SUZANNE LUMMIS
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The Poem Noir
Too Dark to be Depressed
Excerpt from “The Poem Noir: Too Dark to be Depressed”
What is it, the poem noir?
To understand, one must know what film noir is and, happily (if “happily” has a place here), many people know a little; they can associate the term with those low-budget black-and-white crime movies of the 40s and 50s, which the French critics shrewdly singled out from the rest of the Hollywood imports and dubbed “noir.”