Week 3- Hollinger: Film Noir, Voice-Over, and the Femme Fatale

Riley Arp@rileyarp

Voice-over technique as important staple of film noir, began in the 1940's.
Other 40's genres use voice-over primarily to accentuate the verisimilitude of and to increase audience identification with their narrators' stories.
narrator's often contain weak, powerless narrators who tell a story of their past failures. Usually done in a confessional/investigative mode.
The voice-over penetrates into the past of the character's psyche that will arrive to a fundamental truth that is causing an individually and/or socially abnormal or destructive situation.
The confessing narrator is somehow relieved of guilt or anxiety by arriving at the sense of truth.
The truth involved about femininity, where the nature of female difference is met by the male character.
a paternal figure often listens to the confessional/investigative story.
"In this phallic economy, femaleness becomes simply insufficiency or excess in comparison to maleness"
Voice-over creates this fragmenting effect by establishing within the film a fight for narrative power as the narrator struggles to gain control of the narrative events recounted.
Film noir takes away the female's weak and ineffectual figures of Classical Hollywood films and grants them overwhelming visual power.
The male voice-over attempts to control the female image, but is actually pitted against the dominant visual presence against his voice.
The spectator is placed in a position where they have a distance from the narrative and don't grasp it as one ideologically correct position, but a battleground for competing ones.