Edward Dimendberg is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Urban transformations are the burden of Edward Dimendberg’s fitfully brilliant study, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity: the passage of a historical city of old neighborhoods, traditional if often menacing public spaces, and anonymous crowds into the postwar suburbs, highways, shopping malls, and industrial landscapes… Dimendberg’s animating insight remarks the coincidence of this radical reorganization in American space and the film-noir cycle—from 1939 to 1959 or, as he slyly glosses, from the New York World’s Fair, the construction of Rockefeller Center, and publication of The Big Sleep to the Nixon–Khrushchev ‘Kitchen Debate,’ Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, and the death of Raymond Chandler. Film noir registers the fears and human toll of all that spatial mutation, yet obliquely, metaphorically, a sort of phantom parallel to everyday enterprise… [A] mostly dazzling scholarly investigation.

• Introduction 1. Naked Cities 2. Centripetal Space 3. Walking Cures 4. Centrifugal Space 5. Simultaneity, the Media Environment, and the End of Film Noir Notes Index

Edward Dimendberg is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Urban transformations are the burden of Edward Dimendberg’s fitfully brilliant study, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity: the passage of a historical city of old neighborhoods, traditional if often menacing public spaces, and anonymous crowds into the postwar suburbs, highways, shopping malls, and industrial landscapes… Dimendberg’s animating insight remarks the coincidence of this radical reorganization in American space and the film-noir cycle—from 1939 to 1959 or, as he slyly glosses, from the New York World’s Fair, the construction of Rockefeller Center, and publication of The Big Sleep to the Nixon–Khrushchev ‘Kitchen Debate,’ Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, and the death of Raymond Chandler. Film noir registers the fears and human toll of all that spatial mutation, yet obliquely, metaphorically, a sort of phantom parallel to everyday enterprise… [A] mostly dazzling scholarly investigation.

• Introduction 1. Naked Cities 2. Centripetal Space 3. Walking Cures 4. Centrifugal Space 5. Simultaneity, the Media Environment, and the End of Film Noir Notes Index

Edward Dimendberg is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Urban transformations are the burden of Edward Dimendberg’s fitfully brilliant study, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity: the passage of a historical city of old neighborhoods, traditional if often menacing public spaces, and anonymous crowds into the postwar suburbs, highways, shopping malls, and industrial landscapes… Dimendberg’s animating insight remarks the coincidence of this radical reorganization in American space and the film-noir cycle—from 1939 to 1959 or, as he slyly glosses, from the New York World’s Fair, the construction of Rockefeller Center, and publication of The Big Sleep to the Nixon–Khrushchev ‘Kitchen Debate,’ Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, and the death of Raymond Chandler. Film noir registers the fears and human toll of all that spatial mutation, yet obliquely, metaphorically, a sort of phantom parallel to everyday enterprise… [A] mostly dazzling scholarly investigation.

• Introduction 1. Naked Cities 2. Centripetal Space 3. Walking Cures 4. Centrifugal Space 5. Simultaneity, the Media Environment, and the End of Film Noir Notes Index