This fall, the longest-running film noir series in North America returns with a program set within the most filmmable of cities. Few genres in cinema have quite exploited the riches, spoils, bacchanalian abundance, calamitous ruin and down-and-out despondency of Los Angeles to the extent of film noir. It's as though the geography of the city itself has developed to map the elevated heights and plumbing depths of the human experience. Thom Anderson's positioning of the city as narrative central protagonist in his essential exegesis "Los Angeles Plays Itself", supplies substantiation of this fact. As further representation, the near-century of noir, neo-noir, and crime thrillers on exhibit in "L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise"offers ample evidence supporting this assessment. The films in the series span the gamut of "Kiss Me Deadly"'s hardman gone awry in a time of 1950s Cold War paranoia, "Point Blank"'s fragmented broken-mirror damnation of 1960s modernism and the emptiness of the coming era of materialism, laconic and existential 1970s adaptations of the classic Raymond Chandler text "The Long Goodbye", the hyper-stylized 1990s celluloid ambience of "Heat", the kinetic sound and motion of "Drive", "L.A. Confidential"'s channeling of the the tabloid sleaze of James Ellroy, and the "Inherent Vice" found in Thomas Pynchon's slippery fixation on paranoid parallel narratives. For these films and more in the series, we can thank programmer Greg Olson, who continues his essential work after "Fate of SAM Film Series Unclear as Museum’s Longtime Film Curator Laid Off", with the elimination of his position at Seattle Art Museum. It should be noted, that with the loss of their film program, including the longest running film noir series in America, the plan at Seattle Art Museum appears to be to bring cat videos, guest chefs, and miniature golf to fill the void left at the museum. Subsequently, in the years since Olson has rented theaters as a guest programmer, bringing his Ingmar Bergman, Powell and Pressburger, and Fellini series to the screens at SIFF Cinema.
