DI - Femme fatale (Assessment) Flashcards
In her seminal essay on Women in Film Noir, Janey _____ (1998) identified eight stylistic and iconographical motifs associated with the representation of women in film noir.
Place
According to Janey Place (the femme fatale): The iconography is explicitly _______ with long hair (blonde or dark), make up and jewellery.
Sexual
According to Janey Place (the femme fatale): Cigarettes have sexual connotations of __________ and phallic power.
Liberation
According Janey Place (the femme fatale): ‘_______ – or the lack of it – defines the women.’
Dress
According to Janey Place (the femme fatale): Women are generally centre ________ or drawing our attention by focusing on the foreground.
Frame
Place perceived patterns of representation which were prevalent across a range of films. She felt the femme fatale was a male fantasy and that ultimately the assertive woman is punished for the threat she posed to the patriarchal order.
However, she felt film noir ‘gives us one of the few periods of film in which women are active, not static symbols, are intelligent and powerful, if destructively so, and derive ______, not weakness from their sexuality’ (Women in Film Noir, 198).
Power
The male fear of women reached a peak towards the end of the Second World War. Women had successfully taken on traditional male jobs in the workplace and had worked with considerable success. Myths that they were incapable of certain aspects of economic production had been disproved and men felt uneasy as a result:
‘the industrial world was shocked – and occaisionally dismayed – that women, now 36% of the labour force, worked ________ than men, required less supervision, had fewer industrial accidents, and did less damage to tools’ (Marjorie Rosen, Dark Cinema, 1984)
Harder
This new economic and industrial success for women (during WWII)led to a desire for economic power and social engagement which transcended previous roles.
Femme fatales have ambitions which go beyond those usually allowed by the __________ order: ‘She wants her husband’s insurance money, not her comfortable middle class life (Double Indemnity)’ (Janey Place, Women in Film Noir, 1998).
Patriarchal
This social liberation is mirrored by the sexual liberation of women in film noir. But if the working woman was forced to resume domestic duties after the war, then the sexually assertive woman was similarly punished for challenging the patriarchy in film noir. Behind the apparent liberated sexuality of the femme fatales lies the misogynist force of the patriarchal order:
‘… the male protagonist in the film is usually alienated from his environment and one of the principal factors behind this alienation is the fact that the femme fatale is in possession of her own sexuality … the femme fatale must be __________ for this attempt at independence, usually by her death, thus restoring the balance of the patriarchal system. (John Tuska, 1984)
Punished
Who is the femme fatale in Double Indemnity?
Phyllis Dietrichson
