Locations of Film Noir

Abstract

Maps and mapping are evident almost everywhere in post-war cinema. The end of the Second World War and the advent of the Cold War had caused many of the world's borders to be redrawn. Cinema played a vital role in bringing forward the dilemmas that came with these shifts. Film noir offers a singular cartography of cinema: it dislocates its viewers through its 'mental maps' that call into question the specific times and places of their settings. Its force owes much to two conflicting cartographies: one, that is psychic, is at odds with another, which is geographic. Two films (The Killers and The Crooked Way) are studied to show how the mapping agency that prevails as of the end of the Second World War finds its most precocious and enduring formulas in the conventions of this cinema.

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