Volume 1
Published on December 2021The 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).
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Benedict Anderson’s masterpiece Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has influenced the discipline of national cinema greatly since its publication . This paper aims to decode British national cinema from the late 1940s to early 1960s to rediscover the situation of British society at that time through Anderson’s conception of “imagined communities”. Through reading closely on two representative British films A Matter of Life and Death (Emeric Pressburge, 1946) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), the paper portrays the great changes happened in Britain from the end of the the Second World War to the beginning of the 1960s.
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