Ideology and Neo-noir: political discourses and the cinematic mode of production in Hollywood cinema

Abstract The following thesis deals with American cinema in the 1970s. The author will analyze several films from the neo-noir genre and compare and contrast them to film noir from the classical cycle in Hollywood cinema. There will be a discussion of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) in terms of their ideological and political discourses in relation to American society. There will be another discussion on private detective films made in the seventies: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975). This discussion will focus on the ideological and political discourses in the films and relate them to American society. There will also be a discussion of private detective films from the classical period of Hollywood with a comparison to private detective films made in the 1970s.