ENGL3041: Killer Women: Film Noir, Its Origins and Legacies

In this course we will explore the highly influential Hollywood genre, Film Noir. Film Noir flourished in the 1940s and 1950s, when the United States was undergoing major societal changes in the aftermath of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. In this class we will take an intersectional approach, thinking about gender in relationship to other societal structures like race, sexuality and disability, all of which come into play in Film Noir. In the postwar period, changes in the relationships and hierarchies between different genders were particularly fraught. Many women had worked in war-related industries and therefore had earned their own money, made decisions about their own lives and had control of their own sexuality. When the men who had fought in the war returned home, power relationships shifted, causing tension and deep anxiety. This tension was a frequent focus of Film Noir. The ?femme fatale? emerges within the genre as key symbolic figure. She can be the sexualized ?killer woman,? who does not accept male authority and acts entirely in her own self-interest even to the extent of committing murder and other crimes. Film Noir also developed in the early years of the Cold War, when US society was obsessed with fear of communism and hence with finding ?enemies? of ?the American way of life? who could be hidden in plain sight, as your neighbors, friends and lovers. Because of the film censorship that was prevalent certain material, potentially subversive in nature, was coded: presented in ways that were visible to some people but not to general audiences and the censors. We will investigate how particular visual codes defined the genre and how these codes can be partially understood in light of societal tensions and hierarchies. Racial tension was often a coded element, in which a more progressive view of race can sometimes be perceived behind the apparently conventional approach. Alternative sexualities and non-binary constructions of gender also can be read as coded elements in Film Noir. We will often look at films ?against the grain,? asking what questions they may pose beyond their obvious content. While most of the course will focus on ?classic? Film Noir from the 1940s and 1950s, we will also consider some examples of ?neo-Noir? films which return to the figure of the ?femme fatale? in a more contemporary context, and which can now directly address the hidden and coded subject matter of earlier films in the genre including race, queerness and non-binary gender.

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