The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts

The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts

Also by Helen Hanson HOLLYWOOD HEROINES: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film

Also by Catherine O’Rawe AUTHORIAL ECHOES: Textuality and Self-Plagiarism in the Narrative of Luigi Pirandello

The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts Edited by

Helen Hanson and

Catherine O’Rawe

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe 2010 Individual chapters © Contributors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–20361–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Dedicated to the memory of Gerry O’Rawe (1929–2008) and Margaret Hanson (1933–2009)

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Notes on Contributors

xi

Introduction: ‘Cherchez la femme’ Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe

1

1. Ecoutez la Femme: Hear/Here Difference Griselda Pollock

9

Part I

Literary and Visual Archetypes

2. The Mother of All Femmes Fatales: Eve as Temptress in Genesis 3 Karen L. Edwards

35

3. Challenging the Stereotype: The Femme Fatale in Fin-de-Siècle Art and Early Cinema Jess Sully

46

4. Silent Divas: The Femmes Fatales of the Italian Cinema Muto Joy Ramirez

60

5. ‘You’ll Be the Death of Me’: Mata Hari and the Myth of the Femme Fatale Rosie White

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Part II Film Stars 6. Diabolically Clever – Clouzot’s French Noir Les Diaboliques (1954) Susan Hayward

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7. Fatal Femininity in Post-War British Film: Investigating the British Femme Melanie Bell

98

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Contents

8. ‘Put the Blame on ... Mei’: Zhang Ziyi and the Politics of Global Stardom Olga Kourelou

113

9. Gender, Genre and Stardom: Fatality in Italian Neorealist Cinema Catherine O’Rawe

127

Part III Femmes Fatales in European and World Cinemas 10. The Femme Fatale of Spanish Retro Noir: The Recuperation of a Repressed Voice Ann Davies

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11. Chiaroscuro: The Half-Glimpsed Femme Fatale of Italian Film Noir Mary Wood

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12. A Myth Is Born: The Femme Fatale in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema John L. Marambio and Marcie Rinka

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Part IV

Hollywood

13. ‘I Can’t Tell Anymore Whether You’re Lying’: Double Indemnity, Human Desire and the Narratology of Femmes Fatales Steve Neale 14. ‘Well, Aren’t We Ambitious’, or ‘You’ve Made up Your Mind I’m Guilty’: Reading Women as Wicked in American Film Noir Julie Grossman

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15. The Big Seduction: Feminist Film Criticism and the Femme Fatale Helen Hanson

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Index

229

Illustrations 1.

2.

Image of Herbert Draper’s ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ from Bridgeman Art Gallery Credit: Ulysses and the Sirens, 1910 (oil on canvas) by Draper, Herbert James (1864–1920) © Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) UK / The Bridgeman Art Library Nationality / copyright status: English / out of copyright Maud Allan as Salome, in the play by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Credit: Photo by Hulton Archive Getty Images

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52

3.

Image from Assunta Spina (1915) Credit: Source BFI

60

4.

Image of Greta Garbo in Mata Hari (1931) Credit: MGM / The Kobal Collection / Bull, Clarence Sinclair

73

5.

Press Materials for Easy Money (1948) Courtesy of Cinema Library Credit: The Steve Chibnall archive

104

6.

Image from Ossessione (1943) Credit: Industria Cinematografica Italiana / The Kobal Collection

127

7.

Image from Il Bandito (1946) Credit: DI Laurentiis/Lux Film / The Kobal Collection

157

8.

Image of Maria Felix Credit: The Kobal Collection

171

9.

Image of Gene Tierney in Laura (1944) Credit: 20th Century Fox / The Kobal Collection

200

ix

Acknowledgements The editors would like to acknowledge the University of Exeter, Departments of English and Modern Languages for supporting the ‘Cherchez La Femme’ conference out of which this collection arose. We would like to thank all the speakers who gave papers at that conference and those who attended and engaged in debates about the femme fatale figure, and Amy McGill and Caroline Green for acting as conference stewards. Thanks are due to Dawn Teed for providing a great deal of administrative help during and after the conference, and to staff at the Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre where the event took place. In addition Catherine O’Rawe would like to acknowledge the support of Danielle Hipkins and Derek Duncan, and Helen Hanson would like to thank Phil Wickham for his help.

