When it appeared in France in 1955, A Panorama of American Film Noir was the first book ever on the genre: this classic is at last available in English translation. This clairvoyant study of Hollywood film noir is "a ‘benchmark’ for all later work on the topic" (from the Introduction by James Naremore). A Panorama of American Film Noir addresses the essential amorality of its subject from a decidedly Surrealist angle, focusing on noir’s dreamlike, unwonted, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel atmosphere, and setting it in the social context of mid-century America.

Beginning with the first film noir, The Maltese Falcon, and continuing through the postwar grande époque, which included such films as Gilda, The Big Sleep, and The Lady from Shanghai, Borde and Chaumeton examine the dark sides of American society, film, and literature that made film noir possible, even necessary.

A Panorama of Film Noir includes a film noir chronology, a detailed filmography, an index of names, and a selection of black-and-white stills.

"Incredibly, this is the first English translation of the very influential 1955 French book that initially identified, described and assessed the Hollywood movies that we now term film noir... a seminal work of cinema description and analysis and therefore an essential purchase for most libraries." – From the Starred Review in Library Journal

Raymond Borde (b. 1920), founder of the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, has written extensively on film history.

Etienne Chaumeton was the film critic of the Toulouse newspaper La Dépêche until his recent death.

Paul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He edited and translated The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, and he is the author of Constellations of Miró, Breton.