Suburban Noir

Overview

According to the late, and surprisingly great, film critic Roger Ebert, film noir is a genre that “at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.” It's bleak, thunderous stuff. But it's an electric and exciting experience, as well. The Museum of Sydney is investigating this dark and smoky genre with an exhibition exploring a bleaker vision of our town after the Second World War, Suburban Noir.

The world of the 50s and 60s is so often set out as a notional consumer paradise, slowly changed by the coming of a cultural revolution. A Mad Men idyll transformed by second wave feminism and protests against Vietnam. This is not that story. This is Sydney through a blackened lens.

The exhibition promises a Sydney of isolated moments, gathered through archives of old police photographs from the 50s and 60s. These are stark images of a despondent town. Alongside the original photos, there'll also be artistic interpretation of same from contemporary chroniclers of local byways like Ken Searle, Rhett Brewer and Vanessa Berry, who'll be hanging their own interpretations of these lonely Sydney scenes.

Image: Bondi by Rhett Brewer.