LIT 155P Gangsters and Destiny: French Film Noir

Mid-twentieth century French films plunged audiences into a shadowy world of doomed gangsters, weary antiheroes, and deadly femmes fatales. Why did so bleak a vision capture the national imagination—and transform global cinema? This course probes French film noir’s stylistic signatures, its roots in war, empire, and inequality, and its entanglement with Hollywood. Students learn to “read” cinema as cultural text, developing vocabulary and tools to analyze how films refract and reimagine the world.