'An Introduction to Neo-Noir - Coining a term'

Here is an excellent academic essay on the progression of Noir into contemporary cinema.
Found on the website 'crimeculture.com' & written by Lee Horsley

http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/NeoNoir.html

Themes & Style of Film Noir

Primary Characteristics and Conventions of Film Noir: Themes and Styles

'The primary moods of classic film noir were melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation and paranoia.

Heroes (or anti-heroes), corrupt characters and villains included down-and-out, conflicted hard-boiled detectives or private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, a lone wolf, socio-paths or killers, crooks, war veterans, politicians, petty criminals, murderers, or just plain Joes. These protagonists were often morally-ambiguous low-lifes from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they were cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners (usually men), struggling to survive - and in the end, ultimately losing.

Storylines were often elliptical, non-linear and twisting. Narratives were frequently complex, maze-like and convoluted, and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks (or a series of flashbacks), witty, razor-sharp and acerbic dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration. Amnesia suffered by the protagonist was a common plot device, as was the downfall of an innocent Everyman who fell victim to temptation or was framed. Revelations regarding the hero were made to explain/justify the hero's own cynical perspective on life.

The females in film noir were either of two types (or archetypes) - dutiful, reliable, trustworthy and loving women; or femme fatales - mysterious, duplicitous, double-crossing, gorgeous, unloving, predatory, tough-sweet, unreliable, irresponsible, manipulative and desperate women. Usually, the male protagonist in film noir wished to elude his mysterious past, and had to choose what path to take (or have the fateful choice made for him).

Invariably, the choice would be an overly ambitious one, to follow the dangerous but desirable wishes of these dames. It would be to follow the goadings of a traitorous, self-destructive femme fatale who would lead the struggling, disillusioned, and doomed hero into committing murder or some other crime of passion coupled with twisted love. When the major character was a detective or private eye, he would become embroiled and trapped in an increasingly-complex, convoluted case that would lead to fatalistic, suffocating evidences of corruption, irresistible love and death. The femme fatale, who had also transgressed societal norms with her independent and smart, menacing actions, would bring both of them to a downfall.
Film noir films (mostly shot in gloomy grays, blacks and whites) thematically showed the dark and inhumane side of human nature with cynicism and doomed love, and they emphasized the brutal, unhealthy, seamy, shadowy, dark and sadistic sides of the human experience. An oppressive atmosphere of menace, pessimism, anxiety, suspicion that anything can go wrong, dingy realism, futility, fatalism, defeat and entrapment were stylized characteristics of film noir. The protagonists in film noir were normally driven by their past or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes.

Film noir films were marked visually by expressionistic lighting, deep-focus or depth of field camera work, disorienting visual schemes, jarring editing or juxtaposition of elements, ominous shadows, skewed camera angles (usually vertical or diagonal rather than horizontal), circling cigarette smoke, existential sensibilities, and unbalanced or moody compositions. Settings were often interiors with low-key (or single-source) lighting, venetian-blinded windows and rooms, and dark, claustrophobic, gloomy appearances. Exteriors were often urban night scenes with deep shadows, wet asphalt, dark alleyways, rain-slicked or mean streets, flashing neon lights, and low key lighting. Story locations were often in murky and dark streets, dimly-lit and low-rent apartments and hotel rooms of big cities, or abandoned warehouses. [Often-times, war-time scarcities were the reason for the reduced budgets and shadowy, stark sets of B-pictures and film noirs.]

Some of the most prominent directors of film noir included Orson Welles, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Howard Hawks.'

(Published on the filmsite.org/filmnoir)

Review on 'The Maltese Falcon' by Tim Burks

This link takes you to a detailed review on the film 'The Maltese Falcon'.
http://www.filmsite.org/malt.html

Film Noir PathFinder Link

Here is a link to a highly resoursecful pathfindeer for academic essays on women in Film Noir! =D

http://ils.unc.edu/dpr/path/filmnoir/essay.htm

'No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir'

The reworking of the classic femme fatale/nurturing woman dichotomy evident in Touch of Evil and even in earlier films like 1948's Pitfall indicates that, in the last decade of the film noir cycle, filmmakers consciously altered noir conventions developed for the 1940s to reflect the American psyche of the 1950s. As early as 1948, the "threat" of the independent female represented by working women during World War II had been effectively contained by the post-War marriage and baby boom. But this feminine threat was rapidly being replaced by a new, equally threatening image of woman — the demanding housewife. Particularly during the 1950s, women often were viewed either as shameless gold-diggers out to capture wealthy husbands or as selfish housewives relentlessly pressuring their husbands to play the traditional role of breadwinner. Indeed, as Barbara Ehrenreich observes in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, which chronicles a male revolt against domesticity beginning in the 1950s, men increasingly saw marriage and family life as a self-serving scheme devised by women:

"The popular masculine wisdom of the fifties was that women had already won, not just the ballot, but the budget and most of the gross national product. Homemaking was a leisure activity reserved for the more powerful sex, while a proletariat of husbands labored thanklessly to pay the bills."