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Contributors Melanie Bell is Lecturer in Film at Newcastle University. She has recently published Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2010) and is co-editor of British Woman’s Cinema (Routledge, 2009). Her most recent research focuses on women film critics in post-war Britain and the methodological questions this raises for women’s film history. She is a Steering Committee Member of the AHRC-funded ‘Women’s Film History Network – UK/Ireland’. Ann Davies is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at Newcastle University. Her books include Daniel Calparsoro (Manchester University Press), Pedro Almodóvar (Grant and Cutler) and Carmen on film: a Cultural History (Indiana University Press, with Phil Powrie, Chris Perriam and Bruce Babington). She is also co-editor of The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (Wallflower Press, with Phil Powrie and Bruce Babington) and Carmen: from Silent Film to MTV (Rodopi, with Chris Perriam). She has also written various articles on Hispanic cinema. Karen L. Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses generally on the literature and politics of the seventeenth century, especially in relation to the Bible and natural history, and more specifically on the works of John Milton. She is the author of Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’ (CUP, 1999) and Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary (Milton Quarterly, 2005–2009). Julie Grossman is Professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is co-editor of A Due Voci: The Photography of Rita Hammond (Syracuse University Press, 2003). She has published articles on film noir, the Hollywood movie musical, Todd Haynes’s Safe, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karen Finley, and Francis Ford Coppola, Hearts of Darkness, and the mockumentary. Her book Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.

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xii Contributors

Helen Hanson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (I. B. Tauris, 2007), and the co-editor (with Andrew Spicer) of the Companion to Film Noir (Blackwell, forthcoming). She has written essays on the gothic film in Gothic Studies Journal, film sound style in the neo-noir thriller in Neo-Noir (Wallflower, 2009) and sound in film noir in The Cambridge Companion to Film Music (Cambridge, forthcoming). She is currently researching film sound work and film sound style in the Hollywood studio system. Susan Hayward is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on French cinema; her books include: French National Cinema (Routledge, 2005), Luc Besson (Manchester, 2007), Simone Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign (Continuum, 2004), Les Diaboliques (I. B. Tauris, 2005) and French Costume Drama of the 1950s: Fashioning Politics in Film (forthcoming). She is also the author of Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2006). Olga Kourelou is currently completing a PhD thesis at King’s College London, on the topic of national and transnational stardom in the Greek context. Her research interests are in star studies and national and transnational cinema, with an emphasis on European cinema and Hollywood. Her work has been published in Ruby Cheung and David Fleming (eds), Cinemas, Identities and Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), and in Raphaëlle Moine, Brigitte Rollet and Geneviève Sellier (eds), Policiers et criminels: un genre européen sur grand et petit écrans (Paris: L’Harmattan, Champs Visuels, 2009). Dr John L. Marambio is a Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the University of San Diego, San Diego, California. He holds a degree from Texas Tech University. Dr Marambio has co-authored several articles on the Latino image as portrayed by Hollywood. He is also the author of several articles on Latin American literature and has published Julio Cortázar y sus mundos literarios (2000). Dr Marambio has lectured in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Steve Neale is Professor of Film Studies at Exeter University. He is the author of Genre and Hollywood (Routledge, 2000), co-author of Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Wayne State University Press, 2010), editor of Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (BFI, 2002) and co-editor of ‘Un-American’ Hollywood: Politics And Film In The Blacklist Era (Rutgers University Press, 2007).

Contributors xiii

Catherine O’Rawe is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Bristol. She is currently working on a monograph on Italian neorealism and Hollywood, and has articles published and in press on Romanzo criminale, Angela, and masculinity in contemporary Italian cinema. She is co-editor with Alan O’Leary of the special issue of the journal Italian Studies on ‘Thinking Italian Film’ (2008). Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds, England. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, developing methods and theories of international, feminist post-colonial cultural analysis with a current focus on trauma. Her recent publications include Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2007), as well as edited collections on Encountering Eva Hesse (with Vanessa Corby, 2006), Museums after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement (with Joyce Zemans, 2007), Psychoanalysis and the Image (2006), Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis (2007), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (2007) and Bluebeard’s Legacy: Death and Secrets from Bartòk to Hitchcock (with Victoria Anderson, 2008). Forthcoming are Reading Van Gogh: Memory and Modernity, Theater of Memory: Allothanatography and Trauma in Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre? and Trauma and Aesthetic Inscription/Encryption in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Joy Ramirez, PhD, Comparative Literature, has taught Italian literature and film at the University of Colorado, the Colorado College and Vanderbilt University. She has lectured and published on topics ranging from film and feminism to Las Vegas and its Italian architectural models. She writes about food and culture, develops and leads educational and culinary trips to Italy and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Marcie Rinka received her doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese from Tulane University. She has taught all levels of Spanish language and literature at several US universities, most recently the University of San Diego. Her research interests include Latin American cinema, Latin American women writers, and feminist literary theory. In addition to publishing numerous entries in The Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Cultures (Routledge, 2001) and Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2009), she is author of a Spanish conversation textbook, Revista: conversación sin barreras (Vista, 2007).

xiv Contributors

Jess Sully completed an MPhil in Comparative Literature and History of Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2006; her thesis challenged the prevalent stereotype of the femme fatale in art and literature, c.1850–1910, with a particular emphasis on Symbolism and Decadence. She now works for a government-funded project that accelerates innovation in the creative industries by bringing together creative businesses, technology developers and other interested parties to share ideas and inspiration. Rosie White is a Senior Lecturer in English at Northumbria University. Her research interests include the novels of Michele Roberts, violent women in popular fiction, film and television, and representations of women spies in popular culture. Her monograph Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture was published by Routledge in October 2007 and she is currently developing work on women and television comedy. Mary Wood is Professor of European Cinema at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Head of the Department of Media and Cultural Studies and responsible for a large film and media programme. Her publications include articles on Italian political cinema, particularly the films of Francesco Rosi; representations of space and landscape; popular crime films and representations of right-wing terrorism. She is the author of Italian Cinema (Berg, 2005) and Contemporary European Cinema (Hodder Arnold, 2007). She is currently completing a chapter on Franco Zeffirelli and the problem of critical value. Her research on Italian film noir continues.

Introduction: ‘Cherchez la femme’ Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe

The dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction is among the oldest themes of art, literature, mythology and religion in western culture. She is as old as Eve, and as current as today’s movies, comic books and dime novels. (Place 1998: 47) She appears time and again in art, poetry and fiction either in her mythical forms or in contemporary guise: she can be prostitute, man-hunting aristocrat, vampire, African queen, native (black) woman or murderess. She crosses boundaries of class and race. (Stott 1992: viii) This collection of essays seeks to engage with figurations of the femme fatale in a wide range of cultural texts, at different socio-historical junctures and in distinct national/geographical terrains. The idea for the collection arose from a distinct sense that, while the femme fatale figure is a recurrent presence in both popular and high culture, the figure is a perennial site of uncertainty, raising challenging questions and inviting further investigation. The femme fatale is thus read simultaneously as both entrenched cultural stereotype and yet never quite fully known: she is always beyond definition. This sense of mystery, of a concealed identity always just beyond the visible surface, is common in critical discussions of the femme fatale. Indeed, Mary Ann Doane opens her influential discussion of the femme fatale by positing unknowability as her key feature: ‘the femme fatale is the figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential 1

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Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe

epistemological trauma. For her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she seems to be’ (Doane 1991: 1). Conventionally, the femme is, in diegetic and critical terms, both unknowable and an index of unknowability, always representing more than can be articulated. Doane’s model of epistemological trauma emphasizes and interrogates the ‘legibility’ of the femme, the fetishism of her powerfully attractive visual appearance, which is held in tension with the desire to uncover her hidden essence. In addition, the ‘secret’ of the femme, her motivation, her essence, where she comes from, makes her a readable figure for ‘the epistemological drive of narrative itself, the hermeneutic structuration of the classical text’ (Doane 1991: 1). Given her status as locus of mystery, it is appropriate that in the twentieth-century context the femme fatale figure has often been looked for and located within discussions of film noir, with its emphasis on mystery, darkness, motivation and revelation. Indeed, the link between the femme and noir can be read as in many ways a tautological one: if a film has a femme fatale, it is a film noir, and in order to qualify as a noir, the femme is indispensable. Feminist work, particularly in the 1970s, on the femme as an operation of narrative identified a certain ‘resistance’ in the figure which has been picked up as a mode of feminist agency: the collection Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan (1978, 1998) contained many essays which examined the femme fatale as narratively or textually ‘contained’ but culturally resonant and ideologically challenging, and available to be read ‘against the grain’. This volume focused particularly on the female protagonists of a group of canonical noirs, such as Phyllis Dietrichson of Double Indemnity (Wilder 1944), Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Garnett 1946) and of course the eponymous protagonist of Gilda (Charles Vidor 1946). The attraction to feminist critics of the femme resides in the terminal ambiguity of her active sexuality, her narrative agency, her ‘visual centrality’ (Place 1998: 54) and, conversely, the problematic nature of this sexual ‘power’; critics have decried her role as a textual fantasy, and interrogated the enduring stereotype of the sexually powerful woman as a ‘symptom of male fears about feminism’ (Doane 1991: 2–3).1 However, critics have worked to challenge this overdetermination of the femme fatale as a noir icon, attempting to displace her from this position of centrality within the genre. Angela Martin noted the inability of noir critics to recognize female characters as performing other narrative functions than that of the femme fatale (Martin 1998); Richard Dyer looked for access to the interiority of Gilda, challenging the idea of her unknowability (Dyer 1998). Elisabeth Bronfen, meanwhile,

