In this year’s keynote lecture, Professor Shelley Stamp (University of California, Santa Cruz) explores how film noir was aggressively marketed to female moviegoers in the 1940s and early 50s. Separate “femme” sales campaigns were designed for virtually all films in the noir cycle. While these campaigns employed strategies typical of Hollywood’s appeal to female customers in this era, emphasizing heterosexual romance, fashion, beauty, and domesticity, those themes took on an entirely different register in the perverse, violent, and volatile world of film noir. Women who came to see films in this cycle, women who might have reveled in the deviant femininity embodied onscreen, were invited to fashion themselves after those same deadly women, to slip into the very clothes those women wore, to make-up their faces in the same manner – a reminder of the broader possibilities for self-fashioning during and after the second World War.

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