Movies shown at  'THE SCREEN'  at the College of Santa Fe  1600 St. Michael's Drive  -  Santa Fe, New Mexico  87505

SUMMER IN THE DARK has found a new home at The Screen at the College of Santa Fe for its 8th season, where series curator Jerry Barron feels confident the audience will respond enthusiastically. The Screen is New Mexico's premier Cinematheque. The Screen, curated by Brent Kliewer, showcases the finest in World, Art, and Independent Cinema. The Screen features a 16 speaker Dolby Digital 6.1 Surround Sound system, a High Definition curved screen and luxurious stadium seating.

There are almost as many definitions of film noir as there are films in the genre. The term 'film noir' was originally used by the critics of CAHIERS DU CINEMA, a Parisian magazine dedicated to the serious discussion of film, to describe the American films that emerged suddenly in Europe after World War II, which had created a drought of foreign movies to Europe. To these elite critics, Hollywood had begun to exhibit the dark influence of both German Expressionism and Existentialism, manifesting itself in criminal story lines, dark cinematography, and themes of alienation, loss of identity, revenge, duplicity, insanity, obsession and other decidedly un-cheerful subjects.

1940's Hollywood, with its eastern European émigrés and American craftsmen, somehow managed to turn these dark preoccupations into one of the most entertaining of all American .lm genres. The pure fun of the films, the sheer voluptuous pleasure of the black and white photography, the emphasis on highly fashionable clothes and the most beautiful actors and actresses to ever grace the silver screen added up to some of the most enduring of all Hollywood .fims. Nowhere else in cinema is one as likely to see such snap, crackle and wit in the dialogue, or be suffused with such a nostalgic sense of the American Forties, or see as much cigarette smoke drifting slowly upward through endless shafts of silvery light.

Film Noir was initially inspired by the tough-as-nails, hard-boiled crime .ction of the twenties and thirties, by authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The genre was kicked off with the adaptation in 1941 of the Hammett novel, the MALTESE FALCON, produced, written and directed by a very young John Huston. The .lm invested Humphrey Bogart with the wise-cracking, sharp-as-a-whip personality he'd inhabit on screen for the next twenty years.
The end of the Noir cycle came in 1958 with the aptly apocalyptic TOUCH OF EVIL, by the endlessly talented Orson Welles, whose CITIZEN KANE had helped to inspire a great deal of the look of Film Noir, with its oblique angles, deep-focus cinematography and use of wide angle lenses.

Screenings take place daily July 8th thru July 14th.