scholarly journals Gothic Noir Filmic Male Gaze: Gender Stereotyping in Margaret Atwood’s “The Freeze-Dried Groom”

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Manuela López Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender Stereotyping ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Freeze Dried ◽  
Males And Females

Stereotyping has been crucial in artistic representations, especially cinema, in the construction of gender paradigms. Males and females have been portrayed by means of simplified unrealistic clichés with the purpose of controlling and constraining them into patriarchal roles and conventions, promoting societal normative ideologies. Noir women are projections of male anxieties about female sexuality and female independence. In “The Freeze-Dried Groom,” Atwood unveils gender stereotyping through a typically film noir male gaze in three of its stock characters: the femme attrapée, the “detective” and the femme fatale. Hence, Atwood depicts a femme fatale to reflect not just on this character in film noir, but also on female identity, gender dynamics and feminism. She exposes and questions the marriage-family institution, and the patriarchal society as a whole.

Noir En Couleur

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Motion Picture Industry ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Black Widow ◽  
Industrial Landscape ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Interracial Romance ◽  
Female Detective

The decline of American film noir is historically coincident with the advent of the “red menace” and the “blacklist” as well as the transformation of the motion picture industry occasioned by new technologies such as Technicolor and CinemaScope. However, a close examination of color and widescreen in select feature films of the period—Black Widow (1954), House of Bamboo (1955), Slightly Scarlet (1956), and A Kiss before Dying (1956)--suggests that film noir in the 1950s in fact adapted to the rapidly changing industrial landscape of Hollywood and, in the process, engaged such “classical” and topical issues as the femme fatale, femininity, and the “murder mystery” (Black Widow), homosexuality, interracial romance, and the occupation of Japan (House of Bamboo), criminality, gangsters, and female sexuality (Slightly Scarlet), as well as class, the homme fatal, and the female detective (A Kiss before Dying).

Kiss Me Deadly

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Pulp Fiction ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Private Detective ◽  
The 1950S

In part because of its pulp fiction, Mickey-Spillane provenance, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) has been widely interpreted as a key text of McCarthyism, yet it’s arguably better interpreted, via the film’s repeated recourse to the X figure, as an apocalyptic one with the proviso that in the 1950s the discourse about the “red menace” is frequently imbricated with the discourse about femininity--about, that is to say, the femme fatale and female sexuality. While censorship in the form of the Production Code Administration (PCA) played a significant part in the production of Kiss Me Deadly, there’s little doubt that Robert Aldrich’s picture is a film noir since it features a private detective who, knee-deep in sex and violence, is ultimately unable to prevent an atomic detonation that can itself be interpreted as both a death and orgasm, cataclysm and resurrection.

Femme fatale

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
American Film ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
French Version ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
French Film ◽  
French Culture ◽  
The City

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This chapter considers la Parisienne as femme fatale in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève(1939) and Le quai des brumes(1938), and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960). These films can be considered examples of French film noir and their female protagonists read as femme fatales. However, the femme fatale of French film noir is different from the femme fatale of American film noir; she comes from a different cultural tradition and is informed by a different cultural figure. This chapter argues that the development of the femme fatale as a cinematicarchetype passed through a cultural tradition not usually associated with the noir genre: nineteenth-century French culture and the tradition of the filles d’Eve embodied in the type la Parisienne. The French version of this archetype grew out of the popular nineteenth-century trope of the association of woman with the city and death. Indeed, there is an aesthetic and narrative overdetermination of the femme fatale by the figure of la Parisienne, particularly through iconographical motifs associated with the type, like fashion, ambiguity, sexuality and danger

Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart's Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Mellard
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
The Real ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Slavoj Žižek

Read through Lacan and such new Lacanians as Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, Josephine Hart's Damage (1991) illustrates how an ethics of jouissance founds a tragic action emblematic of postmodern narcissism. New Lacanians stress drive, jouissance, the real, the primordial father, and the femme fatale. Typically, they find these elements in film noir. Transforming noir into love story, Damage foregrounds an unnamed narrator whose sadomasochistic affair with his son's fiancée precipitates the son's death. Beginning with the narrator in the guise of the traditional oedipal father, the affair unveils the fiancée as a femme fatale who constitutes the narrator as what MacCannell would call the destructive, narcissistic brother become primordial father. Enacting an ethics of jouissance because the narrator will not abandon his drive to enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle, primordial father and femme fatale participate in a narrative that must be called Lacanian tragedy.

