Announcing the Film Noir Screening Series

The Department of Film & Media Arts is pleased to announce its Fall 2026 Film Noir Screening Series. This series will explore the iconic, and often enigmatic, genre through three films that span the globe. All screenings will take place in the Kent & Martha DiFiore Cinema in the Film & Media Arts Building, and are free and open to the public.

The Film Noir Screening Series is programmed by Professor Chris Lippard, in concert with the FILM 4210: Film Noir class he is teaching this semester. In line with the Department’s commitment to become a key venue in the Salt Lake City arts community, Lippard wanted, he said, “to make use of our new cinema and do a few evening screenings that are open to the public.”

“Since postwar French movie critics first identified film noir, it has become one of Hollywood's most notorious cycles of cinema,” said Department Chair Professor Tim Palmer.  “To some a visual style, to others a philosophy, to still others a gritty low-budget mode of production, noir's endless evolution has inspired some of North American's most bleakly beautiful filmmaking.”

The series will show the following films:

Night and the City (1950)
Directed by Jules Dassin
September 22 | 6pm

Night and the City is, Lippard says, “one of those films that sometimes gets nominated for being the most archetypical of noirs… with [actor] Richard Widmark at his best, running all over but always inevitably entrapped.” While the film was shot in London, Lippard says “it is very much an American film.”

Pool of London (1951)
Directed by Basil Dearden
November 3 | 6pm

Also set in London, Lippard describes Pool of London as “a British noir that also was one of the very first British films to deal intelligently with the intersections between race, class and gender.”

High and Low (1963)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
November 17 | 6pm

High and Low should be "a treat for all cinephiles,” says Lippard, stating that it is “one of the cinema's great 'moral dilemma' films which was shot in ultra-wide screen. Let's really make use of our new space to screen a film that demands to be seen on the big screen. Come to the new cinema and watch it!”

“We might boil down film noir's cynical creativity to a single poetic line,” said Palmer. “In the classic Out of the Past (1947), Robert Mitchum, in a casino, is asked, ‘Is there a way to win?’ He replies, ‘There's a way to lose more slowly.’ Come join us in the Film & Media Arts Cinema so we can celebrate film noir and all, perhaps, lose a little more slowly.”