By Marlisa Santos.

As the movie-viewing public was becoming more comfortable with these kinds of filmic depictions, poster art, never to shy away from marketing hooks, aimed to tantalize prospective audiences with images that promised entrance into a suspenseful world of increasingly commonplace criminality and subversion of systemic stability….

University Press of Mississippi has published Film by Design The Art of the Movie Poster, edited by Gary D. Rhodes & Robert Singer. In Chapter 11, Marlisa Santos focuses on the film noir poster and its

often-sensationalized depictions of psychosis, anxiety, doom, and amnesia narratives [that] display their own mesmerizing gaze outward, pulling audiences inward toward examination of social instability and the precarious containment of dark and dangerous impulses.

To read her excerpt from Film by Design, visits her piece at Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon.

Film by Design - The Art of the Movie Poster

Marlisa Santos is professor in the department of humanities and politics and director for the Center of Applied Humanities at Nova Southeastern University. She is the editor of Verse, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema (2013) and the author of The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir (2010). She has also authored various articles on topics such as Cornell Woolrich, film noir aesthetics, American mafia cinema, Martin Scorsese, Edgar G. Ulmer, Joseph Lewis, food and film, and contemporary southern film.

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