Arthouse Crime Scenes

Book excerpt: Arthouse Crime Scenes is the first book to address the relationship between art cinema and crime, contributing to the study of both categories. Case studies are provided of works by celebrated filmmakers including Lucretia Martell, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Bong Joon Ho, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hirokazu Koreeda, Jia Zhangke, Andrey Zvyagintsez and Lee Chang-dong. How is crime represented in art cinema? And how can this be understood in the context of global sociopolitical and film-industrial trends? Arthouse crime scenes draw on variable combinations of elements associated with art cinema and crime genres. Crime might be shown or lurk only at the edges. It might be left unresolved or unexplained. Crime can be petty and small scale or raise big questions associated with the arthouse sector: political issues, the nature of humanity, truth and knowability. In this book, close textual analysis is combined with focus on social and industrial contexts. A recurring theme is the situation of arthouse crime films within differing manifestations of broader processes of late-modern neoliberal globalization and cultural hybridity. Approaches examined range from the oblique to social realism and other mixtures of crime and arthouse tendencies.