ABSTRACT
Film Noir has regularly categorized the American archetypal male and female as a binary system. This chapter looks at the emergence of urban environments and the behavioral qualities of the Detective and Femme Fatale. Noir as an exercise is meant to expand upon the stereotypical gender roles found within the Hollywood canon. The exercises in this chapter focus on clarity of thought, the power of stillness, and the permission to explore gender, within the elasticity of space and charged energy that is so essential to the classic form of Noir. This chapter asks the question: How can we reconstruct gender norms within perceived notions of character and language? Included in this chapter is an exercise called Noir Café, followed by a dialogue between acting students and me debriefing how the exercise affected them and what they observed.
