Flourishing in the United States during the 1940s and 50s, the bleak, violent genre of filmmaking known as film noir often reflected the attitudes of writers and directors whose lives and work were affected by the events that followed the First World War. Films such as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, Laura, Kiss Me Deadly, and more recently Chinatown and The Grifters, are indelibly American. Yet the sources of this genre are to be found mainly in Germany and France, and emigrant writers and directors developed the form in the United States, where it quickly flourished.Andrew Dickos's history of the film noir traces the style back to its German Expressionist (1920s) and French Cinema Golden Age (1930s) forerunners, and is among the first to explore noir primarily through a look at the works of those that shaped the genre in America: notable directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, and others. the genre's influence on such celebrated French New Wave filmmakers as Jean-Pierre Melville, Francois Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard is also examined, as is noir's contemporary manifestation in the cinema of the last twenty-five years.Dickos has set Street With No Name apart from other film noir books by tracing its development in a loosely historical style that associates certain noir directors to those features in their films that helped define the scope of the genre. Liberally illustrated with classic film stills, Street With No Name offers a unique account of the rise of film noir.