Presenter: Brennan Heller
Mentors: Ulrick Casimir, English; Kelly Sutherland, Biology
Oral Presentation
Majors: Business and Psychology
Dark lighting. Risqué women. Hard liquor paid in cold cash within the corrupt cities of noir. During its apotheosis, noir fully critiqued the social, cultural, and political changes in American ideology through powerful aesthetics. Analyzing how the economic restrictions of World War II on the United States influenced noir’s developed use of novel lighting, characterization, and fatalistic narrative, I will demonstrate how the aesthetics of this genre captured the anxious zeitgeist of American society distraught by the war and its aftermath. By examining noir’s stylized cinematography,
I show how noir was the aesthetic response from an apprehensive America faced with ideological upheaval in the wake of World War II.