally.

In devising a film that could engage the many currents circulating around cinematic
constructions of the city, due to my prejudices against classical or Griersonian documentary, I
initially found little appeal in the offerings of documentary per se. It was only through the
work of Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller, Guy Maddin and Errol Morris that I decided to re-
visit and re-examine documentary and factual modes and seriously consider its creative
possibilities. Upon closer inspection, the opportunity presented by documentary then seemed
twofold: Its heritage meant documentary representation produces audiences expectations of a
general fidelity to the real and forges strong associations with History. The second
opportunity was the paradox that contemporary practitioners of documentary, just like some
quarters of its audience, were embracing modes that were more pliable, plastic and highly
creative in form. Amidst these developments I saw an opportunity to produce a drama-
documentary that would be innovative as well as disruptive and provocative.

Since the 1960s and the challenges to expository documentary form that gathered momentum
under the Direct Cinema movement the critical reception of documentary and its more
experimental practitioners have interrogated its modes of representation. Pioneers like Jean
Rouch, DA Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, Robert Drew and many other practitioners
since have challenged documentary form and the various ways it both constructs and
represents specific renderings of history. Yet at the same time, depending on its audience,
documentary persists as a filmic genre that can engender high levels of trust and investment
in its representation of the the facts. Part of the sustained credibility enjoyed by
documentary in the contemporary era of media saturation has to reflect a mediascape
dominated by high entertainment qualities and the contrivances associated with reality-
television where the reality quotient is exceedingly low.

Literacy around the compromised nature of documentary is perhaps at an historical high. Yet
in a kind of postmodern contradiction, at the same time documentary seems to be fulfilling a
broad cultural desire of a return to the real enabling it to respond to the growing appetite for
authenticity capable of re-presenting the truth. Polemical blockbuster documentaries like,
The Corporation (2003), Super Size Me (2004), McLibel (2005), An Inconvenient Truth
(2006), and Michael Moores oeuvre testify to the renewed currency enjoyed by documentary

151
since the turn of the millennium and its continued place and role in a revived media
advocacy. The kind of showmanship and polemic that is orchestrated in these documentaries
engenders its popular reception and renews faith in the documentary modes ability to
challenge corporatized infotainment styles that increasingly dominate news, media and other
factual programming.

The Brisbane Line deploys some of documentarys most well worn tropes and trusted
conventions to subvert its register of verisimilitude and expand its form to open up questions
around historical representation and fiction, memory and myth. Two key documentary
conventions used in The Brisbane Line include the use of archival stills and the talking
head/voice-over narration. I devised the talking head narration as the central plank of The
Brisbane Line and the spine upon which the narrative hangs to immediately signify a
documentary mode and the presence of a filmmaker. The talking head convention also
exploits and anchors the narrative in the tradition of oral history and the faithful re-telling of
events, indexing a social history against a personal and subjective experience.

The talking head convention also opens up the possibility of a highly subjective account that
is designed to raise questions around the reliability of the narrator and the classic film noir
convention of the voice-over. As an unreliable and subjective narrator, the fictional Martin
Whites talking head commentary oscillates between onscreen sound and vision of him in a
chair and offscreen voice-over laid across stills and dramatic recreations. Whites
commentary, part documentary narration and part noir voice over confession, operates
according to the principles behind narrative memory discussed by Michael Roth. Narrative
memory integrates specific events into existing mental schemes. In so doing the specific
events are decharged, rendered less potent as they assume a place in relation to other parts of
the past (Roth, 1995, 98).

The talking head narrative in The Brisbane Line makes explicit the telling and ordering of
past events according to the dictates of memory. Combined with dramatic recreations, the
film traverses a mode associated with mockumentary, but by pursuing a neo noir dramatic
narrative the film sidesteps the alternative, sub genre of mockumentary and instead treads the
less familiar path of a fictional documentary. By rallying devices and conventions from
factual and fictional cinema, The Brisbane Line shares its factual-meets-fantastical
orchestration with Peter Greenaways The Falls (1980), Patrick Keillers London (1994) and

152
Robinson in Space (1997). The Brisbane Line also echoes the sentiments of German
filmmaker, Alexander Kluge by employing all the conventions of documentary and playing
off what McQuire and Berger outlined as the allure of the photographic image. Nave faith
in photo-realism provides what film maker Alexander Kluge termed a unique opportunity to
concoct fables (McQuire, 1998, 134).

