For many years, the sultry and mysterious presence of Hollywood film noir has remained a genre of intrigue in the world of cinema. Films like “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Big Heat,” and “In a Lonely Place” are still popular today, with recognizable stars like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall emerging and film movements like French New Wave drawing inspiration from the genre.

The School of the Arts has celebrated the complexity of film noir for several years through the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival. The festival had previously relied on presenting archival 35 mm prints of these films according to different film noir themes, but with the onset of COVID-19, the festival has made the transition to presenting these films virtually.

Film noir has been influenced by notable film eras including German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French poetic realism, and art deco scenography. Its themes have been known to stylishly cover crime, sex, drama, and several other complex topics in its downplayed black-and-white visual style.

In previous years, the Kit Film Noir Festival, founded by Gordon Kit, CC ’76, in honor of his parents Saul and Dorothy Kit, was known to schedule roughly 12 films over a long weekend in March surrounding a specific theme to be explored by film noirs. The festival’s previous themes include: “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Paris 1946 and American Film Noir,” “Into the Night: Cornell Woolrich and Film Noir,” and what was supposed to be last year’s festival theme, “Film Noir & the Jewish Experience: From WWII to the Blacklist.”

This year, an abridged version of the Kit Film Noir Festival, which takes place from March 11-21, will feature three films around its central theme, “Border Incidents: The US-Mexico Border in Film Noir.” These films include Anthony Mann’s “Border Incident,” John Farrow’s “Where Danger Lives,” and Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.”

The first film, Mann’s “Border Incident,” is about a pair of federal agents going undercover to confront a gang smuggling Mexican migrant workers across the border. Farrow’s “Where Danger Lives” covers the story of a young man who falls in love with a mentally ill woman, quickly becoming involved in the murder of her husband and fleeing with her to the U.S.-Mexican border. Lastly, Welles’ “Touch of Evil” tells a complex story in a U.S.-Mexican border town where an American drug enforcement agent explores the deeper corruption behind an American police captain and his partner.

“In terms of the selection, the border has been the hottest of hot button issues over the last four years,” Rob King, the festival programmer and director of undergraduate film and media studies at Columbia, said. “I thought it would be interesting to try and put the present in dialogue with the past and the past in dialogue with the present. America, of course, is a nation that has often perceived its strength as being in its history of migration, but today it does not see migration as a strength.”

According to King, the idea of covering the U.S.-Mexico border in film noir had been on the back burner for some time as a potential festival theme. Since there are a limited number of films in the genre that tackle the subject, it would have been hard to implement the theme in a regular in-person festival. Therefore, the new virtual format proved to be an opportunity to select more niche topics since the festival could screen films on a smaller scale of three films rather than do its typical 12-film festival.

All three films will be available to stream for free on Swank. “Border Incident” will be available between March 11 and 12, “Where Danger Lives” between March 13 and 14, and “Touch of Evil” between March 20 and 21. Streaming the films also allows anyone internationally to engage with this form of cinema. These components of the virtual format help make the festival more accessible to a larger audience that may not be familiar with the genre, and moreover, how the genre has been used to address incidents at the U.S.-Mexican border.

According to the Columbia film program festival and events manager, Soheil Rezayazdi, there were other ways to make the festival more accessible and compelling in a virtual space. For example, both King and Rezayazdi felt that a scholarly component was still needed along with the films and decided to add recorded introductions from several friends of the festival, professors, and an alum of Columbia College. Some of the featured speakers include professor of professional film practice James Schamus, professor of film Annette Insdorf, and Columbia alumnus Matthew Rivera, CC ’18.

In addition to these scholarly introductions, a roundtable discussion with several other scholars and activists will take place on Thursday, March 18 at 7 p.m. Those participating in the discussion include Jonathan Ryan, CEO and president of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services; Homi K. Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg professor of the humanities at Harvard University; Jonathan Auerbach, emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland; Margarita de Orellana, editor at “Artes de Mexico”; and Rob King, director of undergraduate film and media studies at Columbia.

While the Kit Film Noir Festival is taking place virtually this year, both King and Rezayazdi are excited about taking on this project until the return of their official in-person third annual festival, which was supposed to take place around the time New York City began shutting down in March 2020.

“We’re all stuck in this situation—we’re stuck at home, where we can’t really travel, can’t go to movies, can’t go to these larger events,” Rezayazdi said. “And once you get over the initial sadness of that fact, [we thought] ‘Well what can we do that we couldn’t ordinarily do?’ … So I thought rather than just say we’re going to take a year off and we’ll come back to 2022, we thought it would be interesting to try to engage with this strange digital, virtual culture that we have in this year and see what we can put together.”