The Maltese Touch of Evil Video Essay

Throughout the first half of this year, I’d been working on editing a short video essay/book trailer with ex-prof/friend Richard Edwards. The video is based on the forthcoming book “The Maltese Touch of Evil” by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards, and that book is based on their podcast series “Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir”. The video was finished last month and recently posted on their newly remodeled website noircast.net, and I highly encourage you to go watch it because it’s awesome.

Editing the project was very refreshing to someone primarily stuck firmly in the corporate video position, and I had a lot of fun working with something with an intellectual argument behind it for a change. I hope to work on more creative projects like this soon. They’re like a mud bath for the editor soul.

From the post:

“In their new book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, Clute and Edwards focus on these underappreciated characteristics of noir to demonstrate how films noir frame their “intertextual” borrowings from on another and create visual puns, and how these gestures function to generate both compelling narratives and critical reflections upon those narratives….In this video essay, Clute and Edwards use the simple constraint of run time percentage to recombine iconic moments from 31 films noir and neo-noir, and in the process create a short film that is at once a noir narrative and an investigation into the narrative constraints embraced by noir.”

Go read the rest of the post and stream the video essay at noircast.