Need an escape from Seattle’s dull weather? Head over to the SIFF Cinema at the Uptown on lower Queen Anne, grab a bag of popcorn or two, and settle in for a double-feature of long shadows, wet asphalt, blinking neon lights and people doing bad, bad things.
SIFF Cinema programmer Clinton McClung wrote in an e-mail that this is the fifth year that it has teamed up with the Film Noir Foundation to bring Noir City to Seattle. The weeklong series, “The Stuff Bad Dreams Are Made Of,” will benefit the Film Noir Foundation.
The noir program will start on Friday, Feb. 24, and run for a week. Each day will bring a double-feature, meaning for the price of one ticket, you can see two vintage noir films. The opening night will feature “Thieves’ Highway” and “The House on Telegraph Hill.”
Eddie Muller, the creator of the series and founder of the Film Noir Foundation, said he is looking forward to having the films show at an actual movie theater, as opposed to McCaw Hall, where previous series’ films have screened.
“These are the types of movies that are meant to be seen in a movie theater with popcorn,” he said.
Plus, the “gorgeous marquee” at the historic Uptown theater will be able to display the “wonderfully provocative film titles,” McClung wrote.
‘Genuine’ noir
The mission of the Film Noir Foundation is “to discover or rediscover films that have slipped through the cracks and make sure that there are viewable prints of these movies in existence,” said Muller, an author and “noir connoisseur.”
Muller started the Noir City film festival 10 years ago in San Francisco. He has since expanded it, guest-programming noir series in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Last year, Muller did a 40-film showing in Paris at the Cinémathèque Française, where he has been invited to show again in 2013.
Nino Frank, the French film critic first coined the term “film noir” (black film) in 1946. Ominous shadows, wet asphalt, dark alleys, flashing lights, dim lighting and odd camera angles set the scenes in noir films.
“[The stories] are, by and large, stories about people that are doing the wrong thing and they do it anyway, and they reap the consequences. Generally, the thing they are doing wrong is committing some kind of crime,” Muller explained.
But Muller sees a difference between “garden-variety crime films made in the ‘40s” and “genuine noir”: “I see genuine noir as being stories in which the protagonists are not heroes. They really aren’t the good guys.”
Muller cites “Double Indemnity,” made in 1944, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, as one of the definitive noir films. It’s a “story about a man who meets a woman, falls under her spell, she wants to bump off her husband, she talks the guy into it, he does it, they betray each other, it all ends badly — that movie gets made all the time today,” he said.
“Films are still being made that follow the film noir style; they just don’t look like they did in the past,” Muller said.
Modern examples of the genre are “Body Heat,” with Kathleen Turner, made in 1981 and “The Last Seduction” from 1994.
The communal experience
The “Czar of Noir,” a nickname given to Muller by Laura Sheppard of the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco, said an additional goal of the Film Noir Foundation is to preserve the movie-going experience.
“All of the new digital technology leads, frankly, to greater isolation between people because you can watch a movie at your desk, you can watch it on the subway on your iPad or your iPhone…. Movie-going becomes less and less a communal experience,” he said.
To appeal to the widest audience possible, Muller said he always runs films in his series as double-features, often pairing a well-known film with a lesser-known one. That way, there is more of a chance that people are exposed to a film that is very valuable and rare, but largely unknown to the general public.
Molly Areneson, of Seattle, who calls herself a fan of “moody crime dramas” and SIFF, said that she looks forward to seeing a few of the films in the upcoming series.
“I’ll definitely go and see ‘Gilda’ and ‘Laura’ because they are just classics, and to get to see them on the big screen is just too irresistible,” Arneson, 31, said. “And maybe also ‘Unfaithfully Yours’ because I’ve never really thought of a noir-comedy,” she said after reading the description.
Muller said he makes a “concerted effort to entice younger people” to these films because it may be the last time for young people to see these films as true films and not digital ones.
“Film will always have a more lustrous quality to it,” he said. “I will, to my dying day, contend that the film image is superior to the digital image.”
But it’s not just the way a film looks on screen that concerns Muller when it comes to digital film.
“I’m constantly battling against this idea that if you can see it on your computer screen, it’s preserved; it’s not. It can disappear from your computer screen tomorrow if somebody decides, ‘Oh, that was illegally uploaded. Remove that,’ and it’s gone. If you have it on film and you can store it in an archive, it is there; it is preserved.”
Muller will be on hand at the Uptown theater to introduce the films and provide commentary.
The series “The Stuff Bad Dreams Are Made Of” runs at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown Friday, Feb. 24, through Thursday, March 1.
For more information, visit www.siff.net.
For more information about The Film Noir Foundation, visit www.filmnoirfoundation.org/
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