Debates about the generic ontology of film noir

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Varmazi ◽  
Funda Kaya
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Critical Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Film Genres

This viewpoint discusses the various definitions given to classic film noir in order to show how the concept of film noir is difficult to demarcate as a genre, remaining a debatable subject among theoreticians. On a broader level, it might be argued that these discussions are linked with the intertextuality, the dynamism and the hybridity of film genres. One can also argue that film noir stands as one of the preliminary examples of such hybridity in the history of Western narrative cinema. Such a debate is also connected to film noir’s deviance from Hollywood conventions. While inhabiting elements from these conventions, classic noir has been affected by European film movements whilst influencing them. Noir holds a critical position to the social conditions of its era, defined usually from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. It also produces generic stereotypical characters such as the ‘hardboiled’ detective and the femme fatale that are both embraced and highly criticized by film theoreticians. However, film noir is an ambivalent concept, a category of films that can be sensed, yet resists delimitation within strict boundaries.

Costume on film: How the femme fatale’s wardrobe scripted the pictorial style of 1940s film noir

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Colpaert
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Star Image ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Double Indemnity ◽  
Mode Of Production

The character of the femme fatale and the visual style of film noir are vital elements in our understanding of that genre. Film costumes worn by the femme fatale are crucial, and are defining elements in genre recognition precisely because of their explicit cinematic visualization, rather than functioning as unequivocal signs. This article proposes a methodology for film costume researchers to conduct a pictorial analysis, without necessarily analysing film costume in terms of a meaning-making repertoire adhering to our understanding of film as a ‘language’. In the proposition of a framework for the close textual analysis of film costumes, the methodology is based on the triangulation of a shot-by-shot description, a wardrobe breakdown and an examination of production stills. This triangulation is crucial to understand the complexity of film costumes, which are defined by a wide-ranging set of factors such as: the film industry’s mode of production, the film costume’s relation to the fashion of its time, the body and star image of the actor, the work of the costume designer and his/her department, and the film-specificity. The ways in which a film costume functions in a specific shot will prove to be an important tool to analyse the pictorial characteristics of film noir and the femme fatale. To exemplify to methodology, this article proposes a close reading of an iconic film costume designed for one of the best-known performances of such a character, i.e. the white jumpsuit designed by Edith Head for Barbara Stanwyck in the closing scene of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).

scholarly journals Examining Gender Representation in an Indonesian EFL Textbook

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-207
Author(s):  
Zango Anisa Agni ◽  
Endang Setyaningsih ◽  
Teguh Sarosa
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Gender Stereotyping ◽  
Gender Representation ◽  
Indonesian Government ◽  
Careful Treatment ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
The Government

Considering its influential role in students’ behavior and attitudes, a textbook has to reflect balanced images and information about males and females. It also has to support broad choices and many roles for both sexes to avoid unjust or bias gender issues. This study aimed at examining whether an EFL textbook published by the Indonesian government promotes gender equity by (1) mapping the proportion of textual and visual representation of males and females in the textbook; (2) describing how males and females are treated in the textbook. Through content analysis, the study revealed that the book is gender-biased as indicated from unbalanced (1) textual and visual representation (2) variety of activity, role, and occupation, (3) order of mention, and (4) adjectival portrayal. In all indicators, the female is underrepresented, hidden, and framed within traditional gender stereotyping.  Reflecting on these findings, revision by the government and/ or careful treatment by teachers when using the book are ushered.  Keywords: bias, content analysis, gender representation, gender stereotype, textbook.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document