Advances in Humanities Research
Vol. 1, 21 December 2021
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Femme Fatale in French Film Noir
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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
References
1. Godard, Jean-Luc, director. À Bout De Souffle. 1959
2. Beineix, Jean-Jacques, director. Diva. Lionsgate Entertainment, 1981.
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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.
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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.
Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- ISBN (Print)
- ISBN (Online)
- Published Date
- 21 December 2021
- Series
- Advances in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7080
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7099
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7080/1/AHR_001
- Copyright
- © 2023 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited