SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION

CMNS 428-4 D2

(MEDIA ANALYSIS PROJECT GROUP)
MEDIA AND GENDER: THE FILM NOIR

Course Description:

Film noir is a term that often seems more evocative than descriptive. A name given by French film critics to American crime melodramas of the 1940s, noir refers to a vein of films that seem to express the moral uncertainty of citizens of America’s urban, industrial landscape. Although many hold that the original noir “cycle” is limited to the forties and part of the fifties, the style’s more recent influence on the burgeoning industry of “retro-noir” and “neo-noir” seems to indicate that its cultural influence is far from over (see, for example, Memento and The Deep End).

In this course, we will make a study of some representatives of the early noir cycle, as well as their legacy in contemporary American film, through the prism of feminist media theory. Feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s had a double purpose: to bring to social consciousness the reactionary effects of sexist portrayals of women in mainstream culture, and to promote the production of so-called ‘alternative’ images of women. Beginning in the 1970s, noir has been given a great deal of attention by feminist critics, not least because of the style’s implicit critique of gender constructions. Populated by a parade of the gender-transgressive, from the femme fatale to the impotent heterosexual male to the figure of the queer, noirs compelled feminists to rethink their originally simplistic analysis of “negative” images of women in mainstream representation.

The class will open up for discussion conceptions of gender and genre in popular culture; the gaze and sexual subjectivity; censorship and the political dimension of entertainment; and the creative role of media criticism in producing cultural understanding. The class will be comprised of lectures, discussion and student seminars. Keeping up with the assigned readings and weekly screenings will be essential to the success of the seminar.


Required Texts:

E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Women in Film Noir (New Edition) (London: BFI, 1998)
Course Package


Recommended (on 3 day reserve in the library):


Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (NY: Routledge, 1991)
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993)
E. Ann Kaplan, Feminism and Film (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000)
F. Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991)
Gerald Mast et al eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (NY: Oxford University Press, 1992)
James Maxfield, The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir, 1941-1991 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1996)
J. Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
R. Barton Palmer, ed., Perspectives on Film Noir (NY: G. K. Hall, 1996)
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (University of Illinois Press, 1989)
Sue Thornham, Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (NY: NYU Press, 1999)


Evaluation:

Class Schedule:

PART I: GENDER AND REPRESENTATION

Week 1 Introduction: Film noir and feminist theory

Reading: Michael Walker, “Film Noir: Introduction” Course Package; Christine Gledhill, “Klute 1: A Contemporary Film noir and Feminist Criticism” WIFN 20-34

Week 2 Double Indemnity (1944), dir. Billy Wilder

Reading: Claire Johnston, “Double Indemnity” WIFN 89-98; Garth Jowett, “Moral Responsibility and Commercial Entertainment: Social Control in the United States Film Industry, 1907-1968” Course Package

Week 3 The Maltese Falcon (1941), dir. John Huston

Reading: Sylvia Harvey, “Women’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir” WIFN 35-46; W. Luhr, “The Maltese Falcon, the Detective Genre and Film Noir” Course Package; N. Frank, “A New Kind of Detective Story” Course Package; R. Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” Course Package

Week 4 Mildred Pierce (1945), dir. Michael Curtiz

Reading: Pam Cook, “Duplicity in Mildred Peirce” WIFN 69-80; Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir” WIFN 47-68

Week 5 Gilda (1946), dir. Charles Vidor

Reading: Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Course Package;
Richard Dyer, “Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda” WIFN 115-129

Assignment #1 due in class

Week 6 Lady from Shanghai (1948), dir. Orson Welles

Reading: E. Ann Kaplan, “The Dark Continent of Film Noir” WIFN 183-201; Eric Lott, “The Whiteness of Film Noir” Course Package

PART II: NEO-NOIR AND RETRO-NOIR

Week 7 Breathless (1959), dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Reading: Dudley Andrew, “Breathless: Old as New” Course Package; Steve Smith, “Godard and Film Noir: A Reading of À Bout de Souffle” Course Package

Week 8 Chinatown (1974), dir. Roman Polanski

Reading: James Maxfield, “‘The injustice of it all’: Polanski’s Revision of the Private Eye Genre in Chinatown” Course Package; John G. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films” Course Package

Take-home mid-term due in class

Week 9 Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), dir. Carl Franklin

Reading: Justus Nieland, “Race-ing Noir and Re-placing History: The Mulatta and Memory in One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress” Course Package;
Manthia Diawara, “Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema” Course Package

Week 10 Blue Steel (1990), dir. Kathryn Bigelow

Reading: William Covey, “Girl Power: Female-Centered Neo-Noir” Course Package; Linda Mizejewski, “Picturing the Female Dick: The Silence of the Lambs and Blue Steel” Course Package

Week 11 Blade Runner (1982), dir. Ridley Scott

Reading: Susan Doll and Greg Faller, “Blade Runner and Genre: Film Noir and Science Fiction” Course Package; Joseph Francavilla, “The Android as Doppelgänger” Course Package

Paper proposal due

Week 12 Basic Instinct (1992), dir. Paul Verhoeven

Reading: Kate Stables, “The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme fatale in 90s Cinema” WIFN 164-182; Chris Holmlund, “Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’: Hollywood’s Deadly (Lesbian) Dolls” Course Package

Week 13 Bound (1996), dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski

Reading: Jean Noble, “Bound and Invested: Lesbian Desire and Hollywood Ethnography” Course Package; Chris Straayer, “Femme fatale or Lesbian Femme: Bound in Sexual Différance” WIFN 151-163

The School expects that the grades awarded in this course will bear some reasonable relation to established university-wide practices with respect to both levels and distribution of grades. In addition, the School will follow Policy T10.02 with respect to “Intellectual Honesty”, and “Academic Discipline” (see the current Calendar, General Regulations Section).