Week 2, Jan 13th: Masculinity /Femininity:
The Tough Guy and the Fatal Woman
“Noir as a genre of forbidden desires”
Noel Carroll
Hollywood’s appropriation of Freud
“It was in the thrillers in the 1940’s that
Hollywood's appropriation of Freud found a
particularly comfortable niche. For many of the
crime films of the period betray an interest in the
‘personalization’ of crime, rather than framing
criminal activity as either ‘a social problem’ or the
product of organized gangs. This fascination with
internal, subjectively generated criminal impulses
has widely been recognizable as a crucial
characteristic of 1940’s film noir” (Frank Krupnik
In a Lonely Street Routledge 1991 xii)
Out of the Past (1947) Jacques Tourneur. With Robert
Mitchum & Jane Greer
Sex, money, power
Screening: The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks
Scarlet Street (1945/6) Fritz Lang (1945); Out of
the Past (1947) Jacques Tourneur, Detour (1945)
Edgar Ulmer
Assignment #1 In Class Film Glossary Test:
Friday January 27th
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/education/glossary.htmlhttp://ww
w.filmsite.org/filmterms7.html
Assignment #2 Film Sequence Analysis Topics
handout: Due, Friday March 3rd
Sources
• Silver Alain and Ursini, James (editors). Film Noir
Reader, New York: Limelight Editions, (1996/
2006).
• BFI Women and Film Noir (1978)
• Silver, Alain & Ward, Elizabeth Film Noir: An
Encyclopaedic reference to the American Style
(1979)
• Hirsch Foster The Dark Side of the Screen: Film
Noir (1981)
• Neale, Steven “Masculinity as Spectacle:
Reflections on men and Mainstream Cinema”
Men & Women in Noir Films
Three dominant character types
1) la femme fatale: corrupt and sexually deviant,
all knowing and independent/ “spider woman” yet
according to film theorist Laura Mulvey unable to
form a stable sexual identity.
2) Her victim, the vulnerable bourgeois male
3)The tough hardboiled cynical yet gallant private
investigator.
Ann Savage
Alida Valli
Veronika Lake
Rita Hayworth
Ava Gardner
2) Her victim, the vulnerable bourgeois male
Barbara Stanwick & Fred Macmurray
3)The tough hardboiled cynical yet gallant private
investigator.
Humphrey Bogart
Sub-character types
• Pure, virginal and naïve women who are
forced through circumstance to become
femmes fatale
• The masculine female
• The feminine male
• The ‘asexual’ male/female
• the male or female homosexual
The Femme Fatale & Film Theory
Readings: Mary Anne Doane “Deadly Women,
Epistemology and Film Theory” (1991) pp 1-16
and Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the
Female Spectator pp 17-32
Thomas, Deborah, "Psychoanalysis and Film
Noir" in Cameron, The Book of Film Noir, pp7187.
Freud & Psychoanalytic Approaches to Film
Noir
• The psychological intricacies of spectatorship.
• Freud (seeing as another drive c.w. the libido?)
• Fantasy dream work (I dream of myself as
another). How does cinema participate in this
fantasy? The spectator’s disavowal of the reality
effect permits the cinematic illusion to have its
desired affect through identification with the
other.
Joan Bennett in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street 1945
Voyeurism & scopophilia.
• The ‘fetishistic male gaze that structures the
woman as subject/object of pleasure.” Laura
Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure & narrative Cinema”
Active male/passive female. Question: What of a
gender switch to submit to the female gaze?
• The femme fatale (1940’s) & narcissism?
Peeping Tom (1960)
Extra diegetic and intra diegetic looking
Extra diegetic and intra diegetic looking (one
describes the spectatorial look, or gaze and the other
the voyeuristic looking of the characters in the film.
“ Mulvey situates the visual pleasures in Hollywood
cinema in the satisfaction of the male’s desire to
contemplate the female form erotically.
This contemplation itself is potentially
unpleasurable, however since contemplation of the
female form raise the prospect of castration anxiety’
[the inability to perform] Noel Carroll
Escape through voyeurism or fetishistic looking,
eroticizing the part or the whole.
• Mary Ann Doane Femmes fatale: Feminism, Film
Theory, Psychoanalysis.(1991)
• Question: Film noir’s image of the independent,
strong woman versus the object of the male gaze?
Sado masochistic fantasies.
• Freud’s recognition of sexual difference --the
primal scene and the castration anxiety.
• The structuring of desire through identification
• Phantasm/
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Chandler
Master practitioner of the American hard Boiled
Crime fiction. Author of The Big Sleep (1939),
film directed by Howard Hawks in 1946 our
featured film today. The title is a euphemism for
death; it refers to a rumination in the book about
"sleeping the big sleep.”
Howard Hawks, director
Noir Transformed the new role of woman into a
negative image. Passing through the noir filter, the
new woman forced by social circumstance And
economic necessity to assert herself in ways that her
culture had not previously encouraged, emerged on
the screen as a wicked, scheming creature, sexually
potent and deadly to the male. The dark thrillers
record an abiding fear of strong women, women who
steer men off their course, beckoning them to a life
of crime, or else so disrupting their emotional poise
that they are unable to function” Hirsch, Foster
(1999)
Next week: Existentialism & Film Noir