The Cinematheque

While film noir is often considered an American phenomenon—a genre defined by an historical period and a style—it never would have existed without the European émigré directors that entered Hollywood with a craft informed by silent cinema and German expressionism. This noir sidebar explores the way that influence can run both ways. Heroic bloodshed, rumberas, and neo-noir might have their own separate rules, but their survey of crime and capitalism, cops and gangsters, fatalistic love and doomed heroes often overlaps with the subject of our annual August tradition. Each film screens in a restored version, and can go toe-to-toe with the best, meanest, and most beautiful entries in the noir canon.