Miami Film Noir :: Film Cinema Movies

MIAMI NOIRWe have much to learn from Mike Davis, CITY OF lechatelierite (Vintage, 1992) who discusses the paradoxical effects that the representations of Los Angeles in weighed downboiled novels and their translation into film noir cinema had on the image and myth of that city.Together they radically reworked the metaphorical figure of the city, victimisation the crisis of the middle class (r arly the workers or the poor) to expose how the dream had become nightm ar. . . . It is hard to exaggerate the damage which noirs dystopianization of Los Angeles, together with the exiles European intellectuals living and working in L.A. ban of its counterfeit urbanity, inflicted upon the accumulated ideological capital of the regions boosters. Noir, often in unlawful alliance with San Francisco or New York elitism, made Los Angeles the city that American intellectuals go to sleep to hate (although, paradoxically, this seems only to increase its fascination for postwar European intellectua ls). As Richard Lehan has emphasized, probably no city in the Western world has a more negative image. . . . It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the dominant axis of cultural conflict in Los Angeles has always been about the bodily structure/interpretation of the city myth, which enters the material landscape as a role for speculation and domination (Davis, 20-21).Miami, most notably in the works of Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford, and in the Television series MIAMI VICE, has received some of the same treatment, belatedly, or in a post- or neo- noir modality of the genre. . As Davis noted, noir was like a transformational grammar turn each charming ingredient of the boosters arcadia into a sinister equivalent (38). We call for to sort out those aspects of this noir/booster conflict that are generic and those that are special to Miami. Boosterism is a fundamental feature of Miamis existence. The same paradoxes of attraction are an important part of Florida tourism. How ever, noir carries with it a state of mind, an atmosphere and mood, that are specific to the genre and may or may not have anything to do with the spirit of place specific to our zone.In any case, we should keep in mind that a book about the mythical America of execration writers includes some discussion of the Miami River setting. The Interviewer, John Williams, spoke with James Hall, author of the set SQUALL LINE, as they rode in Halls boat on the bay unspoiled the rivers mouth.