Glamour and Narrative in Film Noir

In this lecture, Patrick Keating will explain how Hollywood made stars look glamorous, both in magazine photography and in the cinema. During the 1930s, portrait photographers had redefined the idea of glamour. Previously, a portrait of a movie star would have looked bright and hazy; now, glamour looked darker and harder. In the next decade, Hollywood cinematographers would extend this look to film noir, a cycle of bleak crime films that took full advantage of glamour's connotations of modernity and deception. Examples will include Phantom Lady (1944) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

Patrick Keating is professor of Communication at Trinity University where he teaches courses in film studies and video production. He holds an M.F.A. (Film Production) from the University of Southern California, and a Ph.D. (Communication Arts) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (New York:…