How horror, mystery, and science fiction films construct femmes fatales Misogyny or empowerment (original) (raw)
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Feminism, film, and theory now
Re-reading the Monstrous Feminine: Art, Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, eds Nicholas Chare, Jeanette Hoorn and Andrey Yue, Routledge, London, 2020
In these notes I explore current questions of feminism and femininity as well as subjectivity and film, drawing on my work over a number of years and in recently published essays.These notes are themed around the question of horror - the horrible - in an engagement with the groundbreaking study of the horror film by Barbara Creed. It addresses the seen and the heard -the gaze and the voice - in film and new media. What has remained for me a central issue for film and feminist theory is the concept of the subject who is addressed.
Film Noir's “Femme Fatales” Hard-Boiled Women: Moving Beyond Gender Fantasies
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2007
In her essay "Professions for Women," Virginia Woolf says "It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality" (1346). Nowhere is this insight truer than in the culture's preoccupation with the femme fatale, a figure I want to identify as a phantom, an illusion and myth that I wish not so much to kill, but to deconstruct as a category that feeds cultural gender fantasies. Feminist film critics have long recognized the ideological power of the femme fatale: first in terms of her role as a projection of male fear and desire; later, as a politically forceful symbol of unencumbered power. I want not only to extend recent emphases by critics such as Christine Gledhill, Elizabeth Cowie, and Jans Wager on how noir speaks to women but also to show the striking extent to which femme fatales-seductresses whose desires and malevolence are seemingly unmotivated-don't in fact exist in the noir movies in which so-called bad women appear. Instead film noir's lead female characters predominantly demonstrate complex psychological and social identity, resisting the spectator's habit (traced in criticism and cultural responses) of seeing past her as opaque or ambiguous (thus a screen on which to project male fears and desires) or of fixing on her as the thing, a dangerous body, to be labeled and tamed by social roles and institutions. This essay will point to the dearth of film noir's actual femmes fatales, evil women whose raison d'être is to murder and deceive, focusing on films in which the femme fatale is presented in terms of exigency. That is, I want to call attention to the many female characters in original-cycle noir who are shown to be limited by, even trapped in, social worlds presented as psychotically gendered. Exigency for most so-called femme fatales moves these women to express-in aggressive physical and verbal gestures-an insistence on independence, which is then misread as the mark of the femme fatale. Readings of and references to the femme fatale miss the extent to which her role depends on the theme of female independence, often misconceiving her motives and serving mainly to confound our understanding of the gender fantasies that surround these so-called bad women. Such myths are propelled by the culture now both by film criticism and popular culture. Indeed, critics have settled in their discussion of women in noir on the few female characters who conform to the notion of the quintessential femme fatale (as she is represented by Phyllis Dietrichson [Double Indemnity], Kathie Moffett [Out of the Past], and Brigid O'Shaughnessy [The Maltese Falcon]), who then define the category. This has two significant consequences: first, these few really bad women draw all of the attention; second the construction of a false binary opposition between femme fatales and other
Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema
2016
Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema explores the representation of homicidal women in six contemporary films: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001), Baise-moi (Coralie Thinh Thi and Virginie Despentes, 2000), Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994), Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) and The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008). Violent women in cinema pose an exciting challenge to viewers—when women kill, they overturn cultural ideas of typical feminine behaviour. Janice Loreck explores how cinema creatively depicts the violent woman in response to this challenge. Departing from earlier studies that focus on popular and exploitation cinema, the book takes a unique focus on violent women in art films and other critically-distinguished forms. It explores the appeal that the violent woman holds for spectators within this viewing context. Furthermore, the book also examines how cinema responds to the cultural construction of the violent woman as a conundrum and enigma.
"How to Make a Horror Film Out of the Filmmaker's Brutal Disdain for her own Gender" . A review of Coralie Fargeat’s anti-feminist stance in The Substance (2024)., 2024
When the very core of satire focuses on women and their efforts to maintain their appearance and roles in their society, and the filmmaker is a woman, as in the film The Substance, judging the director’s intentions can be complex. Such satire, in the target film, aimed at Hollywood, may not only reflect the obsession women have with aesthetics under the social pressures that force them to prioritize their looks. This essay argues that the film, beyond highlighting the prevailing cultural double standards in Western societies that make such inequalities possible, also reveals Coralie Fargeat’s internalized prejudices toward this particular type of white North American woman, portrayed as intellectually inferior and emotionally wretched, showing how such considerations have both consciously and unconsciously influenced her work. How to Make a Film from the Filmmaker’s Brutal Disdain for Her Own Gender proposes that the key to understanding the filmmaker’s satire lies in looking at her representational nuances side by side with her declared intentions. The analysis begins with the observation of how the director characterizes the protagonist as a completely brainless victim—depicted as a woman incapable of protecting herself, exposed to the influence of the cosmetic market, and sucked into the star system—with an evident and growing contempt for her own body and soul. Although the film highlights the absurdities and injustices associated with these social pressures, it also shows a certain level of disrespect. In several scenes, the satire touches on a destructive absurdity and deep contempt, undermining the balance between fair critique and a deliberately sinister caricature. This film review thus explores the implications of both The Substance and the broader context of gender representation in cinema. The very title suggests a critical investigation into the filmmaker's attitudes toward women, analyzing how these perspectives manifest in the narrative, structure, and aesthetic choices of the film.
