ABSTRACT
Many metropolitan transformations of the last century have been anticipated and reflected upon in cinema. Like other modern cultural forms such as literature or painting, cinema is a cultural form through which the city is both mediated and produced. The aims of this chapter are as follows: first, to provide an overview of the usefulness of neo-noir cinema as a critical visual medium on the city, and second, to analyse two films – Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995) and Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) – that reveal a historical responsiveness not always attributed to neo-noir. That neo-noir cinema as also crime cinema is important. Crime cinema reflects societal concerns about social, economic and political issues, and it almost always makes a critique of some aspect of society. Crime movies almost always encourage viewers to consider issues of justice and fairness (Rafter 2006: 77). As Carrabine (2012: 469) suggests, ‘visual interpretation should never be an end in and of itself, but must always have the goal of social and political explanation firmly in sight’. When crime and/or disorder are cinematically ‘placed’ by neo-noir within an urban context – which they invariably are – the result is a cultural form that can propel critical studies of the city, urbanisation, the urban experience and the right to the city. Conventionally, urban history has been used as a means to understand criminality (e.g. Linebaugh 2003). What is proposed here is a ‘reverse’ visual criminology whereby images (and narratives) of crime are used as a medium through which to better comprehend urban history.
