Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Session Abstract or Summary
A Mountainoir:
The Retrospective History of Country Noir and Frank Borzage’s 1948 Film Noir, Moonrise
Topics: Country noir; film noir; poor whites
Jacob Agner, University of Mississippi**
Frank Borzage’s 1948 film noir, Moonrise, based on Theodore Strauss’s 1946 novel, has gathered recent attention for its setting outside of noir’s traditional dark city. Set in the swamps and mountains of Virginia, it tells the story of Danny Hawkins, a poor white who believes he has “bad blood,” and this leads him in the film’s opening to accidentally bludgeon a tormentor to death. The rest of Moonrise, like many other film noirs, contemplates Danny’s crime and examines how it disrupts his social milieu.
Moonrise, however, is also not like most film noirs because of its setting in the mountain South. With films like Moonrise, scholars now realize that the complex category of noir, even by the 1940s, was never entirely circumscribed by the mean streets of urban America. The new category of “country noir,” which other Appalachian writers like Daniel Woodrell have identified, has started to retrospectively draw out older works like Moonrise that did not figure into noir’s early paradigms. What happens, then, when film noir starts to focus on the poor and the rural? What happens when noir “goes country” and investigates what happens when a mountaineer attempts to assimilate into the small-town South? I would like to use this paper, therefore, not only to address how the Appalachian mountains intersected with one of the most vital (and quite extreme) urban traditions in American literature and film, but also how the new category of country noir provides different ways to approach the archetypal mountaineer.
**This is an individual proposal and would be glad to be a part of any available session
Jacob Agner (jkagner@go.olemiss.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi who focuses on the forgotten “country noirs” of 1930-1965 in literature and film. He has published essays on Eudora Welty, Cormac McCarthy, and film.
Presentation #1 Title
A Mountainoir: The Retrospective History of Country Noir and Frank Borzage’s 1948 Film Noir, Moonrise
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Frank Borzage’s 1948 film noir, Moonrise, based on Theodore Strauss’s 1946 novel, has gathered recent attention for its setting outside of noir’s traditional dark city. Set in the swamps and mountains of Virginia, it tells the story of Danny Hawkins, a poor white who believes he has “bad blood,” and this leads him in the film’s opening to accidentally bludgeon a tormentor to death. The rest of Moonrise, like many other film noirs, contemplates Danny’s crime and examines how it disrupts his social milieu. Moonrise, however, is also not like most film noirs because of its setting in the mountain South. With films like Moonrise, scholars now realize that the complex category of noir, even by the 1940s, was never entirely circumscribed by the mean streets of urban America. The new category of “country noir,” which other Appalachian writers like Daniel Woodrell have identified, has started to retrospectively draw out older works like Moonrise that did not figure into noir’s early paradigms. What happens, then, when film noir starts to focus on the poor and the rural? What happens when noir “goes country” and investigates what happens when a mountaineer attempts to assimilate into the small-town South? I would like to use this paper, therefore, not only to address how the Appalachian mountains intersected with one of the most vital (and quite extreme) urban traditions in American literature and film, but also how the new category of country noir provides different ways to approach the archetypal mountaineer.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jacob Agner (jkagner@go.olemiss.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi who focuses on the forgotten “country noirs” of 1930-1965 in literature and film. He has published essays on Eudora Welty, Cormac McCarthy, and film.
A Mountainoir: The Retrospective History of Country Noir and Frank Borzage’s 1948 Film Noir, Moonrise
Frank Borzage’s 1948 film noir, Moonrise, based on Theodore Strauss’s 1946 novel, has gathered recent attention for its setting outside of noir’s traditional dark city. Set in the swamps and mountains of Virginia, it tells the story of Danny Hawkins, a poor white who believes he has “bad blood,” and this leads him in the film’s opening to accidentally bludgeon a tormentor to death. The rest of Moonrise, like many other film noirs, contemplates Danny’s crime and examines how it disrupts his social milieu. Moonrise, however, is also not like most film noirs because of its setting in the mountain South. With films like Moonrise, scholars now realize that the complex category of noir, even by the 1940s, was never entirely circumscribed by the mean streets of urban America. The new category of “country noir,” which other Appalachian writers like Daniel Woodrell have identified, has started to retrospectively draw out older works like Moonrise that did not figure into noir’s early paradigms. What happens, then, when film noir starts to focus on the poor and the rural? What happens when noir “goes country” and investigates what happens when a mountaineer attempts to assimilate into the small-town South? I would like to use this paper, therefore, not only to address how the Appalachian mountains intersected with one of the most vital (and quite extreme) urban traditions in American literature and film, but also how the new category of country noir provides different ways to approach the archetypal mountaineer.