Almost without exception, the spider woman of classic film noir is located in relation to the central male character. It is his story that is told on screen. Consequently, scholars have tended to focus on the antihero’s experiences, disregarding female perspectives or treating them as a secondary concern. Conversely, Born to Kill disrupts these conventions, unusually situating a femme fatale (Helen Trent, played by Claire Trevor) at the center of the narrative, which is played from her perspective. This approach raises a key question: How does subjective alignment with the fatale figure change the way the character is interpreted? The aim of this article is to set aside dominant theories of the gaze, as valuable as they have been to film noir scholarship, in order to take an alternative look at the femme fatale as she appears in Born to Kill.
COM 491: Feminism in Cinematic Art
This independent study is designed to offer students the opportunity to place critical research and textual analysis into creative action. The course presents an expansive introduction to feminist film history, with particular focus on historical achievements – technically, politically, culturally, and artistically. Through the duration of this course, we will investigate the milestones that shaped women’s role in moving-images and the impact their work had on social and economic frameworks. The aim of this course is to examine feminist cinema as a cultural text from the vantage point of feminist criticisms and concepts, feminist films (directed by females and/or strong female leads). In doing so, we will discuss how to read a film as a document – with attention paid to the text’s functionality – and identify the text’s preoccupations and influence on the historical and sociological climate in society.
The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender
Routledge, 2017
Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention into the field of cinema and gender. The essays included here address a variety of geographical contexts, from an analysis of cinema. Islam and women and television under Eastern European socialism, to female audience reception in Nigeria, to changing class and race norms in Bollywood dance sequences. A special focus is on women directors in a global context that includes films and filmmakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The collection also offers a solid overview of feminist contributions to thinking on genre from the "chick flick" to the action or Western film, to film noir and the slasher. Readers will find contributions on a variety of approaches to spectatorship, reception studies and fandom, as well as transnational approaches to star studies and essays addressing the relationship between feminist film theory and new media. Other topics include queer and trans* cinema, eco-cinema and the post-human. Finally, readers interested in the history of film will find essays addressing the methodological dimensions of feminist film history, essays on silent and studio era women in film, and histories of female filmmakers in a variety of non-Western contexts.
The German Cinema Book , 2020
In 2001, the feminist director Jutta Brückner wrote that films by women were the product of an often arduous "quest for traces. " 1 Her comment echoed an interview three decades earlier, when Brückner had spoken of film as a means to "reconstruct symbolically" the "disrupted physical integrity" of women in history. 2 The reference in both instances was not only to her own work but in general to filmmaking by women who seek new forms of articulation for feminine subjectivity and experience. Brückner's observations have resonance too for a different cultural practice of retrieval, that of history-writing in respect of women's film. This chapter attempts a reconstruction of key moments in German women's filmmaking, which we explore in particular, but not solely, in its relation to feminism. Like Brückner's film narratives, our history-which for reasons of space is necessarily partial-starts from an assumption of "disrupted integrity, " though not, as for Brückner, in the physical or symbolic body of woman, but in the similarly fractured cinematic body of work by women over twelve decades of German film. It is, moreover, not only Brückner's understanding of film as a medium capable of lending tangible presence to an otherwise invisible or fragmented gendered experience that is useful for this chapter. Her filmmaking method offers further helpful insights for approaches to women's cinema history. Early in her filmmaking career, in films including the experimental documentary Tue recht und scheue niemand (Do right and fear nobody, 1975) and the semi-autobiographical Hungerjahre (Years of Hunger, 1979), Brückner used newsreel inserts, still photographs, voice-over, and found sound to "suggest the complexity of a whole period": in Tue recht, five decades of one woman's mid-twentieth-century petit bourgeois existence; in Hungerjahre, the 1950s as viewed from the perspective of a bulimic adolescent. Brückner's juxtapositions of archive image and sound with memory fragments and fictional narrative revealed female subjectivities in a state of emergence, developing as "the result of a long cultural process" that is "constituted by … history. " 3 Analogously, the history of women's filmmaking-of the moments, then, in which women become the active subjects of cinematic perception as well as social actors in film production and circulation-demands an approach that registers traces of feminine subjectivity and agency as the products of specific conditions of historical emergence: conditions that may at one moment facilitate women's filmmaking and at others suppress female participation in the film industry or cinematic practice. Examples from early film history should serve to illustrate the point. Three women who would later move into production and directing-Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen (see Chapter 5), and Leontine Sagan-began careers in acting at a historical moment in which film performance and stardom belonged to, indeed were significantly shaping an early twentieth-century culture of public visibility for women. In Emilie Altenloh's pioneering sociological study of early cinema audiences, Asta Nielsen in particular figures not merely as an audience magnet for a cross-class community of female fans. 4 Feminist historians including Miriam Hansen, Heide Schlüpmann, and Andrea Haller have also shown how the mass presence of women in the film audience may be understood as part of a broader early twentieth-century challenge to the "dominant organization of public experience" around masculine norms. 5 That challenge was rooted in socio-historical developments including the expansion of women's education, the advance of 31 FEMINISM AND WOMEN'S CINEMA
The Body and the Screen: female subjectivities in contemporary women's cinema
2017
This book draws on feminist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Christine Battersby, Sonia Kruks, Iris Young and others to offer readings of some of the most important and memorable films directed by women in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. It suggests where feminist film studies might go 'after psychoanalysis', arguing that a feminist film-philosophy of an ethical female subjectivity can best assist women directors' increasingly subtle exploration of gender relations, desire and embodied action.