“‘Anything Is Possible Here’: Capitalism, Neo-Noir, and Chinatown”,

Topic: Assignment 2
September 27, 2020
Science and Materials
September 28, 2020

“‘Anything Is Possible Here’: Capitalism, Neo-Noir, and Chinatown”,

Please read:
1) Jeanne Schuler and Patrick Murray’s essay “‘Anything Is Possible Here’: Capitalism, Neo-Noir, and Chinatown”,
2)”Notes on the Development of Film Noir and Neo-Noir Film and Some of the Thematic and Stylistic Devices Used in These Films”
3)”Neo-Noir Film and the Search for Self/Identity: Some Thoughts from Essays by Jerold J. Abrams, Mark T. Conrad, and Jean-Francois Lyotard”
4)Robert Micklitsch’s essay “Audio-Noir: Audiovisuality in Neo-Modernist Noir,” pp. 28-36, in Neo-Noir, edited by Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck.
Then watch Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir film Chinatown and write a double- spaced 3 page Critical Essay in which you identify the way in which at least three thematic and three stylistic devices (see my list of these devices in Course Documents in my notes entitled “Notes on the Development of Film Noir and Neo-Noir Film and Some of the Thematic and Stylistic Devices Used in These Films”) are used by Polanski to convey the post-Nietzschean existentialist challenge to traditional realist thinking, particularly the patriarchal hierarchal system of that world view through its structure (see Richard Gilmore’s essay “The Dark Sublimity of Chinatown” for a discussion of the use of the thematic device of counternarratives in Chinatown).