Film Noir pays an indirect tribute to these and films like them, and provides a broad and brief discussion of American film noir from 1941 to the present. Given the breadth of the subject and the span of time spanned so long, I inevitably have to overlook some important names. For example, I decided to place influential directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles on the relatively fringes of this study, whom I've written about elsewhere - despite the fact that The burning "R" at the end of The Butterfly Dream (Rebecca, 1940) echoes the burning "Rosebud" at the end of Citizen Kane; Hollywood in the 1940s was extremely important. However, I explore those European and British films that influenced Hollywood, with a heavy focus on the French intellectual context in which the concept of "film noir" is first articulated. I'll also nominate some overlooked films as noir, or at least question their absence from previous discourses, and use some space to discuss elements of noir in other mediums.
View more about Rebecca reviews
