Week 2, Jan 13

th

: 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 27 th http://www.screenonline.org.uk/education/glossary.htmlhttp://ww w.filmsite.org/filmterms7.html

Assignment #2 Film Sequence Analysis Topics handout: Due, Friday March 3 rd

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

, pp71 87.

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