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.

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.

scholarly journals Gothic Noir Filmic Male Gaze: Gender Stereotyping in Margaret Atwood’s “The Freeze-Dried Groom”

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Manuela López Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gender Stereotyping ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Artistic Representations ◽  
Freeze Dried ◽  
Males And Females

Stereotyping has been crucial in artistic representations, especially cinema, in the construction of gender paradigms. Males and females have been portrayed by means of simplified unrealistic clichés with the purpose of controlling and constraining them into patriarchal roles and conventions, promoting societal normative ideologies. Noir women are projections of male anxieties about female sexuality and female independence. In “The Freeze-Dried Groom,” Atwood unveils gender stereotyping through a typically film noir male gaze in three of its stock characters: the femme attrapée, the “detective” and the femme fatale. Hence, Atwood depicts a femme fatale to reflect not just on this character in film noir, but also on female identity, gender dynamics and feminism. She exposes and questions the marriage-family institution, and the patriarchal society as a whole.

Touch of Evil

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-162
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
Pulp Fiction ◽  
Generic Status ◽  
Private Detective ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
The Law ◽  
Crime Types ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
Historical Moment

If Touch of Evil (1958) touches on what the director, commenting on the film, calls the “abuse of police power,” this Orson Welles picture is especially pertinent in the context of the ’50s “bad cop” film, since despite the fact that it’s dominated by his performance as corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan, Touch of Evil is not customarily thought of as a rogue cop movie. Just as, say, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) has transcended its generic status as a private-detective film, so too Touch of Evil--thanks to its extraordinary formal ingenuity and expressionist rhetoric as well as its investigation of the politics of race and sexuality, the law and the border--has long since transcended its origins in Whit Masterson’s pulp fiction, Badge of Evil (1956). Welles’s picture nevertheless remains a product of a particular cultural-historical moment in which it signifies, according to Jonathan Munby, the “end of the line” of gangster noir, as well as the “passing of two distinctive crime types”: “the femme fatale,” Tanya, and the “morally ambivalent rogue cop,” Hank Quinlan.

Noir En Couleur

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Motion Picture Industry ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Black Widow ◽  
Industrial Landscape ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Interracial Romance ◽  
Female Detective

The decline of American film noir is historically coincident with the advent of the “red menace” and the “blacklist” as well as the transformation of the motion picture industry occasioned by new technologies such as Technicolor and CinemaScope. However, a close examination of color and widescreen in select feature films of the period—Black Widow (1954), House of Bamboo (1955), Slightly Scarlet (1956), and A Kiss before Dying (1956)--suggests that film noir in the 1950s in fact adapted to the rapidly changing industrial landscape of Hollywood and, in the process, engaged such “classical” and topical issues as the femme fatale, femininity, and the “murder mystery” (Black Widow), homosexuality, interracial romance, and the occupation of Japan (House of Bamboo), criminality, gangsters, and female sexuality (Slightly Scarlet), as well as class, the homme fatal, and the female detective (A Kiss before Dying).

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

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.

The Essential Ambiguity in Lope de Vega'sPeribáñez: Theme and Staging

1976 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Varey
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Country Life ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
First And Second Generation ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town

The town of Madrid was first chosen as the permanent seat of the Court in 1561; for a few years, from 1601 to 1606, Valladolid challenged Madrid's supremacy, but in that year Madrid was confirmed as the capital of Spain. The years from 1561 saw, as a result, a rapid growth in Madrid, an explosion of population and of size which was not to have its counterpart again until the 1870s and, more recently, the 1950s and 1960s. Inevitably, the growth of Madrid sucked into the town a great number of peasants and, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, a significant part of the population must have consisted of first- and second-generation town-dwellers, imbued, to judge from the evidence of the plays performed in the commercial theatres, with a nostalgia for the country-side, a nostalgia which was reinforced by and expressed in terms of the old literarytoposof the dispraise of life in the city (or at Court) and the praise of country life.

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