RAGTAG is a chronological collage drawn from a vast corpus of footage belonging to the so-called classic era of American cinema which, in the 1950s, French critics labeled film noir. The work spans roughly twenty years — about 310 films — from the early 1940s to the late 1950s, also including some foreign productions.
Noir stems from the Gothic tradition — from Melville and Poe to the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain — and is marked by a dark visual style indebted to German Expressionism, brought to Hollywood by émigré filmmakers during the war.
Yet film noir is more than a genre: it is a worldview, a gaze upon human existence haunted by loss, fear, and moral ambivalence in the post-war era. It reflects the crisis of meaning and faith — the Nietzschean “death of God” — through its fascination with crime, paranoia, and desire. Its atmosphere permeates not only thrillers and gangster films, but also westerns, melodramas, and even science fiction, extending beyond black-and-white into the horizontality of technicolor and cinemascope.
RAGTAG engages with this heritage through montage techniques of sound counterpoint, visual flicker, and différence et répétition, recalling the Verfremdungseffekt of experimental found-footage cinema. Not intended as documentary or illustration, the film becomes a historical portrait of the twentieth-century psyche — a gesture where the past is inscribed in the present, in an ouroboric act of destruction and creation between light and shadow.