Representations of the Femme-Fatale in Film Noir

The femme-fatale is a key character in film noir and is still used as a basic character construct in modern films such as Basic Instinct and Sin City. She usually begins her on screen presence as innocent and worried. She expresses her troubles to an eager detective willing to help the damsel in distress by any means possible. Usually he takes the case and finds out by the end that he's been on a wild goose chase lead from the start by none other than the femme-fatale.

Her true character is dangerous and unhinged, she will go to endless lengths and stop at nothing to get what she wants, it's almost admirable how determined she is, but that admiration is quickly diminished by how transparent she becomes. You truly see how crazy she is, how some of them don't cause the chaos for a reason, they do it for fun, they like chaos, they're extremely dangerous.

Examples of some of cinemas greatest femme-fatales include Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity with the infamous low angle shot focusing on her character Phylis. Joan Bennet in Scarlet Street playing her character of Kitty Marsh, and Lauren Bacall in the big sleep. The manipulative street smart Vivan Ruttledge.

For the time they defied expectations of how a woman should act, during the 30's and 40's women's role in society changed because during World War II men went off to war and women had to cover men's old jobs- farming, building. When the war ended women wanted change and power as opposed to what they had before. for the first time in history women were emancipated. However they still had to act a certain way, to conform to the work place like men had to and be polite about it. This is why a woman non-conforming took the audience by storm as it was unusual, people wanted more.

We are using a femme-fatale for our film however as it's only an intro so we're trying to establish her early on as someone who appears to be hated by her lover (the villian: Tony) then as she walks off a later shot is shown where Tony and his nephew are trying to keep quiet and exchange secret information, then the camera tilts up and shows that the femme-fatale has been watching the whole time, this shows that she'll be a key part later on in the film for the villains downfall/hubris.

The shot I just mentioned is reminiscent of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity as her introductory scene of her at the top of the stairs: