What happens when a genre's formal transformation becomes its political argument? This special session brings together four papers that examine film noir as a genre which investigates the marginals and invisibilities of global capitalism, revealing the emancipatory power hidden beneath them. Film noir typically points to what dominant culture suppresses: the underside of modernity, the cost of progress, and the bodies left behind. Our panel argues that contemporary filmmakers across national contexts have renovated noir's formal vocabulary — its lighting, landscape, pacing, and character conventions — as an affective response to the crises global capitalism renders marginal. By "transformation of formal elements as ideology," we mean that the how of contemporary noir has become inseparable from the what of its critique. There is no more fitting venue than Los Angeles, where Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Chinatown was born, and where the American dream's contemporary contradictions remain visibly on display.

While foundational scholarship successfully integrated formal analysis with ideological critique, it did so primarily within classical American cinema. J.P. Telotte's Voices in the Dark (1989), James Naremore's More Than Night (1998), and Edward Dimendberg's Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004) established that classical noir's formal strategies were direct political responses to mid-century American anxieties. More recent scholarship, including Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland's Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (2010) and Dennis Broe's Class, Crime and International Film Noir (2013), has linked the genre to capitalism's global contradictions. However, this global turn has largely occurred at the level of theme and cultural history rather than specific formal transformation. Our panel advances these claims by extending them to contemporary global cinema while locating capitalism's critique in specific formal strategies: screen light, neon color, durational pacing, and character renovation.

The session features four scholars at various career stages, with presentations strictly limited to fourteen minutes each. We begin with "Culture of Light Revisited in Cell Phones and Computer Screens" by Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss, Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of North Georgia. Moss argues that contemporary noir has replaced the bare bulb with the glow of digital screens — a transformation not merely stylistic but deeply ideological. Reading Pascal Plante's Red Rooms (2023) alongside Weimar's "culture of light," she shows how screen lighting renders visible the digital underworld that networked capitalism simultaneously produces and conceals.

Mingrui Wen, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Davis, brings the panel's argument into global focus. His paper, "Yellow Shadows and Purple Towns: Diao Yi'nan's Noirscapes of Postsocialist China," examines Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) and The Wild Goose Lake (2019), arguing that Diao deploys neon-noir's saturated chromatic vocabulary to construct "dis/utopian" semi-rural spaces that map the geographic margins left behind by China's postsocialist modernization, demonstrating how formal strategy becomes precise critique of uneven development.

Just as Wen and Moss map geographic and digital margins, William Covey examines noir's shift toward marginalized subjectivities. A Professor at Slippery Rock University with an extensive publication record in the genre, Covey focuses on teenage investigators in films from True Crime (1995) to Winter's Bone (2010) and Saving Zoe (2019), arguing these figures transform the hardboiled tradition by substituting female knowledge and resolve for the classical male detective's institutional authority — detective labor here born from economic precarity and neoliberal institutional failure rather than professional choice.

The session closes with Emma Ridder, Ph.D. candidate in English at UCLA. Her paper, "Contemporary Eco-Noir and the Affect of Slow Violence in Reichardt's Night Moves and Schrader's First Reformed," argues that eco-noir transforms noir's fatalist pacing into an affective ethical burden, making visible the environmental destruction that global capitalism produces yet conceals by dispersing its costs across time and geography. Drawing on Rob Nixon's slow violence and Lakshmi Padmanabhan's durational cinema, Ridder shows how slowness forces spectators to feel ecological collapse as chronic anxiety — refusing capitalism's preference for the immediate and profitable.

Together, these papers argue that contemporary noir’s formal shifts represent not a departure from the genre’s classical logic but its most rigorous fulfillment. What the genre once performed within the shadows of the mid-century city, it now does for the systemic, imperceptible violences of global modernity. It renders visible the margins that dominant culture ignores. Noir, we propose, is the blues of contemporary cinema: it insists on describing what hurts, and in doing so, frees us to act. In sum, this panel asks what it means to reclaim noir's defining pessimism and conventions as a form of emancipatory vision.