The Brisbane Line is designed to construct a narrative history of Brisbane, one that has been
both concocted as well as composited out of historical facts and history, supported by
archival material, but underscored by rumour, fiction and myth. While it is a fictional
character relaying a fictional tale, the narrative for the Brisbane Line is organized around the
temporality of memory while drawing on elements from Brisbane history. Told
retrospectively through the film noir convention of flashback, like Joe Gillis (William
Holden) in Billy Wilders, Sunset Boulevard (1950), the entire narrative unfolds as the
flashback of the central subject/protagonist, Detective Martin White. Like Joe Gillis, he is
deceased at the opening of the film. As the narrative proceeds, a history of the city of
Brisbane is recreated and constructed in terms of memory, regret and an irretrievable past of
lost innocence. Former detective Martin White walks around the city in the manner of a
flaneur, his journey determined by the events of the past and his memory. Similar to Chris
Markers, La jette (1962) his physical journey is steered by a temporal journey back in time
which leads inevitably to the narratives heart of darkness the base of the Story Bridge.
Whites journey ends at the final un-resting place of the body from the crime he helped
conceal forty years earlier. Whites journey and the narrative concludes beneath the citys
iconic, and through the approach of the film, ironically titled, Story Bridge, an apt metaphor
of the film as a whole, which uses narrative to link and re-connect period with place.

The journey White takes in The Brisbane Line around Brisbane city operates like urban
flanuerie in acknowledgement of how this early modernist practice is intrinsic to cinema, the
modern city produces the flaneur who in turn produces a filmic citythe authentic
experience of the modern city always eludes the flaneur who constantly needs to evoke
memory of the past to represent the present (Short, 2006, 37). By the conclusion of the film,
the city is seen slowly receding at night obscured by foreground darkness and in long shot,
Brisbane, past and present will have been revealed in the noir manner outlined by Christopher
(2006). The city-as-a-character in film noir is revealed to us incrementally, in the way of a
cubist construction, plane by plane, prism by prism, off a multifaceted whole (Christopher,
153
2006, 31). It is this cinematic evocation of history through the hybridity of actual archival
photography, dramatic reconstructions, fake archival imagery and a fictional documentary
subject that positions the film as operating according to the fractured logics of memory.
Ultimately the film comprises a site of new history as advocated by Rosenstone, Landsberg,
Landy and Hoskins, an approach that can see fact and fiction more readily reconciled.

By exploring the relationship between images, history and the possibilities around the
cinematic evocation of aspects of Brisbanes past, The Brisbane Line engages in postmodern
approaches to historicisation that increasingly turn to memory as one of it most vital of
sources. The Brisbane Line extends the idea of memory by constructing a fictional version of
it to render some verified and official historic moments and incidents. For Jameson, such
directions in textual imaginings and historical methodologies amount to a questionable
development that somehow impoverishes an authentic historical past. [It] is memory itself
that has become the degraded repository of images and simulacra, so that the remembered
image of the thing now effectively inserts the reified and the stereotypical between the
subject and reality or the past itself (Jameson, 1991, 123).

Rather than interpreting these postmodern developments as degrading history it is possible

to see it as the foundations of new historiographies and new memory producing histories that
animate instead of ossify, personalize rather than abstracts and perhaps most importantly,
democratizes rather than closing it off to scholarly discourse. The Brisbane Line is an
attempt to deploy both cinema and history in narrative play, embracing the processes Andrew
Hoskins terms as new memory and the functions of what Robert Rosenstone describes as
new history. For Rosenstone, the interplay between history and film can expand our
notions of history and help us overcome many of the prejudices installed by the term
memory.

