Film Noir Screening Series

The Kent & Martha DiFiore Cinema is running a film noir series this fall, with three screenings spread across the semester. It's programmed by Professor Chris Lippard, who also teaches the FILM 4210: Film Noir class, and it's part of the Department of Film & Media Arts' push to be a key venue in the Salt Lake City arts community.

The lineup starts with Night and the City (1950), directed by Jules Dassin, which Lippard calls one of the most archetypal noirs, with Richard Widmark at his best. Next is Pool of London (1951), directed by Basil Dearden—a British noir that Lippard describes as among the first British films to deal intelligently with the intersections of race, class, and gender. The series closes with Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963), which he calls one of cinema's great "moral dilemma" films, shot in ultra-wide screen.

Department Chair Professor Tim Palmer puts the whole thing in context: since postwar French critics first identified film noir, it's become one of Hollywood's most notorious cycles, inspiring some of North America's bleakest and most beautiful filmmaking. He quotes the 1947 classic Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum replies "There's a way to lose more slowly" to the question "Is there a way to win?"

All three screenings are at 6 PM at the Kent & Martha DiFiore Cinema in the Film & Media Arts Building at the University of Utah. Night and the City played on September 22, Pool of London is on November 3, and High and Low follows on November 17. Admission is free and open to the public.