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

La bohème’s Paris

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
La Boheme ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

This chapter analyses the ways in which La bohème was influenced by popular romantic representations of Paris and the ways in which it, in turn, helped shape them. It discusses the late nineteenth-century Italian fascination with French culture and the way in which Puccini’s opera was nostalgically depicting an old Paris that had been swept away by Baron Haussmann’s regeneration of the city. The chapter considers Puccini’s conception of Bohemianism, demonstrating that it had Italian as well as French roots. It examines the composer and his librettists’ reading of certain archetypal Bohemian figures, such as the good-hearted demimondaine, and of symbolic Parisian locations, such as the pavement café. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Puccini’s representation of ‘picturesque poverty’ and discusses the ways in which directors have attempted to make the work more or less gritty through their stagings.

1. The idea of film noir

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
James Naremore
Keyword(s):  
Strong Influence ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
American Film ◽  
French Film ◽  
American Films ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S

The term ‘film noir’ originated with French film critics during the 1930s, but it soon became associated with American films in the mid-1940s. ‘The idea of film noir’ explains the strong influence of the Surrealists on French attitudes toward the new American films. The first and most important book on film noir was A Panorama of the American Film Noir: 1941–1953, compiled by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton. They define noir in terms of five affective qualities typical of Surrealist art: oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. Film noir continued through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and forms of the genre have spread all around the world.

scholarly journals The city as a national work of art: modernity and nation building in fin-de-siècle Lviv

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Aleksander Łupienko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Building Project ◽  
The City

Historic monuments were one of the vehicles of modern nation building in the nineteenth century. Their role could turn out to be even more exposed in an ethnically mixed territory of central and central-eastern Europe. For the turn of the twentieth-century Polish inhabitants of the capital of the Austrian crown land of Galicia, urban secular historic architecture proved to be such a key tool. The Old Town of Lviv, in itself witness of a centuries-old multi-ethnic and multi-cultural tradition, became the basis for a modern nation-building project, in which local and regional Polish character administrative bodies and social institutions were involved. The project relied on the strengthening of national identity among Lviv's inhabitants by means of securing the ‘Polish character’ of the Old Town, which amounted to reinventing it anew.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

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