"Good Stories" from the Mean Streets
Weegee and Hard-Boiled Autobiography
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15015136 |
|---|---|
| Authors | V Penelope Pelizzon (corresponding author), Nancy Martha West |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 20-50 |
| Publication date | 2004-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Yale journal of criticism/ The Yale journal of criticism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0893-5378 • E-ISSN: 1080-6636 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/yale.2004.0006 |
| OpenAlex | W2037370848 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 3 |
Our essay studies the exchanges between tabloid news and the entertainment media's representations of crime during the 1930s and 1940s. Section One considers how tabloid photographers, including Weegee, recast news-work hardships as "hard boiled" prose autobiographies. Meanwhile, Hollywood crime films were borrowing representational tropes directly from the tabloids. Part Two argues that Weegee's seminal 1945 photo-essay Naked City must be reconsidered as autobiography. Part Three posits that film noir's current popularity derives from a middlebrow desire to enjoy crime imagery while distinguishing such images from contemporary tabloid media. By neglecting crime films' allegiance with the tabloids, however, film scholarship has overlooked a major influence upon the noir canon
Aesthetics · Allegiance · Art · Art history · Biography · Entertainment · Hollywood · Literature · Middlebrow · Political science · Popularity · Scholarship · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Law · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Media Studies and Communication
| Citations per year | 0.09 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2004 - 2009 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |