Dangerous dames

by Jans B. Wager

Both film noir and the Weimar street film hold a continuing fascination for film spectators and film theorists alike. The female characters, especially the alluring femmes fatales, remain a focus for critical and popular attention. The antithesis of the femme fatale, which Wager calls the femme attrapee, has received considerably less notice. Unlike most theorists, Jans Wager examines these archetypes from the perspective of the female spectator and rejects the persistence of vision that allows a reading of these female characters only as representations of unstable postwar masculinity. Instead, she suggests that the woman in the audience has always seen and understood these characters as representations of some aspect of her own existence.