All the Things in Film Noir Shadows

I miss university very much and I'd love to make an effort - an effort to study and learn and do an essay because I've been into courses, I have. Filmmaking is one of my courses and I am studying film noir. We went outside and we used the sunlight to create shadows. I used a cigarette holder to be the femme fatale character (even though I don't smoke and I'm too young and healthy to smoke.) That character is female and beautiful and has power. In Cleudo (which is a game of characters that I am interested in) the femme fatales are Lady Lavender and Miss Scarlett. The femme fatale is a lady who kills people and lovers. So she could be the murderer in Cleudo. She might wear furs, have a gun and wear high heeled shoes, classic lingerie and sexy stockings.

In filmmaking class we traced around the shadows with chalk (which was a bit filthy to touch and use on the ground.)

The villain men of film noir are fat (or skinny), lazy and drunk - and rude and swearing - and they're usually men that "mothers would not want their daughters to marry." They don't have a good reputation, which means that mums - and fathers - have heard that those villain men are no good because they're not kind and not loyal. (Unlike me because my parents think I am kind and loyal. This means I have a good reputation. Though I am not sure of what reputation totally means and maybe Anna can help me with that.)

Double Indemnity is the film I am talking about today. It's a great film and I love the female (played by Barbara Stanwyk) who is a phenomenal character. Phenomenal -I need that word and I love it. What's a phenomenal? It's a word about how amazing something is, like 'female fatale phenomenal'. Every film noir has one of them. In Double Indemnity, the femme fatale is a phenomenal gold digger for love and money, she has an amazing power for it, to show off her body and to be greedy for money.

Her name is Phyllis - the phenomenal femme fatale.

She has a big plan to get money. What's her plan? Before I tell you, I have to say that the Addams Family Values has a gold digger who has a plan for Uncle Fester's money and that this is a joke film made from the serious film of Double Indemnity. Which is the film where it all started about killing rich men of the bachelor kind and the married kind, for gold and money and jewellery and mansions and chandeliers - all the things in film noir shadows and in Cleudo, which is the British posh version of all that.

Maybe I can do that gold diggers phenomenal stuff with my friends' husbands, can I? Anna says "I think not, Emma!" Okay so I won't do that in real life. I will act it. In filmmaking class. And I will pinch the beautiful jewellery but it will be just acting because I'm not a thief! And you don't want to see me really with a gun or a cigarette, do you? (Although I wouldn't mind a real kiss in the real acting of the film - a passionate one at the end.)

The men in film noir, some of them are business detectives and they are dramatic and serious because they have a case to solve and then they fall love and get mixed up with the case because of the sex appeal. I would like to mix vampires with detective film noir but they different genres. Yep.

I talked to my flatmate Allison about how I need to know about women in film noir and she talked about The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is like Double Indemnity but with modern characters "who can't connect and hold each other and break through to the daylight." I like those words, that sentence. The modern words for "womanisers" is "man whore*", that means men who sleep with too many women, but I still like them, the man whores, because they are sleazy and make good villains.

In Double Indemnity, Phillis kills her husband with the help of her lover: on the poster it says "From the moment they met it was murder". That is too creepy for me. I'm not into that type of violence and I don't like harm. I try to be calm. I like things that are violent to stay on film and to have distraction from it, like goddess women movie stars, gold digger stars, man whores* and imagination fantasies.

And that's film noir.

• don't say that to your boyfriends or exes.