Sheri Chinen Biesen is professor of film history at Rowan University. She is the author of Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (2005), Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films (2014), and Film Censorship: Regulating America’s Screen (2018).
Meticulously researched and elegantly presented, Through a Noir Lens offers an authoritative history of the persistence (in different forms) of noir style from the 1940s to the present. Biesen pays full attention to aesthetic choices, but the book is unique in its expert understanding of how the noir ‘look’ has both survived and prospered, while adapting to changing technologies, industrial forms and modes of reception. * Brian Neve, author of <i>The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and Zulu</i> * Biesen’s timely fourth study on American film noir connects the evolution of the noir style to key changes in film and digital technology, providing a persuasive visual chronology from the 1940s into the 2020s. Through an impressive synthesis of primary source research and stylistic analysis of case study films that encompasses both classic and neo-noir, Through A Noir Lens is an important contribution to the vibrant film noir discourse in American film and media studies. * Emily Carman, author of <i>Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System </i> *