by School of Film
June 25th 2026
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Every year the School of Film gives awards for the best essay or essays submitted for consideration. The judges are film faculty and any paper written in a film class during the year is eligible.
This year two winners were selected from the many papers submitted.
Second Place: "Gender, Criminality, and Deviance: Film Noir Through the Framework of Angela Y. Davis" by Saturn B
About Saturn
Saturn B is a documentary filmmaker and experimental interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. Their work focuses on deviancy, queer identity, the struggles of young artists, and the role of subcultures in fostering belonging. During their time at PSU, Saturn has developed a passion for film scholarship, researching topics such as film archives, gender and sexuality, and Third Cinema
Writer’s Statement
My senior quote in high school was from ‘How Gender Structures the Prison System’ in Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?. It encapsulated the way gender, queerness, perceptions of deviancy, and their interwoven implications painted my experience growing up. Many years later, in university, a man told me he thought femmes fatales were empowering for women. This shook me to my core. Femme fatales felt like another construction of patriarchal, gendered punishment. While reflecting on my reaction, I realized that I have witnessed firsthand the way that patriarchy, criminality, and consequences to the rejection of cisheteropatriarchal norms poison the lives of marginalized genders, and that Davis’s writing fully formed my understanding of that as a greater systemic, social issue. This felt applicable to the conversation. After rereading this chapter and using my notes while watching classic film noirs, the results were undeniable. Davis’ observations on the prison system are one and the same with what I observed in film noir, and these permeating social constructions of gender create vast implications on marginalized genders within punitive systems; whether in prison, the media, or beyond.