For this Video Essay, I plan to delve into the mystique of the femme fatale. Specifically, I want to analyze the evolution of the femme fatale throughout the evolution of the films noirs and how what we consider the femme fatale changes with the times. My specific research question probably needs some reworking/revision, but I’m thinking this:
How does the Femme Fatale trait evolve alongside film noirs?
For topics and subjects, I feel like that was already defined in my research question/thesis. I’m going to be looking into the evolution of what we consider as the Femme Fatale. I want to look deeper into this archetype and explore what this meant for the representation of women in film and gender roles in these earlier time periods.
For course readings, I feel “Women As Seen In The Film Noir” by Andrew Dickos would be the most useful reading out of the chosen readings. I could use some excerpts from “Towards a Definition of Film Noir” by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chautmeton to establish an introduction and outro possibly to the video essay. I feel for most of my textual resources, I will draw from external sources I find from Google Scholar.
So for the films, I can easily see myself looking at “The Maltese Falcon” for starters. This was the first film that stood out to me and made me think that this would be my research topic. O’Shaughnessy as a character grasped my interest when I first watched this for class. Another film, I can see myself looking into is Double Indemnity with Phyllis. Maybe even Laura; (even though we didn’t view it for class) I think it can be applicable to the femme fatale. (For context, I’ve seen this film before in a Janterm previously.) I’m essentially just spitballing here, but there are plenty of other films I can see myself referencing to explore this evolution of the archetype.
I also feel that finding a research topic good enough for an assignment of this scope was a little difficult. It was between this and writing about style and german expressionism, but I was struggling a tad bit trying to find something that I could really delve into for an extended writing/video essay.
This question is definitely engaging to me, because personally I enjoy femme fatales across noir films. I typically find them very interesting as characters granted they are not always very complex.
I do feel like the readings and films selected fit the question. Obviously the piece by dickos about women in noir is a supportive reading, and as far as films, Both the Maltese Falcon and Double indemnity have very prominent femme fatale characters so those both fit the bill as well.
I don’t particularly have any suggestions in terms of readings and films for this particular proposal
This will definitely be a fun read once you get it all put together, Id say if you’re going to look at the evolution over time it’ll be important to include some contemporary noir as well as the perfect classic examples you listed above.
I like your train of thought for your topic. I think maybe for your question you could consider something along the lines of, “To what extent does the femme fatale affect the intensity of a neo-noir film?” though that might be different than what you’re thinking. It’s a big research question and I personally would narrow the scope of it. Maybe you could compare two films; one early noir and one neo-noir. On the subject of films to look at. I think another film you could look at is Vertigo. I remember the female character in that one to be a “forced” femme fatale for lack of a better way to phrase it.
I think this idea of the mystique aspect of femme fatale is intriguing, but im struggling to grasp exactly what your getting at.
It seems like, if im understanding correctly, you want to look into how femme fatale has evolved over time. My question then is, what is the mystique aspect you are looking for? Is it one of the intrinsic traits of the femme fatale? Is it something else entirely? If its the latter, you’ll definitely need some kind of example to give context. If I was doing this and wanted a film that demonstrated this, something such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? would be my choice, as I think both addresses this idea of the mystique (again, if I understand it correctly) and has a unique portrayal of the femme fatale concept with Jessica.
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