Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity analyzes the logic and history of the modern metropolis through the eyes of its most faithful disciple and staunchest critic, the postwar noir film, especially its B variation, where “[t]he loss of public space, the homogenization of everyday life, the intensification of surveillance, and the eradication of older neighborhoods by urban renewal and redevelopment projects are seldom absent” (7). In the tradition of Siegfried Kracauer, Dimendberg is interested in the common, the everyday, and the epiphenomenal, expressions of mass culture that lend us insight into the unconscious logic of late-capitalist reason. Following Henri Lefebvre, he traces the culture of abstraction that permeated twentieth-century film and urban design, focusing on the effects of urbanization and modernization on everyday social life. While Kracauer cast his gaze on Groβstädte such as Berlin, a city where Expressionist cinema catalogued both the triumphs and the tribulations of the alienated metropolitan subject during the interwar years, Dimendberg relates the rise and symbolic demise of the postwar metropolis, investigating the emergence of our information-driven postmodernity and its relation to urban space.

Dimendberg defines film noir as “a cinematic practice thoroughly industrial yet finely attuned to both the realities of early modernism and the post-1939 built environment and media culture” (17). He regards it, rightly, it seems, as a minor cultural practice that stands sandwiched between the utopian aspirations of Weimar Berlin and the dystopic realities of the modern suburb. Dealing with themes of nostalgia, longing, loss, and mourning, these films thematize anxieties about mechanization, “spatial regimentation, consumer manipulation, and corporate economic control” (14). If interwar films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) represent the city as a space of virility, efficiency, and productivity, according to Dimendberg, noir films view urban space as a source of awe and fear, revulsion and attraction. In Freudian terms, they force an encounter with the Unheimlich—literally, the “unhomely”—inspiring simultaneous feelings of familiarity and dread. They conjure images of moral degeneracy and decay at the same time that they celebrate urban renewal and densification. Like Walter Benjamin’s arcades, noir films afford us a fleeting glimpse into a present that we can engage only through hieroglyphic fragments, unconscious memories, and decaying ruins.

Throughout his book, Dimendberg stresses the representational and narrative strategies common among noir films. His first two chapters take up the genre in its heyday, roughly between 1939 and 1950, in such examples as The Naked City, Criss Cross, The Big Combo, and Johnny One-Eye, while also surveying the architectural literature of the period. He argues that “disaster narrative, aerial views, street scenes, and humanizing narration” (68) were formal techniques that gave coherence to these films during this period, providing a template upon which subsequent works could be based. Emphasizing themes of control, surveillance, and spectatorship, these films treat the city as an organic whole, interspersing shots of alleyways, dark corners, dimly lit rooms, and dingy bars with bird’s-eye views of skylines, city blocks, and clusters of skyscrapers. Even though the metropolis was a site of murder, intrigue, and deception, Dimendberg points out that in such sequences it was simultaneously depicted as a place where justice, transparency, and truth could also reign. Indeed, films of the 1940s exemplify the “centrifugal” nature of urban space in the United States, he argues, in that they understand the city as an orderly, self-regulating system, one in which criminals are always nabbed and the gaze of reason invariably prevails against chaos and uncertainty.

The next chapters in Dimendberg’s book examine the decline of the modern metropolis and its significance for notions of subjectivity, as well as for film in general. In chapter 3 he considers Street of Chance and Killer’s Kiss, investigating why stories about wandering and randomness were so important in noir cinema during the early 1950s. In keeping with Charles Baudelaire’s reading of the Parisian flâneur, he argues that the growing importance attributed to point-of-view shots and the “worm’s-eye” perspective was symptomatic of society’s growing skepticism toward modernist-based macro-understandings of the city. No longer comprehensible as a totality, the metropolis increasingly became a space of amnesia and anxiety. What did this new relationship to the modern city mean for film? According to Dimendberg, it signaled the beginning of the end of the noir genre. For if earlier films of the cycle “convey[ed] a nostalgia for older urban forms” (98), later examples found themselves preoccupied by questions of time, temporality, and finitude, that is, themes that are fundamentally nonspatial and nongeographic in nature. In such examples as Thieves’ Highway, Criss Cross, Plunder Road, and White Heat, the vantage point of the driver or passenger looking through a windshield came to dominate the imagination of filmmakers, which in turn transformed noir films into a “race against time” rather than one against space. Radio news flashes and televised bulletins, that is, symbolic and verbal rather than visual cues, began to play a decisive role in shaping story line and plot structure, which led both to the decline of architecture as an organizing trope in American film and the corresponding rise of more fluid notions of space and representation, ones defined by the automobile and the suburb. In terms of the history of cinema, genres such as the road movie suddenly came to the fore and injected a renewed sense of energy and optimism into American film. As Dimendberg puts it, “[t]he end of film noir coincides … with the end of the metropolis of classical modernity, the centered city of immediately recognizable and recognized spaces…. One might speculate that as spatial dispersal became a ubiquitous cultural reality, centripetal space began to appear excessively archaic while centrifugal spatial forms could be more effectively romanticized or negotiated through other genres such as the road movie” (255).

Taken as a whole, Dimendberg’s book is a remarkable achievement. The mediated character of contemporary spectatorship is not the author’s conclusion but his starting point. He provides a context to his discussions that draws upon his vast knowledge of architecture, film, cultural theory, and urban history, astutely reading the cinema as it reads the city. Disavowing formalist analyses of individual buildings, he offers a much-needed alternative to more traditional accounts of postwar urbanism, which tend to downplay the influence of images and the mass media in situating our encounter with the modern city. Dimendberg also insists upon the importance of time as an organizing principle in our media-intensive age, which suggests fascinating links between the emergence of the postmodern subject and the cultural vocabulary of modern cinema. His thesis is fundamentally in keeping with arguments advanced by other contemporary scholars—Pamela Lee, for example, whose Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004) explores the importance of temporality in postwar avant-garde art—in that he similarly sees the information and communications revolutions as central forces in culture today. Indeed, for Dimendberg the city is not simply the site of static bodies and discrete functions, as the early modernists would have had us believe, but a temporally contingent matrix of forces and bodies in motion, a mechanism that exemplifies the tensions and inner contradictions inherent to modernity.

To applaud the structure and overall argument of this book is not, however, to say that it does not have problematic moments, for the text is least convincing when it strays from its core subject and delves into side discussions about everything from Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941) to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City proposal. Dimendberg’s descriptions of these developments are interesting in and of themselves, but their relevance to the overall argument of the book is not always transparent. Nonetheless, Dimendberg’s study is still a wonderful and illuminating read, one that warrants close analysis by cultural theorists, art and architectural historians, film theorists, and Americanists alike. Its ambition is admirable, as is the degree of scholarly rigor that informs the research. Most significantly, perhaps, the author is actively rethinking the history of the postwar American city through a range of media and disciplines, drawing attention to the inadequacies, both methodological and substantive, of the current disciplinary paradigm within which many of us work.