L.A. Neo-Noir

Programmed by: Lena Bolotin

Los Angeles’ founding promise is reinvention. It is a place with no past where anyone can arrive, shed an old self, and become someone new. Such a promise is embodied by Hollywood itself, the industry of manufactured dreams at the city’s heart. Through noir, the sun-drenched dream factory of LA casts a long shadow. Aspiration shades into delusion, performance into deception, and the city’s endless sprawl becomes a web of crime, masks, and dark pasts.

This series reveals the criminal underbelly of the glamorous, sun-drenched landscape of Los Angeles — the city where film noir found its voice with classics like Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep and where the genre was later reconceieved with neo-noir. Their protagonists are strivers and seekers who discover that in L.A. every identity is provisional and every story has an author with an agenda. The films themselves refuse to tell their stories straight, with chronologies that shuffle and reverse, narratives that fold in on themselves, and dream which logic intrudes on waking life, so that viewers must piece together the truth from fragments, just as the characters do.