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Alan Trachtenberg is Neil Gray, Jr. Professor of English
and American Studies at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in
American Studies at the University of Minnesota, and taught at Pennsylvania
State University until 1968, when he became a member of the Yale
faculty. He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned
Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Trachtenberg's books include The Incorporation of America:
Culture and Society in the Gilded Age and Reading
American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Evans Walker.
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Cain, Hammett & Chandler
- Detectives in Fiction and Film
March 25-29, 1998 at
the University of Oklahoma
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The seminar focused on the role of the big-city detective in
the genre of popular cinema known as "film noir",
a Hollywood phenomenon of the 1940s and 1950s. At the core of
the seminar was a close reading of three "hard-boiled"
detective novels -- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell
Hammett, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, and
Double Indemnity by James Cain, and of the films
adopted from these novels. Discussions of the novels and films
was framed by additional readings regarding the roots of film
noir and changes in American society and culture in the postwar
era. The major concern of the seminar was to see how these novels
and films constructed a picture of American life in these years.
The discussion took up both aesthetic and historical questions.
How did the film noir genre develop within the Hollywood system
(its relation to the gangster films of the 1930s, for example)?
From an aesthetic point of view, what differences between fiction
and film need to be considered in a discussion of how cinema
translates fiction into moving images with sound -- the role
of lighting, of camera angle, of musical score, for example?
What role do such matters as masculinity, femininity, the family,
crime, weath, race and ethnicity, and the city as a physical
place, play in the picture of American life these works project?
What do the novels and film reveal about such enduring themes
as honor, integrity, love, loyalty? An underlying theme of the
seminar was the definition of "noir sensibility",
its roots in the American cultural tradition, and its persistance
not only in the abiding popularity of these old books and films
but in the continuing production of "neo-noir" in
popular film and fiction.
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The Class Reading List: (These books and articles supplied
by OSLEP)
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammet
Double Indemnity by James Cain
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Age of Doubt by William Graebner
Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American
Style by Alain Silver & Elizabeth Ward (selected
entries)
"American Film Noir: The History of an Idea"
Film Quarterly Winter 1995 by James Naremore
The Simple Act of Murder by John Cawelti
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