Welcome by Carol Becker, Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts
Introductory remarks by Gordon Kit (CC’76)

“Selling Noir’s ‘Red Meat’ To The Female Market”

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.  

Professor Stamp further shows how female customers were cultivated in publicity surrounding noir’s “gal producers” - Joan Harrison, Virginia Van Upp, and Harriet Parsons - who not only played a central role in forging the landmark cycle of films, but also helped redefine broader conceptions of women’s work and female professionalism. The appeal noir might have held for women during these years lay perhaps lay not primarily in the unconventional gender roles they saw onscreen, but in the very real women they recognized behind the scenes in Hollywood.  

About Shelley Stamp

Shelley Stamp is the author of two award-winning books, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (2015) and Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (2000), and curator of the award-winning disc set Pioneers:  First Women Filmmakers (2018).  She has provided expert audio commentary for DVD and Blu-ray releases, has appeared in several documentaries on the history of women and film, and has been quoted in media outlets including NPR, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.  She is Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has twice won the Excellence in Teaching Award.

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