Film noir is...
(1) A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.
(2) A movie which at no times misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.
(3) Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.
(4) Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top if everything else, I'e been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking."
(5) Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.
(6) For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbow-length gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.
(7) For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in ies, such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkies, jockeys, and cabbies.
(8) Movies either shot in black and white or feeling like they were.
(9) Relationships in which love is the only final flop card in the poker game of death.
(10) The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.
- Roger Ebert, "A Guide to Film Noir Genre"
Dec 15, 2018
Dec 14, 2018
Dec 8, 2018
an afternoon to read
US policymakers reacted in shock over what they denounced as Japan's unprovoked attack [on Pearl Harbor]. For being so starkly surprised, however, they had no one to blame but themselves. Had they taken an afternoon to read Thucydides and to think about the consequences of Athen's Megarian Decree, or reflect on Britain's efforts to contain the rise of Germany in the decade after 1914, they could have better anticipated Japan's initiative...
- Graham Allison, Destined For War
- Graham Allison, Destined For War
The only lesson
Like other practicing historians, I am often asked what the "lessons of history" are. I answer that the only lesson I have learnt from studying the past is that there are no permanent winners and losers.
- Ramachandra Guha
- Ramachandra Guha
Only the dead
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
- George Santayana
- George Santayana
Dec 2, 2018
and indeed are forced to do so...
Indeed, the kind of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa are a libertarian's paradise. The region as a whole is a low-tax utopia, with governments often unable to collect more than about 10 percent of GDP in taxes, compared to more than 30 percent in the United States and 50 percent in parts of Europe. Rather than unleashing entrepreneurship, this low rate of taxation means that basic public services like health, education, and pothole filling are starved of funding. The physical infrastructure on which a modern economy rests, like roads, court systems, and police, are missing. In Somalia, where a strong central government has not existed since the late 1980s, ordinary individuals may own not just assault rifles but also rocket-propelled grenades, antiaircraft missiles, and tanks. People are free to protect their own families, and indeed are forced to do so. ...
- Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
- Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order
intolerable multitude in volumes
Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man, who has read steadily that which he ought to have read sixteen hours a day, from early infancy. … My leisure has been moderate, my desire strong and steady, my taste in selection certainly above average, and yet in ten years I seem scarcely to have made an impression upon the intolerable multitude in volumes which ‘everyone is supposed to have read.
- Arnold Bennett, as quoted on futilitycloset.com
- Arnold Bennett, as quoted on futilitycloset.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)