Conclusion

Jameson sees postmodern representations and negotiations of the past as nothing less than the
profound waning of historicity in cultural life. But as Paul Grainge has argued in relation to
Pleasantville and Forest Gump, rather than postmodern representation evacuating history,
postmodern filmic representation of the past may demonstrate how a stylized evocation of

154
pastness does not negate, but may textually reconfigure, the form and locution of memory
politics in the semiotic terrain of contemporary culture (Grainge, 2003, 203). Grainges
position, like that of Huyssen, Sobchack, Collins, Landsberg and McPhee sees the expansion
of visual technologies and media as transforming the experience of memory and expanding
our understandings of history rather than dissolving it. For McPhee, the intensification
produced by relentless visual representation that Jameson sees undermining historicity need
not be a disabling phenomenon, indeed it may prove just the opposite depending on ones
conception of history and how it can be experienced and become known.

Rather, this intensification might be taken as opening up possibilities for

different configurations of experience. But this understanding of vision
also suggests something else, namely how visual experience might be
thought of in relation to knowledge without being made identical to it.

(McPhee, 2002, 94)

In The Brisbane Line, memory and history, like fact and fiction, drama and documentary,
play out in parallel with one another. As the film that provides carriage to the ideas and
arguments raised in the research it aims to invite a critical awareness of Brisbanes past and
history by simultaneously excavating both. Neither binary is positioned to offer a total
solution. The construction of the particular cinematic city represented in The Brisbane Line
provides gaps and possibilities in interpreting aspects of the city through a discursive
representation of Brisbane and an overlooked period of its past.

I have agreed to participate in this film for a few reasons. One of the most
important I suppose isis a desire, as I see it, to correct some historyif I
can. I guess normally youd say I was trying to set the record straight. But its
just that, in this casenot much of it was ever even on the record.

The Brisbane Line (2010)

155
Conclusion

The city and the cinema have been inextricably bound for over a century. As distinct entities
they form supreme manifestations as well as agents of modernity. Viewed together they
illustrate the transformative impact of modernity, across urban form to the experience of
history and aspects of consciousness itself. As we traverse the less certain contours of our
postmodern present we map its topography by the co-ordinates provided by modernity and its
historical precedents. Prefixed adverbially with post, the namesake of the present clearly sees
modernity providing our temporal orientation as well as anchoring our spatial and
experiential reality.

A key feature of the postmodern is the vital heritage that has been inherited from the
relationship between the city and the cinema. However, what was once distinct under
modernity has increasingly become blurred under postmodernity, and what was primary can
become secondary resulting in Reel cities and Real cities increasingly interacting,
overlapping and becoming co-dependent.

The thesis, Noir and the Urban Imaginary builds on and develops what film criticism has
established as a highly attenuated relationship between film noir and the modern city and
extends that argument into aspects of postmodernity and neo noir. By commencing the
discussion within an account of urban theory the thesis has endeavoured to bridge textual
analysis of the cinematic city to the contemporary critical frame surrounding actual cities and
their transformations under postmodernity. A key assertion of this study is that urban
theorys approach to the symbolic and economic functions surrounding the city provides the
essential frame within which to expand cinema studies understandings and approaches to the
cinematic city. How urban theory has taken account of the manifold ways in which real cities
are impacted by textual cities and the proliferation of the city in images is of vital import to
cinema studies when viewing the representation of cities.

By concentrating on film histories, film texts, shifts from style to genre and the combined
impact films have on the postmodern representation of the city, the research has maintained a
basis in cinema studies but expanded critical and textual approaches through incorporating
urban theory and creative practice.

156
The thesis makes the case that at the centre of film noir, neo noir and urban representation is
the city of Los Angeles, which has formed an essential frame of reference throughout the
study. By focusing on film noir and Los Angeles it has been possible to demonstrate how
filmic saturation through film noir and neo noir has seen representations effect processes of
urban historicisation, place creation and the process of film noir style becoming neo noir
genre. In other words, Los Angeles, as advocated by the Los Angeles School of Urbanism,
appears to be the place where all things come together and especially so when it comes to
noir. Through a focus on Los Angeles, it is argued cinema constitutes a vital component of
urban historiography. Not purely in terms of the materiality surrounding its technological
apparatus, like production facilities and element of social gathering, but more broadly
through its textual outputs and filmic renderings which now form some of the bedrock
substrata upon which sits the blurring between reality and representation that has gone on to
define aspects of postmodern representation and in turn, postmodern reality itself.

