Tweet Film Noir - Reading recommendations

I'd appreciate any pointers in the direction of some good books on the genre.
Thanks.

-Mike

[Mike Gebert]

Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style by Alain Silver is a solid, straightforward history. Silver has other books that are more picture oriented (basically mining his text here, I think).

The BFI Companion to the Crime Film is really good, not exclusively noir, but of course noir accounts for a significant portion of the book along with its predecessors in the gangster film and the influence it had on subsequent crime film.

Finally, this AMS thread is interesting, if maddening, reading for demonstrating how hard it is to agree on a simple term like film noir...

[Mike Gebert]

Hold on, I think I'm confusing the title of the Silver book with the text of The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir by Foster Hirsch. The Silver book is, as its title suggests, an encyclopedic guide with entries on individual films, the Hirsch is better at laying out a chronological history of the style.

Thank you.

I found Barbara Deming's Running Away From Myself (1969) to be very astute about film noir, and 1940s film in general. It's in a lot of libraries and used copies are pretty cheap.

Eddie Muller's Dark City and Dark City Dames are worth your time, too.

Fred

[Christopher Jacobs]

And while not, technically, reading material, there are numerous insightful and informative audio commentaries on many of the recent wave of film noir DVDs, many by some of those same book authors and historians, and others by the directors themselves (although sometimes edited in to the appropriate spots from archival interviews). A few also feature comments by current directors influenced by the original noir cycle.

--Christopher Jacobs
http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs