Marc Ribot played New School Film Noir Festival

Sex! Trash! Violence! Marc Ribot, noted American guitarist and composer explores the border between classic noir film scores of the 40s thru 60s, and the 80s no-wave bands who worshipped them. Material will include re-arrangements of Henry Mancini (Touch of Evil), Andre Previn (Scene of the Crime), Roy Budd (Get Carter) on the one hand and the Lounge Lizards, Rootless Cosmopolitans, and new noir by the artist on the other.

The New School Arts Festival Presents Noir

Friday thru Friday, April 1–8

The New School Arts Festival is a first—a cultural showcase reflecting the artistic and intellectual energy of the entire university. Each festival will explore a single theme by presenting works from genres with an artistic home at The New School, including design, drama, film, literature, music, and critical theory.  Each festival will feature renowned guest artists and theorists, discussion of contemporary criticism, and original work created by New School students and presented at festival events all around campus.

The theme of our first arts festival is Noir, a cinematic style of shadowy expressiveness that had its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s.  Coined by a French critic in 1946, the term film noir refers to movies depicting a morally ambiguous world of cynical private eyes, lonely gangsters, and femme fatales.  Since then, the influence of noir has been felt in areas ranging from fashion design to fine art, graphic art to fiction, suggesting the alienation and disorientation of modernism through stark silhouettes, sexual frankness, stylized emotion, and the absence of sentimentality.  Join The New School community in an exploration of noir in a festival of iconic films, hard-boiled storytelling, graphic art, and illustration inspired by this uniquely 20th century style. 

The event features renowned artists and critics Frances McDormand, Todd Haynes, Marc Ribot, Guy Maddin, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Pinsky, Greil Marcus, Luc Sante, Terry Teachout, Paul Moravec, Frank Bidart, Molly Haskell, Ben Katchor and more, as well as new works created by the New School community.