A central challenge of the research has been to conduct a rigorous analytical inquiry into the
dynamics surrounding modern and postmodern representation of cities and to pursue this in
conjunction with creative practice. The creative application of the ideas explored in the
critical inquiry resulted in the twenty-eight minute film, The Brisbane Line. As outlined
throughout Chapter Four the equation between critical inquiry and creative practice was far
from linear and a two-way exchange in ideas, problem solving and questions that resulted
from the creative practice was an invaluable aspect of the research. It is with considerable
satisfaction that a film has been produced that simply could not have come about from a
conventional script development process. Similarly, the theoretical inquiry also took
directions that would not otherwise surfaced had a film not been factored into the research.

The combined critical analysis and creative practice strives for a seamless whole. Analysing
how film noir and neo noir have forged imaginary cities that have in turn expanded our
experience and understanding of actual cities, and then seeing how this can be applied in a
film about Brisbane, the research has interrogated claims around the cinematic city and
applied select findings in a city film.

The central questions asked by the research revolve around the relationship between film noir
and the modern city and neo noir and the postmodern city. In order to address this
fundamental distinction a taxonomical film studies exercise was pursued that differentiated

157
film noir as a style from neo noir which is seen to operate as a genre. From this vantage point
an in-depth analysis of Chinatown and Blade Runner revealed how film noir supplied not
only the foundations for neo noir as a genre but equally significantly, the basis upon which
neo noir representations of the city were reconstructed out of film noir. The relationship
operating between the two forms, film noir and neo noir, evidence new dynamics in the way
cities are represented and interpreted both cinematically and historically, textually and
materially. These findings have been supported by the writings of key scholars to the
research like Dimendberg, Rabinowitz, Naremore, Rosenstone, Sobchack, Landy, McPhee
and Landsberg as well as framed by the approaches taken to actual cities by urban theorists
like Davis, Dear, Suvin, Soja, and Scott, writers and scholars associated with the Los Angeles
School of Urbanism.

Underpinning the research has been the theoretical position on postmodernity occupied by
Frederic Jameson whose writings and stance has often formed an essential counterpoint for
the thesis. The fundamental contribution of the research is to provide one more renegotiation
of postmodernity and its discontents. The creative and critical approaches are premised on
being empowered not subjugated by postmodernity and interpreting visual media and
representation as emancipatory rather than disabling.

In essence, the thesis and its combined critical and creative output represents a challenge to
various notions of authenticity that privilege knowledge and approaches based on the written
word and formal historical modes like classical expository documentary and the hold they
maintain on history and historiography. By examining the dynamics surrounding the
representation of cities in film noir, neo noir, fiction, and the imaginary, the cinematic city is
argued to be a vital and sustaining feature of our modernist past, one that now informs and
constitutes vital aspects of our postmodern present.

To embrace the possibilities of the postmodern is to embrace postmodern representation and

the principle of uncertainty. Whether it is knowledge, ideas and creativity, or representation,
memory and history, it is within the blurred edges surrounding the uncertainties of
postmodernity where contemporary reality may be reconciled with the past, the present and
the future.

