Abstract
Los Angeles and Noir are historically intertwined through Hollywood cinema and hard-boiled detective fiction. In this discussion film noir and neo noir are employed to map the spatial transformations that have shaped the actual city of Los Angeles throughout the twentieth century. The shift from modernity to postmodernity in Los Angeles coincided with the demise of film noir and rise of neo noir representations of the city. The 1970s saw key neo noir films like The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974) capture developments in the built environment of Los Angeles that reflect the city’s transformation from modernist centripetal urbanism to postmodern centrifugal urban formation. Neo noir representations of Los Angeles in the 1970s will be examined in terms of their potential as urban historiography and the expanded role city-cinema criticism affords cinematic representation of urban space.
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