Seduction and Mutually Assured Destruction

2017 ◽  
pp. 90-111
Author(s):  
Ana Cabral Martins
Keyword(s):  
Film Noir ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Pulp Fiction ◽  
David Fincher ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Cinematic Adaptation

In cinema, the most prevalent representation of the figure of the seductress has been the femme fatale or the “vamp”. This chapter will explore the femme fatale in various incarnations in American cinema throughout its history. This chapter will also overview several definitions of femme fatale, and its connection with sex, seduction and destruction, in cinema's history, principally the American silent film's “vamp”, personified by the actress Theda Bara; and the 1940s filmnoir's femme fatale, personified by actresses such as Rita Hayworth and Barbara Stanwyck. In an attempt to trace a connection between different embodiments of the femme fatale in American cinema, this chapter will focus, in particular, on David Fincher's cinematic adaptation of the pulp fiction novel Gone Girl (2012), by Gillian Flynn. Not only does Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014) offer one of the most recent interpretations of the traditional film noir trope, it also provides a modern update of the femme fatale.

Kiss Me Deadly

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Pulp Fiction ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Private Detective ◽  
The 1950S

In part because of its pulp fiction, Mickey-Spillane provenance, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) has been widely interpreted as a key text of McCarthyism, yet it’s arguably better interpreted, via the film’s repeated recourse to the X figure, as an apocalyptic one with the proviso that in the 1950s the discourse about the “red menace” is frequently imbricated with the discourse about femininity--about, that is to say, the femme fatale and female sexuality. While censorship in the form of the Production Code Administration (PCA) played a significant part in the production of Kiss Me Deadly, there’s little doubt that Robert Aldrich’s picture is a film noir since it features a private detective who, knee-deep in sex and violence, is ultimately unable to prevent an atomic detonation that can itself be interpreted as both a death and orgasm, cataclysm and resurrection.

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).

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