This skillful reshaping of noir conventions reminds us that film noir is by definition a reshaping or rejection of Hollywood formulas and, by extension, Hollywood's endorsement of the status quo family. And no convention is more strongly associated with classical Hollywood cinema than the happy ending in which the hero marries the woman he loves. Yet in film noir, no convention is more often reworked or rejected. Although film noir typically offers the hero a chance to marry the femme fatale, the good woman, or the marrying type, the hero (and the film) consciously or unconsciously makes such a resolution impossible. Moreover, marriage cannot serve as the resolution of a noir film or the goal of its characters without disrupting the continuity of the film, particularly when the body of the film attacks or questions the norms of conventional family life.

In rejecting the formula of Hollywood romance, film noir exposes the myths by which we fulfill our desires — e.g., the happy ending in marriage — as well as the myth of the family itself. That is, noir films question not only marriage and the traditional family, but also the cultural supports (e.g., popular films) that reinforce these institutions. Sylvia Harvey concludes that, by replacing the formula of romance - the fulfillment of desire through marriage — with the frustration of desire and the denial of marriage, film noir questions the validity of both the classical Hollywood formula and the values that it endorses.

John Blaser (1994-9)

Common Conventions of Film Noir

In order to understand and respond to the re-surfaced genre of Neo-Noir, we must understand the common forms and conventions of the classic noir and find similarities and differences with the two.

Classic Film Noir

• Film Noir visual motifs (rain soaked streets reflecting harsh neon, etc)
• Low-key black-and-white visual style (Having roots in German Expressionist cinematograohy).
• Voice-over narration
• Urban claustrophobia
• Narrative of crime fiction (that emerged in the United States during the depression.)
• 'Private eye' & 'Femme Fatale' = characters indentified with the classic Film Noir

Detailed Proposal No 1

1. Topic Area

Women & Film

2. Proposed title, question, hypothesis

How has the stereotypical character of the 'femme fatale' been represented in Classic Film Noir? (With a focused section on the progression or lack of from classic to contemporary noir).

3. Teacher approval granted, in principal?

Yes

4. Principle texts (if text based study)
Classic Film Noir

Double Indemnity - Billy Wilder (1944)

The Maltese Falcon - John Huston (1941)

Sunset Boulevard - Billy Wilder (1950)

Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich (1955)

Neo-Noir

La Confidential - Curtis Hanson (1997)

Sin City - Frank Miller (2005)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - Shane Black (2005)

Layer Cake - Matthew Vaughn (2004)

5. Reason for choice

I think that the representation of women in Film Noir as such strong characters is an interesting subject to research. The stereotyopical character of the 'femme fatale' has been historically established through centuries of myth and film with little progressiveness, meaning that the question would have some satisfactory closure.

6. Academic context for this study (similar research, relevant theory, named theorists)
'Women in Film Noir' - E. Ann. Kaplan
Cowie, in Copjec, Shades of Noir
John Blaser

7. Institutional context for this study (industry focus, other texts for comparison, named practitioners, relevant theory, issues, questions)
Directors?

8. Identify the audience context for this study (audience profile, access to audience, potential sample)

Females aged 40+ (See if they can relate to the ‘femme fatale’ character)
Younger Females 16-21 (Feminist feelings? Shocked by the power of the ‘femme fatale’ or is the ‘powerful woman’ representation the norm?)
Young Males 16-25 (How do they see the ‘sexy seductress’? Sexy? Intimidating?)

9. How will the 4 key concepts be relevant to your study (audience, institution, forms and conventions, representation)?

Audience - response to the 'sexy seductress' character, how male and females respond differently. Males might be turned on or intimidated by her power & independence. Women may idolise, envy or feel totally unable to relate due to ther submission to male dominance.

Institution - Directors, sex of the directors - are they mostly men who are trying to represent women as they think men would want them to be, following the belief of Kaplan that "Film Noir is a male fantasy."

Forms & Conventios - the progression of stereotypical 'femme fatales' from classic Film Noir to Neo-Noir, how they have stayed the same and followed the consistent conventions used to categorise classic film noir.

Representation - How women are re-presented in film noirs and construct the stereotype of the 'femme fatale'.

10 Potential research sources (secondary): secondary academic books and websites, secondary industry books and websites, secondary popular criticism. Please identify specific examples you have come across.

