From the throat, I'm tied to you

[sovay]

thisbluespirit made a batch of icons from the BBC Dracula (1977), so I have with permission stolen the one of Jack Shepherd as Renfield. I am not yet sure what I'll use it for, but it will distinguish itself. Most of my icons turn out to be multivalent anyway.

handful_ofdust linked me an article of ten female-led noirs. My reactions range from "Hell, yes, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)/Gun Crazy (1950)/Phantom Lady (1944)/Clash by Night (1952)" to "I'm sorry, I just didn't like Sudden Fear (1952)." Set It Off (1996) sounds amazing. I still need to write about Bound (1996), which should be on this list.

(I keep thinking about putting together my own list of female-focused noir and keep coming up against the fact that I could make a sincere one, but it wouldn't be comprehensively informed. I saw Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947) the other night. It contains an actual, factual, archetypal femme fatale; she's played by Jane Greer and when she drops the mask at last, she's astonishing. But it took me until now to see an acknowledged classic of the field, for reasons, and there are equal classics out there on which I have as yet no opinion. I hadn't seen several of the movies on Vulture's list. —I am reminding Tiny Wittgenstein, maybe they haven't seen all the movies on mine.)

I like this photograph moon_custafer reblogged of mushrooms growing among deer bones.

So far my day has mostly involved grocery shopping and cleaning, but that is all right by me.

Comments

[sovay]

you don’t see a woman and automatically say “ah-ha, a wild femme-fatale appears!” and ignore all subsequent evidence to the contrary.

I feel it's not that difficult!

(Thank you.)

[alexxkay]

I think that, like many creators, you suffer from thinking that what you do in your art is "not that difficult" (and thus, says Tiny W., worthless). This is rarely so when looked at within a larger context. And even for cases that *are* objectively easy, if there are few/no other people doing them, then they are valuable.

Canon can be corrosive, and deserves to be argued, both actively, and Perhaps equally importantly, *passively*, by simply not granting it the assumption of power. Plus, in this 21st century world, it's no longer reasonable to take time to every example of any given genre that someone called a classic; there's just too MUCH!

(That said, I do love Out of the Past.)

[sovay]

Plus, in this 21st century world, it's no longer reasonable to take time to every example of any given genre that someone called a classic; there's just too MUCH!

I appreciate the reassurance. I am not worried about hitting the marks of an established canon just to hit them. I am interested in what people consider the high-water marks of the genre and I don't want to miss something would be relevant and intriguing to me, like the way people always talk about Gilda (1946) as an iconic femme fatale film as opposed to the bisexual disaster that skygiants and I saw.

(That said, I do love Out of the Past.)

(I enjoyed it a lot. It was beautifully shot, crisply written, well acted, and it was really interesting to see something that looked so much like so many people's ideas of film noir—a private eye, a duplicitous woman, a good girl, a shady history that wraps back around to get you if you let it. As a representative of that particular strand of the genre, it was very fine. I just don't know that it's my favorite strand.)

[ashlyme]

I've just read Skygiants' post on Gilda and I giggled all the way through. Thank you both!

[sovay]

Thank you both!

You're welcome! It was an experience!