Film Noir's Tough Guys & their Female Fans!
- jbatkin0
- Jun 3, 2021
- 1 min read
Special talk by Prof Shelly Stamp (UC Santa Cruz) 17th June 5pm
“Considerable scholarly attention has focused on the arresting brand of hard-boiled masculinity displayed in American film noir of the 1940s and early 1950s. What appeal might volatile, violent masculinity have held for female moviegoers at the time? And how did the movie culture surrounding film noir cultivate and structure their fascination with brute masculinity? Taking an inter-medial approach to noir’s movie culture, this study analyzes the multi-pronged outreach to female moviegoers in original marketing campaigns and fan magazines, alongside fans’ own negotiations of these materials in fan clubs, scrapbooks, and other ephemera. All of this is read against the backdrop of an increased cultural discourse on violent masculinity – much of it aimed at women – that first emerged during the latter half of the second World War, then escalated after the war during the period of noir’s ascendance.”
Shelley Stamp is Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. She is an expert in the history of American silent cinema, cinema-going and women’s film history and feminist film historiography. She is the author of Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (2000) and Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (2015), and numerous articles and chapters. She is the founding editor of the Feminist Media Histories journal (University of California Press).
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