While it can be fun to talk to critics who spend their time keeping up with contemporary cinema, Peter is glad to bring on Imogen Sara Smith, who has always dived into cinema's past worlds. The author of Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy and In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City talks about her initial love of film via the Great Stoneface, her desire to write long in order to thoroughly engage with a topic, and her love of Pre-Code's subversive pleasures. The two also dive deeply into the many ends and odds of the strange cycle of film noir, engaging with questions of genre, psychology, and some underrated hits, before ending with one of noir's canonical masterpieces: Nicholas Ray's In A Lonely Place, a film so brutal in its depiction of love by being at first so intoxicating.
0:00-1:24 Opening
2:15-5:12 Establishing Shots - In The Mouth of Madness
5:28-10:18 Listener Feedback
11:03-1:12:57 Deep Focus - Imogen Sara Smith
1:13:56-1:36:45 Double Exposure - In A Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)
1:36:47-1:39:19 Close / Outtake
Purchase Imogen's two books - In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. Read her work at Bright Lights Film Journal, Moving Image Source, Alt Screen, and The Examiner.
Notes and Links from the Conversation
-Kent Jones on John Carpenter
-Leo Baudry's The World in a Frame
-David Bordwell: "Against Interpretation" and "The Art Film as a Mode of Film Practice"
-Buster Keaton's The Goat (1921)
-Robert Benayoun's The Look of Buster Keaton
-The cyclone gag appears in Steamboat Bill, not Sherlock Jr.
-Buster Keaton in The Gold Ghost and Grandslam Opera
-Film noir beyond the city, in the Western, and domesticity
-Film noir beyond the city, in the Western, and domesticity
-The Breaking Point is available via Warner Archive
-Criterion's Jean Gremllion box set, which includes Remorques
-Other actor appreciations: Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Dana Andrews
-The new documentary on Vivian Maier
-Walter Kerr's The Silent Clowns
-Portraits in Film Noir
-Dorothy Hughes's In A Lonely Place
Theme Music: “Forward” by Northbound
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