The assignment (One Archetype, Five Movies, Five Seconds) is to “Create a five second video of one archetype from five different movies cutting together one second of each.”

Forever ago I had an English teacher who spent more time teaching us about film than she did about books for a good portion of the year. It was pretty sweet and she is largely responsible for my fascination with noir. I feel kind of movie illiterate approaching some of these assignments, simply because I don’t watch that many movies, but I know enough about noir that the femme fatale was one of the few archetypes that I could easily come up with five examples for. Anyway, the femme fatale, which I’m interpreting in the broadest sense, is a mysterious, usually sultry/gorgeous, and often duplicitous (for one reason or another) woman. I think it’s a fascinating archetype, especially in relation to gender stereotypes and how the archetype evolves from classic noir through neo-noir film.

To make this I downloaded clips from each movie from Youtube, then imported them all to iMovie to cut out everything but a single second (or… kind of sort of close to a second) from each and put them all together. The most difficult part by far was choosing only one second to be representative of the archetype.

The ladies, in order, are:
Brigid from the Maltese Falcon.
Phyllis from Double Indemnity.
Rita/Camilla from Mulholland Drive.
Evelyn from Chinatown.*
Laura from Brick.

*I’d argue that she’s not actually a femme fatale, but figured she’d still be a good addition because she’s intended to seem so at first.