SIFF’s Noir City film festival kicks off Friday with 18 movies being shown over the course of a week.
Author and so-called “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller will be introducing the films and discussing them with the audience. Muller spoke with KNKX traffic reporters, Adam Gehrke and Sprince Arbogast, for their podcast “Cinema Squabble” ahead of his appearance in Seattle.
Interview highlights
Describing "film noir": "The shortest definition I've come up with yet is 'suffering with style.' But it's really crime movies from the 1940s and 50s, primarily American. It has proven to be a very influential and long lasting movement. People still react to these films in an incredibly enthusiastic and positive way 75 years later."
The origin of Muller's fandom: "I would definitely say it was my relationship with my father. He was a newspaper man in San Francisco, a sports writer, and he was a character out of a film noir movie, as were all of his cronies. And I was born sort of late in this life. He was already in this 50s when I was born. And I grew up in San Francisco during the 'summer of love' and it was a total counter culture thing, but I was surrounded by my dad's pals and all the ephemera of his career."
Best part of the festival: "For me the most exciting thing is bringing something unexpected to an audience. Because I love the idea that they're going to encounter is for the first time in a movie theater. Not on a DVD, or a Blu-ray, or their laptop, it's going to be in a movie theater. I want to show those movies to young people who may be seeing them for the first time."