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Filmography

2 Days in the Valley (1996) John Herzfeld

42nd Street (1933) Lloyd Bacon

Act of Violence (1949) Fred Zinneman

All the Presidents Men (1976) Alan J. Pakula

Alphaville (1963) Jean Luc Godard

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Davis Guggenheim

Angels Flight (1965) Raymond Nassuar/Kenneth Richardson

Annie Hall (1977) Woody Allen

Batman (1989) Tim Burton

Berlin Symphony of a City (1927) Walter Ruttmann

Black Dahlia (2007) Brian De Palma

Blade Runner Final Cut (2007) Ridley Scott

Blade Runner the Directors Cut (1992) Ridley Scott

Blade Runner (1982) Ridley Scott

Blow Up (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni

Blue Dahlia (1946) George Marshall

Blue Murder (1995) Michael Jenkins

Body Heat (1981) Lawrence Kasdan

Boyz n the Hood (1991) John Singelton

Brainstorm (1965) William Conrad

Breathless (1960) Jean Luc Godard

169
Bullitt (1969) Peter Yates

Californication (2007- ) Tom Kapinos

Cape Fear (1962) J. Lee Thompson

Changeling (2008) Clint Eastwood

Charlie Varrick (1973) Don Siegel

Chinatown (1974) Roman Polanski

Citizen Kane (1941) Orson Welles

Clueless (1995) Amy Heckerling

Collateral (2004) Michael Mann

Colors (1988) Dennis Hopper

Criss Cross (1949) Robert Siodmak

Crumb (1994) Terry Zwigoff

Cry Danger (1951) Robert Parrish

D.O.A. (1950) Rudolph Mate

Dark Blue (2002) Ron Shelton

Dark City (1998) Alex Proyas

Day of the Locust (1975) john Schlesinger

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) Carl Franklin

Die Hard (1988) John McTiernan

Dirty Deeds (2002) David Caesar

Dirty Harry (1971) Don Siegel

Double Indemnity (1944) Billy Wilder

170
Easy Rider (1969) Dennis Hopper

Emerald City (1989) Michael Jenkins

Entourage (2004 - ) Doug Ellin

Erskineville Kings (1999) Alan White

Falling Down (1993) Joel Schumacher

Farewell My Lovely (1975) Dick Richards

Fight Club (1999) David Fincher

Force of Evil (1948) Abraham Polonsky

Forest Gump (1994) Robert Zemeckis

Gattaca (1997) Andrew Niccol

Getting Square (2003) Jonathon Teplitzky

Goodbye Paradise (1983) Carl Schultz

Grand Canyon (1991) Lawrence Kasdan

Grievous Bodily Harm (1988) Mark Joffe

Ground Zero (1987) Bruce Myles/Michael Pattinson

Harper (1966) Jack Smight

He Walked by Night (1948) Alfred Werker

Heat (1995) Michael Mann

Heatwave (1982) Phillip Noyce

Hollywoodland (2006) Allen Coulter

Hungry Miles (1955) Jock Levy, Keith Gow, Norma Disher

Hunt Angels (2006) Alec Morgan

171
Hustle (1975) Robert Aldrich

I Wake Up Screaming (1941) H. Bruce Humberstone

Idiot Box (1996) David Caesar

In a Lonely Place (1950) Nicholas Ray

Inland Empire (2006) David Lynch

Key Largo (1948) John Huston

King Kong (1933) Merrian Cooper/Ernest Shoedsack

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005) Shane Black

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Robert Aldrich

Klute (1971) Alan J. Pakula

LA Confidential (1997) Curtis Hanson

La jetee (1963) Chris Marker

LA Story (1991) Mick Jackson

Lantana (2001) Ray Lawrence

Le samourai (1967) Pierre Melville

London (1994) Patrick Keiller

M (1951) Joseph Losey

Mad Max trilogy (1979-85) George Miller

Made in USA (1966) Jean Luc Godard

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Dziga Vertov

Man-Trap (1961) Edmund OBrien

Marlowe (1969) Paul Bogart

172
Masculin-Feminin (1966) Jean Luc Godard

McLibel (2005) Franny Armstrong/Ken Loach

Menace II Society (1993) Albert Hughes/Allen Hughes

Memento (2000) Christopher Nolan

Mulholland Drive (2001) David Lynch

Mulholland Falls (1996) Lee Tamahori

Murder, My Sweet (1944) Edward Dymtryk

Muriels Wedding (1994) P.J. Hogan

My Winnipeg (2007) Guy Maddin

Naked Kiss (1964) Samuel Fuller

On the Town (1949) Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly

Phar Lap (1983) Simon Wincer

Pleasantville (2001) Gary Ross

Point Blank (1967) John Boorman

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Stephan Elliott

