Ingvar Ambjørnsens hytte-noir

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Rees
Keyword(s):  
Recent Trend ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Forest Landscape ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Late Modern

Abstract This article considers links between contemporary Norwegian writer Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s novel Natten drømmer om dagen (2012; The night dreams of the day) and the concept of noir, both in relation to more traditional film noir, to classic hard-boiled crime fiction, and to the recent trend in crime fiction and television known popularly as “Nordic noir”. The author argues that Ambjørnsen reworks key elements of noir aesthetics and thematics, for example relocating the setting from the more typical “urban jungle” to an equally dark and brooding forest landscape. Ambjørnsen simultaneously activates and dismantles tropes associated with both Norwegian identity (nature, the vacation cabin) and with noir (the anti-hero, the femme fatale) to create a complex social critique of late modern Norwegian society.

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

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.

Debates about the generic ontology of film noir

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Varmazi ◽  
Funda Kaya
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Critical Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Film Genres

This viewpoint discusses the various definitions given to classic film noir in order to show how the concept of film noir is difficult to demarcate as a genre, remaining a debatable subject among theoreticians. On a broader level, it might be argued that these discussions are linked with the intertextuality, the dynamism and the hybridity of film genres. One can also argue that film noir stands as one of the preliminary examples of such hybridity in the history of Western narrative cinema. Such a debate is also connected to film noir’s deviance from Hollywood conventions. While inhabiting elements from these conventions, classic noir has been affected by European film movements whilst influencing them. Noir holds a critical position to the social conditions of its era, defined usually from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. It also produces generic stereotypical characters such as the ‘hardboiled’ detective and the femme fatale that are both embraced and highly criticized by film theoreticians. However, film noir is an ambivalent concept, a category of films that can be sensed, yet resists delimitation within strict boundaries.

Costume on film: How the femme fatale’s wardrobe scripted the pictorial style of 1940s film noir

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Colpaert
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Star Image ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Double Indemnity ◽  
Mode Of Production

The character of the femme fatale and the visual style of film noir are vital elements in our understanding of that genre. Film costumes worn by the femme fatale are crucial, and are defining elements in genre recognition precisely because of their explicit cinematic visualization, rather than functioning as unequivocal signs. This article proposes a methodology for film costume researchers to conduct a pictorial analysis, without necessarily analysing film costume in terms of a meaning-making repertoire adhering to our understanding of film as a ‘language’. In the proposition of a framework for the close textual analysis of film costumes, the methodology is based on the triangulation of a shot-by-shot description, a wardrobe breakdown and an examination of production stills. This triangulation is crucial to understand the complexity of film costumes, which are defined by a wide-ranging set of factors such as: the film industry’s mode of production, the film costume’s relation to the fashion of its time, the body and star image of the actor, the work of the costume designer and his/her department, and the film-specificity. The ways in which a film costume functions in a specific shot will prove to be an important tool to analyse the pictorial characteristics of film noir and the femme fatale. To exemplify to methodology, this article proposes a close reading of an iconic film costume designed for one of the best-known performances of such a character, i.e. the white jumpsuit designed by Edith Head for Barbara Stanwyck in the closing scene of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).

scholarly journals Ethnicity and Social Critique in Tony Hilleman’s Crime Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Šárka Bubíková
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Us ◽  
Intimate Knowledge ◽  
Wide Readership

Abstract American mystery writer Tony Hillerman (1925-2008) achieved wide readership both within the United States and abroad, and, significantly, within the US both among white Americans and Native Americans. This article discusses Hillerman’s detective fiction firstly within the tradition of the genre and then focuses on particular themes and literary means the writer employs in order to disseminate knowledge about the Southwestern nations (tribes) among his readers using the framework of mystery (crime) fiction. Hillerman’s two literary detectives Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police, are analyzed and contrasted with female characters. Finally, the article analyzes the ways in which Hillerman makes the detectives’ intimate knowledge of the traditions, beliefs and rituals of the southwestern tribes and of the rough beauty of the landscape central to the novels’ plots, and how he presents cultural information.

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