Download pdf
Femme Fatale in French Film Noir
- 1 Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The term film noir was coined by two French film critics Borde and Chaumenton in 1956 to describe American detective stories mode in the 1940s. Noir films were seen as a counter-cultural movement within Hollywood at that time, and the French new wave continued this feature in the 1960s. Therefore, the term noir itself connects the Frenchness and Americanness. This paper tends to map out the film noir sensibilities in French content through unfolding the characteristics of femme fatale in two French noir films Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960) and Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981).
Keywords
Americanisation, French New Wave, Film Noir, Femme Fatale
[1]. Godard, Jean-Luc, director. À Bout De Souffle. 1959
[2]. Beineix, Jean-Jacques, director. Diva. Lionsgate Entertainment, 1981.
[3]. Sellier, Genevieve. ‘Gender, Modernism and Mass Culture in the New Wave.’ Gender and French Cinema, edited byAlex Hughes and James S.Williams, Berg, 2001, pp.125-139.
[4]. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. The MIT Press, 1995.
[5]. Forbes, Jill. The Cinema in France: After the New Wave. The Macmillan Press LTD, 1992.
[6]. Morrey, Douglas. Jean-Luc Godard. Manchester UP, 2005.
[7]. Higbee, Will. ‘Diva’. The Cinema of France, edited by Phil Powrie, Wallflower, 2005, pp.153-162.
[8]. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: the Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Indiana UP, 2017.
[9]. Handyside, Fiona. ‘Stardom and nationality: the strange case of Jean Seberg.’ Studies in French Cinema, vol.2, no.3, 2002, pp.165-176.
[10]. Fredric Jameson. Signatures of the Visible. Routledge Taylor, 2007.
[11]. Yervasi, L.Carina. “Capturing the Exclusive Representations in Beineix's “Diva”. Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, Salisbury University, 1993, pp. 38-46.
[12]. Powrie, Phil. ‘French neo-noir to hyper-noir’. European Film Noir, edited by Andrew Spicer, Manchester UP, 2007, PP.55-83.
[13]. Izod, John. ‘Beineix’s Diva and the French Cultural Unconscious’. France in Focus: Film and National Identity, edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Sue Harris, Berg, 2000, pp.181-195.
[14]. Rolls, Alistair and Walker Deborah. French and American Noir. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Cite this article
Gegen,G. (2021). Femme Fatale in French Film Noir. Advances in Humanities Research,1,1-5.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title:
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).