Representation Of Femininity In Film Noir
Submitted by Afroclonk on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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Representation Of Femininity In Film Noir
For this essay I wish to look at the representation of the female character in Classical Hollywood cinema of the film noir era. Firstly this essay will take the form of a look into the film noir movement of the 1940's/50's giving a detailed description of the genre and the changing face of the female heroine. Secondly I will look at the idea of the Femme Fatale and how she was depicted through issues of representation within the Hollywood system. I will look at the depiction of the heroines in Out of the Past, and Double Indemnity. As well as The Postman Always Rings Twice and the Maltese Falcon, among others.
Unlike many other forms of film genre, the film noir has no apparent paraphernalia that it can truly call its own. Unlike the Western, for example, with it's lonely towns, cattle drives and gunslingers, the film noir, borrows its paraphernalia from other forms, usually crime and detective genres, but it has also been known to overlap into thrillers, horror and even science- fiction. For unlike most, film noir is more about visual style than necessarily about theme. As Raymond Durnat asserted in 1970 that film noir is not a genre, as the western and gangster film, and takes us into the realm of classification by motifs and tone' . Almost all critics have agreed that style is the key element in understanding film noir.
The forties and fifties saw the first and most significant cycle of film noir, as Michael Walker states; [this] has traditionally been seen as stretching from the Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) to Touch of Evil (Orson Wells, 1958) peaking between 1946 and 1950' . There is some disagreement with this grouping but on the whole this is what is mainly cited as the first wave of film noir. This group of films was first cited as film noir by French critics once the films had reached their shores post World War II. The films were linked with a series of crime novels known as Séire Noire. For these films are...
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