French film noir

Femme fatale

La Parisienne in Cinema ◽

10.7228/manchester/9781526109538.003.0005 ◽

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

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Julien Duvivier

10.7228/manchester/9780719091148.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ben McCann

Keyword(s):

English Language ◽

Film History ◽

Film Noir ◽

French Cinema ◽

Literary Adaptation ◽

German Occupation ◽

French Film ◽

Sound Film ◽

Continuity And Change ◽

Poetic Realism

This book is the first ever English-language study of Julien Duvivier (1896-1967), once considered one of the world’s great film filmmakers. It provides new contextual and analytical readings of his films that identify his key themes and techniques, trace patterns of continuity and change, and explore critical assessments of his work over time. Throughout a five-decade career, Duvivier zigzagged between multiple genres – film noir, comedy, literary adaptation – and made over sixty films. His career intersects with important historical moments in French cinema, like the arrival of sound film, the development of the ‘poetic realism’, the exodus to America during the German Occupation, the working within the Hollywood studio system in the 1940s, and the return to France and to a much-changed film landscape in the 1950s. Often dismissed as a marginal figure in French film history, this groundbreaking book illustrates Duvivier’s eclecticism, technical efficiency and visual fluency in films such as Panique (1946) and Voici le temps des assassins (1956) alongside more familiar works like La Belle Equipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937). It will particularly appeal to scholars and students of French cinema looking for examples of a director who could comfortably straddle the realms of the popular and the auteur.

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1. The idea of film noir

Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction ◽

10.1093/actrade/9780198791744.003.0001 ◽

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.

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