Ragtag is a chronological timeline collage based on a wide corpus of footage taken from the so-called classic era of American cinema which 1950s French critics labeled film noir. The decoupage-based work covers roughly twenty years, or 310 noir films, spanning from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. It also includes some foreign-made film noirs. Noir harks back to the earlier tradition of Gothic literature, the fiction of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. Later, it displayed affinity for the hard-boiled tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. It was characterized by a dark visual style, owed primarily to German Expressionism which was brought to Hollywood with the influx of German émigrés during the war.