The femme fatale, that cinematic female trope, raised the sexual stakes the moment she first lured a sap to his sad undoing. This deadly woman (literally, from the French) projects her own wily strength, and she embodies a projection of male fears. We’ll start with an up-close-and-personal look at 1940s femmes fatales who filled the post-WWII screen as film noir emerged. (Noir is a classic Hollywood genre of gritty, fallible characters caught on the wrong side of the American dream.) Then we see how femmes and noirs alike have shown impressive staying power: witness today’s neo-noirs. These stories play out in California, Texas, Florida, and New Hampshire, where scheming females and misguided men steam their way into trouble. Films to be discussed are Out of the Past (1947), Body Heat (1981), Blood Simple (1984) and To Die For (1995).
Michael Walsh previously chaired Cinema Departments at Binghamton and University of Hartford, where he co-founded the Cinema major and has taught film studies for 25 years. He has published widely on film, literature, and theory. His recent articles are about the French New Wave director Chris Marker and the issue of adult/adolescent sexuality in Nabokov’s Lolita and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. His book Durational Cinema: A Short History of Long Films was published in 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan.
Mondays, Nov. 4, 11, 18, Dec. 2 | 3 p.m.–4:30 p.m. | Hillyer Hall 303 (Film Projection Room) | $80
Made possible in part by the generosity of the Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
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