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american way of death maider gomez inchauspe   Just as there’s an American Way of Life, we’d say there’s an American Way of Death as well. An electric chair in a Texas jail, a shooting in a high school dining room, being stabbed to death by a serial killer dressed as a clown, being beaten up by the police for going through a red light ... All these American Ways of Death can be seen in films and, in many cases, reality copies fiction. Why do we like film noir so much? Because we’re attracted to the fight between good and evil. Because film noir brings out this contradiction of ours. On the one hand, we want the bad guys to get caught and punished; on the other, we hope they’ll be able to get away. That doubt, that nervousness, attracts us. Mystics might mention society’s ying and yang. Down to earth people would say “man is a wolffor de man”. But what is sure is that we like film noir because we find the bad guys attractive. And there’s not much doubt about this. Or oriental philosophy. We like the bad guys because they do things that we don’t dare to do. Because they’ve really got balls.

Whenever we hear film noir mentioned, we think of black and white films. Hammett and Chandler. Bogart. Femme fatales. Joseph Cotten. Smoky nights. Long macs and hats. Edward G. Robinson. Images from classic cinema. But what is film noir today? What carries the great tradition onwards? What are the best known film noir movies today?

Donostia Zinemaldia has put together a fantastic cycle of films this year to answer that question. As society has changed, film noir has adapted excellently to those changes, and noir reflects the changes of time very well indeed. Film noir has shown that it’s very good at showing different parts of contemporary society. Film noir stories can be set in any period, at any place. And, thanks to that, this series will give us the chance to see different, highly varied realities in the States over the last twenty years. There are many personal touches in the film noir movies by the Coen brothers, Fargo and Millers Crossing, Tarantula’s Reservoir Dogs is full of classical references, Fincher mastered shadows in Seven and Zodiac, Lynch’s world of hallucination can be seen in Wild at Heart, Eastwood’s classic Mystic River, “official” mafia moviemaker Scorssese’s Goodfellas, Jarmush’s samurai noir in Ghost Dog, an existential story, Nollan’s innovative, worrying Memento, Singer’s rapid Usual Suspects.... Each of the 40 films in the cycle has its own character noirin its own special way.

This cycle pays lie to the murmuring, showing that Zinemaldia offers quality and popular cinema at the same time.