Dark Interval, The: Film Noir, Iconography, and Affect (Thinking Cinema)

Invoking key concepts from the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, The Dark Interval examines a subtle but distinct iconography of passivity, stillness and profound self-affection that recurs across noir films of every era. In doing so, it identifies the emergence of a specific cinematic figure – the ‘intervallic’ noir protagonist exposed to the redemptive force of his or her own passion. Significantly, the book contextualises the iconography of film noir in relation to prior art-historical visual traditions, in particular earlier representations of melancholia and the saturnine, locating noir against a much broader canvas than has been the norm. Examining central noir films of the classic and modern era (The Killers, The Man Who Wasn’t There) as well as films at the peripheries of noir (from Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People to Wong Kar Wai’s 2046), the book locates a series of iconographic gestures, performance traditions and affective tonalities at once specific to noir and yet resonant with a deeper cultural and philosophical heritage. It is a meditation that uniquely grapples with the look and the feel of noir, and which dares to detect a unique quality of ‘beatitude’ that runs through a certain strain of noir films. In doing so, it illuminates why film noir remains one of the most provocative and affecting visual milieus of our time.

Padraic Killeen is a media scholar and arts journalist. He holds a doctorate in film from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he has taught on Film Noir, European Cinema, and Digital Film. He has also lectured in Film and Digital Cultures at NUI Galway, Ireland. He is a keen video essayist and digital humanist; his video essays on film have appeared in [in]Transition and Frames Cinema Journal. His research interests include iconography, intertextuality, and adaptation.

David Martin-Jones is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (2006), Deleuze Reframed (2008) and Scotland: Global Cinema (2009), and co-editor of Cinema at the Periphery (2010) and Deleuze and Film (forthcoming). He is on the editorial boards of Film-Philosophy and A/V: The Journal of Deleuzian Studies.