| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Blackout: World War II and the Origin of Film Noir. By Sheri Chinen Biesen. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiv, 243 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-8018-8217-6. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-8018-8218-4.)

For thirty years, film noir has proved an exceptionally fertile field in cinema studies. Dozens of books have delved into issues of industry, gender, modernity, as well as category formation, and have drawn on methods as diverse as psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural studies. The publication of Sheri Chinen Biesen's Blackout signals that any field, no matter how productive, is bound to eventually go fallow. Film noir (literally "black film") was a Hollywood trend identified by French critics at the end of World War II. Although the term did not achieve currency in the United States until the 1970s, industry insiders and critics recognized it at the time as part of a "red-meat" cycle of crime movies—a term the author uses with such frequency that it becomes bloodied by the end of the book. These dark, violent, and sexually provocative films continue to exert a strong fascination for film and cultural historians.

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