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January 6, 2006
Thanks to Homescreen I saw the Cohen Brother's The Man Who Wasn't There the other night on DVD:
It is a reworking of film noir that takes place in the period in which the great films noir were both set and produced: the mid-to-late '40s and early '50s. It is shot in gorgeous black-and-white by Richard Deakins, has the hard-boiled, distancing narration of a corrupted town that gestures towards Dashiell Hammett or a James Cain and stylishly reworks the genre of actual 1950s B movie.
Though they drawing on a variety of texts to construct the films they also deconstruct what they draw upon. For instance, The Man Who Wasn't There excludes all emotion from the monotone of Ed, and this central character is dispassionate and detached. What has been eliminated is passion, desire and sexuality. That suggests The Man Who Wasn't undermines the very fim noir genre that frames it.
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