Risk (2000) Alan White

Risk (2000) Alan White

Robinson in Space (1997) Patrick Keiller

Robocop (1987) Paul Verhoeven

Rocking the Foundations (1985) Pat Fiske

Se7en (1995) David Fincher

Seconds (1966) John Frankenheimer

173
Serpico (1973) Sidney Lumet

Sex and the City (1998-2004) Darren Star

Sex and The City the Movie (2008) Michael Patrick King

Short Cuts (1993) Robert Altman

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) Kerry Conran

Star Wars (1977) George Lucas

Starstruck (1982) Gillian Armstrong

Strange Days (1995) Kathryn Bigelow

Strictly Ballroom (1992) Baz Luhrmann

Suburban Mayhem (2006) Paul Goldman

Sum of Us (1994) Geoff Burton/Kevin Dowling

Sunset Boulevard (1950) Billy Wilder

Super Size Me (2004) Morgan Spurlock

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) John Huston

The Big Combo (1955) Joseph Lewis

The Big Heat (1953) Fritz Lang

The Big Sleep (1946) Howard Hawks

The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) Peter Weir

The Conversation (1974) Francis Ford Coppola

The Coolangatta Gold (1984) Igor Auzins

The Corporation (2003) Jennifer Abbott/Mark Achbar

The Detective (1967) Gordon Douglas

174
The Empty Beach (1985) Chris Thomson

The End of Violence (1997) Wim Wenders

The Falls (1980) Peter Greenaway

The Fifth Element (1997) Luc Besson

The French Connection (1971) William Friedkin

The Graduate (1967) Mike Nichols

The Immigrant (1917) Charlie Chaplin

The Killers (1946) Robert Siodmak

The Killing (1956) Stanley Kubrick

The Killing of Angel Street (1981) Donald Crombie

The Long Goodbye (1973) Robert Altman

The Maltese Falcon (1941) John Huston

The Man From Snowy River (1982) George Miller

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) John Frankenheimer

The Matrix (1991-2003) Andy Wachowski/Lana Wachowski

The Outfit (1973) John Flynn

The Parallax View (1974) Alan J. Pakula

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) Tay Garnett

The Scales of Justice (1983) Michael Jenkins

The Servant (1963) Joseph Losey

The Tender Hook (2008) Jonathan Ogilvie

The Terminator (1984) James Cameron

175
The Thin Blue Line (1988) Errol Morris

Three Days of the Condor (1975) Sydney Pollack

To Live and Die in LA (1986) William Friedkin

Touch of Evil (1958) Orson Welles

Training Day (2001) Antoine Fuqua

Two Hands (1999) Gregor Jordan

Underworld USA (1961) Samuel Fuller

Union Station (1950) Rudolph Mate

Wake in Fright (1971) Ted Kotcheff

176
Appendix

From: Janette Lamb [jd.lamb@qut.edu.au]

Sent: Wednesday, 23 April 2008 2:42 PM
To: SEAN MAHER
Subject: re ethics clearance -- 0600000469

Dear Sean

Thank you for your email in relation to ethical clearance for the data collection of your project 0600000469
Sign cities: media architecture and this cinematic city, which has ethical clearance until 18 June 2009.

It has been noted on the ethics database that the data collection is in progress. This information will be
provided to the next meeting of the University Human Research Ethics Committee and you will only be
contacted again in relation to this matter if the Committee raises any additional questions.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further queries.

Regards

Janette Lamb | Research Ethics Support | Office of Research | Queensland University of Technology

Level 3 | O Block Podium | Gardens Point Campus | GPO Box 2434 | BRISBANE QLD 4001

p +61 7 313 8 5123 | f +61 7 3138 1304 | e jd.lamb@qut.edu.au

w http://www.research.qut.edu.au/ethics/ | e ethicscontact@qut.edu.au

CRICOS No 00213J

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. Jimi Hendrix

This email and its attachments (if any) contain confidential information intended for use by the addressee and may be privileged. We do
not waive any confidentiality, privilege or copyright associated with the email or the attachments. If you are not the intended addressee,
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