research question: what is the significance of the femme fatale character in film noir and how does she challenge or reinforce traditional gender roles in the genre?
topics and subjects: female roles in film noir and the concept of femme fatale as a whole
helpful readings: Women As Seen in the Film Noir by Andrew Dickos
films: Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd, (others yet to be decided)
For your proposal, I feel this is an engaging topic enough to elaborate upon. Ironically, my topic is similar to this one. This topic is interesting to me as it was the one thing about the films noirs that we’ve viewed for class that really grasped my interest as someone who traditionally doesn’t like films noirs. Your angle with the challenging or reinforcing of gender roles I feel is the strongest portion of this proposal.
Your selection for topic/subject is obvious and makes sense. I don’t feel like I can comment much on it.
Your helpful reading is the one reading that highlights your topic in its entirely. Good selection.
For your films selected, this is a good start. Might I suggest “The Maltese Falcon”. There’s plenty of examples that can be used for this archetype in films noirs.
This will be awesome to see put together, I think it’ll be important to reference the social context of how women were viewed in the 50s, and it’ll be super cool to see how some of the examples you listed connect t0 that.
Your question is engaging to me as a potential viewer because this actually correlates with what I have as my potential thesis! So, our videos could almost be partners/referencing the same ideas. I think your selection of reading is spot on, but there’s a lot more that can be added if you’re wanting your video essay to be more well rounded rather than a direct message. It strikes as coherent but I want more to validate your point. I would recommend looking at more recent readings of femme fatales, too, to further your point, as well as screenings of neo-noir with female leads.
For challenging traditional gender roles, I’d definitely take a look at Scarlett Street as well. (That was the film we looked at the laughing/ice pick scene from). I think comparing her to other women in the film would also work well.
femme fatales are always interesting and theirs a lot to unravel with gender roles. I think a film you might want to look at is “focus” with will smith. It might not be noir but I feel the character dynamics say a lot about the femme fatal character trope. One thing you might want to take a closer look at is your perspective, these classic noir films interacted with gender roles a certain way when they were released in the 50s, but as those gender roles have evolved over time they are bound to interact with them differently in our contemporary time..