Film International - Volume 4, Issue 5, 2006

From Double Indemnity to Memento the rich European input into Californian film noir has never been in doubt. But what prompts it? Film noir seems the most American of genres yet many of its great artistic moments come from this changing European vision of California. Why is this so?

Whereas proxemics appears as a rhetoric of the bodies, the Tartu school offers a rhetoric of cultures; it is the deviation that produces meaning. (Sonesson 1995: 71; my translation)