Looking back at Altman's Film/Genre I can see now that the concept of genre--especially his idea of genre as less fixed, more in flux will in fact be useful as a way to situate the films I want to look at. I think that this will be much easier to do than, as I think I was doing before, trying to argue that my films are somehow *outside* genre. In terms of an ongoing process of genrification, my films are certainly a descendant of film noir, though to what degree they are "neo-noir" is questionable, and Altman provides ways of distinguishing my films from films that nostalgically and self-consciously invoke noir (or have been subsequently claimed to be doing so by critics). So I think I am okay to provide a generic context and rationale for the films I want to study in my proposal, the only problem I think is in naming what these films are - "urban thriller," still seems a bit clunky. In terms of methodology, I have been thinking about invoking Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope as a way to make the argument about concrete locality/space (the American city) and specific forms of representation (the films I want to look at) that seems to have been eluding me so far. Vivian Sobchack's essay "Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir" has been extremely helpful for understanding how this might be done. Still a problem for me though is in trying to find what you've called the gestalt of the thing. I have been thinking about arguing that the city in the 1970s forms a sort of uncertain transitional space, apart and discontinuous from the suburbs that becomes a sort of repository of repressed energies that are put on multiple vectors--I'm thinking particularly of Klute, Hardcore, Cruising, Deathwish here. Shown by history, the city becomes renewed through more repressive forms of social control as place of business, and middle-class consumption and entertainment. But was there a point when it could have gone another way, towards a more liberatory, democratic, or collective form of living? I am apprehensive though about valorizing something like the "loss of identity" as a form of political awakening.