'Women in Film Noir' - E. Ann. Kaplan
‘No Place for a woman: The Family in Film Noir’ – John Blaser
www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A717572
Zizek, 'Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire,'
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/index.cfm


11. Potential research sources (primary): audience reception research, your own content/textual analysis etc
· Textual Analysis – develop me own ides/ theories around the ‘femme fatale’.
· Small focus groups of 6-8 females & separate group of males to discuss how they see the ‘femme fatale’ character
à Observe how the participants respond to the character during the screening
· Questionnaire – quantitative results for how audience sees the stereotypical ‘femme fatale’. Negatively/ Positively?

12. Modifications agreed with your lead teacher

13. Potential limits/obstacles/problems?

If I chose to research Neo-noir there perhaps wouldn’t be as much secondary research & theory to work from & use as a framework – The primary research would be too heavily relied on as a source of information.

14. Teacher concerns


15. Teacher approval
Posted by Latymer Students

'Women in Film Noir' - E. Ann. Kaplan

Kaplan describes the stereotype of the 'femme fatale' or the evil seductress as being one of the oldest themes of literature, art and mythology in Western culture.

"She is as old as Eve and as current as today's movies." P. 47

"Film Noir is a male fantsay," P.47

Kaplan describes 'The shock of the new femme fatale'
"If the fatales of the 40s and 50s were marked out fromt he vamp by their hunger for indepencdence, their unfeminine ambition or unsettling sexuality, the threat they posed to cultural norms was merely that of the woman outside the conventional social structures. But in the 90s, the new freestanding 'fatale' willingly inhabits the cultural margins; what motivates her is her enormous appetite for power, money and sex." P. 170

Classic Film Noir & Neo-Noir Film Texts

Classic Film Noir
Double Indemnity - Billy Wilder (1944)
The Maltese Falcon - John Huston (1941)
Sunset Boulevard - Billy Wilder (1950)
Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich (1955)

Neo-Noir
La Confidential - Curtis Hanson (1997)
Sin City - Frank Miller (2005)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - Shane Black (2005)
Layer Cake - Matthew Vaughn (2004)

(Neo-Noir - is a type of motion picture that prominently utilizes elements of Film Noir, but with updated themes, content, style or visual elements that were absent in films noir of the 1940s and 1950s.)

FIlm Noir Definition & Background

Here is a useful link to help understand the history & style of the 'Film Noir' period on the 1940s.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A717572

Initial Proposal No.2

1. Which topic area is this proposal for?
Women & Film

2. What is the suggested focus?
The representation of women in the Film Noir genre - particularly in contrast with male characters & perhaps make a comparison with more contemporary stereotypes of the 'femme' fatale'

3. Do you have an idea for a question/problematic?
How are women represeted in the film genre, 'FIlm Noir?
Or perhaps a slight more focus on the stereotype of the 'femme fatale'

4. Why would you choose this?
It is a subject that I feel strongly about and think that the findings of such research would be interesting. I also have prior knowledge of represention theory through the AS Sit-com unit.

5. Do you have any concerns or are there any limitations to this proposal?
Perhaps the limitations are the lack of contemporary 'film noir' films & the lack of progression in Film Noirs.

6. Can you rate it on a sliding scale 1- 5 (5 being great proposal, 0 being lousy proposal)
4

Women in Film Noir

'Woman [in film noir] as elsewhere is defined by her sexuality: the dark lady has access to it and the virgin does not. That men are not so deterministically delineated in their cultural and artistic portrayal is indicative of a phallocentric cultural viewpoint: women are defined in relation to men, and the centrality of sexuality in this definition is a key to understanding the position of women in our culture...Film noir is hardly "progressive" in these terms...But it does give 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 power, not weakness, from their sexuality.' (Place, 'Women in Film Noir,' in Kaplan (ed) Women in Film Noir, p. 35)

''The scenario of the duplicitous woman as femme fatale affords as well as the pleasures of passivity which arise from being in thrall to her promise of love, pleasures which are no doubt also masochistic. The violent retribution so often enacted upon the femme fatale by the plot and/or the male hero bears witness not so much to patriarchal ideology as to the man's inverse desire to control and punish the object of desire who has unmanned him by arousing passive desire...The male hero often knowingly submits himself to the "spider-woman" - as Neff does in Double Indemnity - for it is precisely her dangerous sexuality that he desires, so that it is ultimately his own perverse desire that is his downfall.' (Cowie, in Copjec, Shades of Noir, p. 125)

'What is really menacing about the femme fatale is not that she is fatal for men but that she presents a case of a "pure", nonpathological subject fully assuming her own fate. When the woman reaches this point, there are only two attitudes left to the man: either he "cedes his desire," rejects her and regains his imaginary, narcissistic identity (Sam Spade at the end of The Maltese Falcon), or he identifies with the woman as symptom and meets his fate as a suicidal gesture (the act of Robert Mitchum in what is perhaps the crucial film noir, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past).' (Zizek, 'Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire,' in Looking Awry, p. 66)

The representation of women in the film noir genre seems to provide a sifficiently in depth research unit with an abundance of secondary sources. The fact that the 'femme fatale' characters are not as progressive a representation as other more contemporary stereotypes means that there will be more pattern in my research. This may also mean that my research may have more of a stronger conclusion.

