Atelier
Noirs
Women in Film Noir - 04:
Socio-historical Background
Femme fatale is one of the most representative figures in film noir. From 1941 to 1958, portrayals of female characters in film noir experienced changes and femme fatales were disappearing by 1958, the last year of film noir golden age. This shift could be decoded by the analysis of women's social position within the specific socio-historical context before and after World War II.
By 李辛吾 Lee Hsin-wu
On Film - 02/11/2023
Looking at the socio-historical background over the history of the film noir golden age, we could trace the trajectory of femme fatale being developed and then undermined connected with women’s social status in the similar trend influenced by the war. In this case, the disappearance of femme fatale image illustrated above could be explained in light of women’s declining social position from the end of the World War II until 1958.
American Girl in Italy, Ruth Orkin (1951)
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In early film noir period during the World War II, the independent gene of femme fatale has inevitable relationship with the growing power of women. Along with the U.S. government propaganda, many domestic women were encouraged to take over men’s job in the labor market. Independent, even masculine portrayals of female bodies prevailed almost everywhere in U.S. from the screen of film to recruitment posters on the street.
The peak of classic femme fatale images came after the end of World War II. With women’s independent characteristics being kept, film noir started to depict women as a source of danger because male audiences largely consisted of veterans became film noir’s target group after the war. Men were experiencing anxieties facing women’s rising positions leading the reconfiguration in the labor market and the entire society after returning from battlefield back to home.
Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946)
With the spreading masculine anxiety, female labor faced unequal treatments compared with male labor in terms of the position provided and wages, leading to the trend of women coming back to nuclear family. This situation, along with the reinforcement of domestic woman figure in post war propaganda, influence the disappearance of female characters in film noir. In the book “More Work For Mother”, Ruth Schwartz Cowan documents the voices rejecting and even discriminating women who still want to have a job:
In the 1950s and the 1960s, psychiatrists, psychologists, and popular writers inveighed against women who wished to pursue a career, and even against women who wished to have a job, and referred to such "unlovely women" as "lost," "suffering from penis envy."
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By 1958, the unequal treatments towards female labors came to its peak and the propaganda has been carried on for over a decade. The phenomenon of disappearing femme fatale characters in 1958 could be accounted for the decline of women’s social positions and the relief of masculine’s anxiety lies behind with the condition that American slowly resolved the “issue of working women thus eliminating the need for a menacing female role”.
Similar changed women’s positions in labor market and society could be found in France, resulting in the disappearance of femme fatale happening in both the United States and France. In comparison between these two trajectories, we would find a progress from Touch of Evil to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud in the narrative perspective. The French film noir is narrated from the perspective of the female character, or femme fatale instead of from the point of view of man. This female centered narrative perspective leads the trend of many films in the famous movement French New Wave. In light of this progress, we would account for the atmosphere of auteur filmmaking in France or it could be claimed as the germination of feminism movement which grows from Europe spreading throughout the world in 1960s.
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Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Notes
7. Ruth Schwartz Cowan. 1985. More Work for Mother. Basic Books Press
8. Suchy, “The End of Noir: Orson Welles' Touch of Evil”, Topics in Film and
Media Arts