“Well, aren’t we ambitious”: Desire, Domesticity, and the “Femme Fatale,” or “You’ve made up your mind I’m guilty”: The Long Reach of Misreadings of Woman as Wicked in American Film Noir

2009 ◽  
pp. 41-66
Author(s):  
Julie Grossman
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
American Film ◽  
Femme Fatale

Femme fatale

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
American Film ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
French Version ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
French Film ◽  
French Culture ◽  
The City

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This chapter considers la Parisienne as femme fatale in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève(1939) and Le quai des brumes(1938), and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960). These films can be considered examples of French film noir and their female protagonists read as femme fatales. However, the femme fatale of French film noir is different from the femme fatale of American film noir; she comes from a different cultural tradition and is informed by a different cultural figure. This chapter argues that the development of the femme fatale as a cinematicarchetype passed through a cultural tradition not usually associated with the noir genre: nineteenth-century French culture and the tradition of the filles d’Eve embodied in the type la Parisienne. The French version of this archetype grew out of the popular nineteenth-century trope of the association of woman with the city and death. Indeed, there is an aesthetic and narrative overdetermination of the femme fatale by the figure of la Parisienne, particularly through iconographical motifs associated with the type, like fashion, ambiguity, sexuality and danger

The Ecologies of Film Noir

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
American Film ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
Rental Property ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Artificial World

Postwar American film noir explores an artificial world that does not foster human happiness and growth, but leads to a kind of human incapacity to act and respond. Beyond merely depicting these negative environments, noir lays bare the attachments to bad living and unsustainable striving that underwrite the accumulating culture of the Anthropocene at midcentury. Positioning itself as the genre that critiques postwar peaceful prosperity, noir gives us the characters, places, and scripts for human expiration as the counter to both nuclear survivalism and consumer capitalism. The hospitality of film noir is rental property. Indeed, impermanent dwelling of the individual and humanity as a whole is one of noir’s lessons for the Anthropocene. American noir is an ecological genre that teaches us in the spirit of Roy Scranton’s book how “to die in the Anthropocene.”

scholarly journals The Hybridization Of The Noir Genre As Expression Of Ethnic Heritage: Rafael Navarro’s Sonambulo

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Anna Marta Marini
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
American Film ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Book Series ◽  
Film Genres ◽  
Fundamental Reference

In his ongoing comic book series Sonambulo, versatile artist Rafael Navarro has been able to channel his Mexican American cultural heritage by creating a unique blend of narrative genres. In his work, Navarro exploits classic American film noir as a fundamental reference and hybridizes it with elements distinctive to a shared Chicanx heritage, such as lucha libre cinema, horror folktales, and border-crossing metaphors; the construction of an oneiric dimension helps bring the narrative together, marking it with a peculiar ambiance. Drawing heavily on a diverse range of film genres, as well as ethnocultural pivots, this comic book series carves out a definite space in the panorama of the Mexican American production of popular culture, adding a powerful voice to the expression of US ethnic minorities.

3. Censorship and politics in Hollywood noir

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-64
Author(s):  
James Naremore
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
American Film ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Standard Report ◽  
The Impact

During the period when American film noir was at its zenith, Hollywood’s self-appointed censorship agency, the Production Code Administration (PCA), exercised control over the movie studios. The PCA’s standard report form of the 1940s was manifestly puritanical and ideological. ‘Censorship and politics in Hollywood noir’ explains the strategies used to get past the strict censorship rules and considers the impact of political censorship, especially the concern with communism, and the general culture’s treatment of women and minorities on Hollywood noir through the 1940s and 1950s, a period of time that saw probably the most regulated, censored, and morally scrutinized pictures of the kind in American history.

Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart's Damage, Lacanian Tragedy, and the Ethics of Jouissance

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Mellard
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
The Real ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Slavoj Žižek

Read through Lacan and such new Lacanians as Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, Josephine Hart's Damage (1991) illustrates how an ethics of jouissance founds a tragic action emblematic of postmodern narcissism. New Lacanians stress drive, jouissance, the real, the primordial father, and the femme fatale. Typically, they find these elements in film noir. Transforming noir into love story, Damage foregrounds an unnamed narrator whose sadomasochistic affair with his son's fiancée precipitates the son's death. Beginning with the narrator in the guise of the traditional oedipal father, the affair unveils the fiancée as a femme fatale who constitutes the narrator as what MacCannell would call the destructive, narcissistic brother become primordial father. Enacting an ethics of jouissance because the narrator will not abandon his drive to enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle, primordial father and femme fatale participate in a narrative that must be called Lacanian tragedy.

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