Initial Proposal No.1

1. Which topic area is this proposal for?

Women & Film

2.

What is the suggested focus?

The representation of women & the comparison between how they are represented by male directed films and female directed films

3.

Do you have an idea for a question/problematic?

In what ways are women represented differently in films directed by female directors and film directed by male directors?

OR maybe specific directors e.g. Sharon Maguire (Bridget Jones' Diary) & David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada)

4.

Why would you choose this?

It is a subject that I feel strongly about and think that the findings of such research would be interesting. I also have prior knowledge of represention theory through the AS Sit-com unit.

5.

Do you have any concerns or are there any limitations to this proposal?

I feel that the question/ focus could be a bit too broad and perhaps needs narrowing to make the research more specific.

6.

Can you rate it on a sliding scale 1- 5 (5 being great proposal, 0 being lousy proposal)

4 <3

Female Stereotypes

Here is a useful link for my intended topic of interest :D Women & Film

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/index.cfm

Website Notes
Beauty, Body Image & Sex

• The idea that film reinforces the importance of a thin body as a measure of a woman’s worth.
• Pressure to be sexually attractive is profound
• Jean Kilbourne – Media Activist Reinforces the idea of objectification - women’s bodies are often dismembered into legs, breasts or thighs, reinforcing the message that women are objects rather than whole human beings.
  “The fascination with finding out what men really want also tends to keep female characters in film and television busy. Professor Nancy Signorielli reports that men are more likely than women to be shown "on the job" in movies and television shows. Female characters, on the other hand, are more likely to be seen dating, or talking about romance.”
• Theory is contradicted by Nancy Meyers What Women Want – showing a man completely focused on listening to women’s thoughts & trying to find out the answer to the ultimate question – What do women want? Also, the main female character is a firm business woman (even if she does conform to the typically ‘Hollywood’ image; blonde, thin, young.)
  
  
  

Women & Film (Some Brief Initial Ideas)

Women & Film

Brief Initial Proposal Ideas

• Something that compares the way female directors & male directors represent female heroines in film.
• Female empowerment – representation of women in power
• Do male directors sexualise female heroine’s more than female directors?
• Are female stereotypes only constructed by male directors?
• Is a woman only empowered when she’s acting like a man?
• BUT who makes the assumptions of how a man is supposed to act?
• Distinguishing between Sex & Gender representation of women
• The effect of glamorous, Hollywood actresses on western, teenage girls?
  
  Potential Texts for analysis…

Male Directors

• The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel)
• Mean Girls (Mark Waters – empowered as a woman/ using feminine attributes to manipulate men)
• Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003 Joseph McGinty Nichol)
• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West 2001)

Female Directors

• What Women Want (Nancy Meyers – is it a true representation of what women want/ what do women want?)
• Bridget Jones’ Diary (Sharon Maguire – heroine who isn’t perfect/ Hollywood beauty)
• Bend it Like Beckham (Gurinda Chadha – compare the representation on 2 women
  of different cultures)

Difference between ‘sex’ & ‘gender’…

• Sex is the biological & physical division of people into male & female
• Gender is a culturally formed, set of assumptions based around a persons sex
  e.g. ‘It’s a boy!’ = surrounded by baby blue clothes, train sets & cars
  OR Women bear children – Therefore they should stay at home and bring them up à ‘Its only natural’.

Post-feminism…

• Suggests that we are now ‘beyond’ the need to struggle for gender equality.
• Young women are now said to take fro granted the respect & equal pay etc struggled for them by earlier feminists

“It’s OK to enjoy shopping and wearing lipstick”

• Points to the pleasure of ‘trying on’ identities
  & the need to REREAD a woman’s sexualised appearance as not necessarily subordinating her to men.
• How satisfying is ‘girl power’ media images of female ‘empowerment’
• Charlie’s Angel’s remake or Lara Croft?
• How far do they fit with what is sketched as ‘post feminist’?

Feminist Quotes

“Feminist theory aims to understand the nature of inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations and sexuality.”

“Speaking for women requires a feminine language that accepts the multiplicities of languages.”

In the beginning...

Rachel is officially a poster. X