Introduction: ‘Cherchez la femme’ 3

has argued that the process of reading the femme fatale in film noir as merely ‘acted upon’ replicates her visual fetishism and overlooks her tragic self-awareness.2 The tendency to ‘read the femme fatale either as an embodiment of threat or as a textual enigma’ overlooks her agency and ‘tragic sensibility’. It is also worth noting that the privileging of noir as the location of the femme overlooks the range of ambiguous and tough female characters in crime film and ‘drama’ in Hollywood of the 1940s and their cross-gendered appeal. Retrospective critical constructions of noir as a male genre do not correspond to the historical and industrial reality of the 1940s (see Hanson 2007: 1–32). The femme fatale is a category as durable, malleable and resistant to definition as noir itself: both terms inevitably evoke more than they describe. In a desire to reach beyond film noir and Hollywood, and to avoid replicating the linkage between the femme fatale and film noir, the emphasis in this volume is on tracing the roots of the femme fatale figure across cultures and periods, and on restoring much-needed context by exploring the transnational and historical origins and intertexts out of which this complex feminine archetype has arisen. Each manifestation of the femme fatale has to be studied in relation to its local context and history, as well as in relation to the ways it may have absorbed other traditions of representation. Although the idea of the femme fatale is ‘as old as Eve’, or indeed as old as Lilith, Adam’s first wife, turned demon and succubus,3 the femme fatale, at least in Western literature and art, ‘is only formulated as a clear and recognizable “type” in the late nineteenth century’ (Stott 1992: ix). Across the field of production of European decadentism and symbolism, in the visual arts and literature representations of fatal women drawing upon the archetypes of religion and myth – Judith, Delilah, Lilith, Salome, Circe, Medusa – proliferated. However, Stott argues for the rootedness of the femme fatale in a British fin-de-siècle marked by anxieties over women’s emancipation, and an interest in the punitive classification of female sexuality, a project, she argues, that is congruent with the contemporary imperialist mapping of the unknown. Ultimately, the femme fatale is ‘a sign, a figure who crosses discourse boundaries, who is to be found at the intersection of Western racial, sexual and imperial anxieties’ (Stott 1992: 30). Thus the femme fatale marks the borders of race and sex, and her ‘darkness’ is the perfect trope of both her illegibility and unknowability, and of the threat of miscegenation and ‘male fears of an engulfing femininity’ (Huyssen 1986: 52–3).4 Figures in artworks such as Salome, Rider Haggard’s She, and Bram Stoker’s female vampires bear out for Stott the

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Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe

extent to which the femme fatale is emblem not just of Otherness, but of ‘chaos, darkness, death, all that lies beyond the safe, the known, and the normal’ (Stott 1992: 37). In symptomatic readings of the fin-de-siècle femme, she also operates as a figure uniting concerns about social class and economic mobility. The body of the woman becomes a trope of capitalist modernity, and Dijkstra reads the vampire figure as addressing these concerns: ‘by 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership and money’ (1986: 351).5 When the woman enters the public sphere she becomes currency; hence the increasing slippage from the nineteenth century onwards between the figures of the actress, the prostitute and the femme fatale.6 Doane points to this slippage between the female flâneur wandering through the urban space of Paris and the prostitute: both represent ‘sexuality out of bounds precisely as a result of woman’s revised relation to space’ (1991: 263). Andreas Huyssen goes further, by arguing that fin-de-siècle discourse obsessively genders mass culture itself as feminine and castrating (Huyssen 1986: 47): within that context the femme fatale’s association with ‘new technologies of production and reproduction’ (Doane 1991: 1), which include the cinema, mediate how the relationship between women and modernity is imagined. In putting together this collection we have been particularly interested in how the collected perspectives on the femme fatale allow us to trace movements between archetypal representations and more local specificities. Essays in the collection explore the cultural and historical specificity of the femme fatale figure in context, as well as how particular media and art forms imagine and disseminate the figure. Rather than trying to resolve the multiple definitions or terminological disputes over the classification of the femme fatale figure, the essays in the collection make a virtue of the proliferation and diversity of fatal female figures. Analyses encompass Eve, the Sirens, Salome, Mata Hari, Vamps, Divas, La Dolente, La Malinche, ruthless women, and ‘good-bad girls’. The volume begins with Griselda Pollock’s injunction: ‘Ecoutez la Femme’. In instructing us to listen to the femme fatale, she moves away from the fixity of visual representations to explore the role of the acoustic imaginary and the dangerous allure of the female voice. Her essay analyses how both the visual arts and the cinematic imagine and offer constructions of the feminine, suggesting that the sonic realm can offer new ways of thinking of female subjectivity and identity. The collection is subsequently organized into sections, so that essays grouped together speak to each other. Section One, on literary and

Introduction: ‘Cherchez la femme’ 5

visual archetypes, opens with Karen Edwards addressing Eve as one of the originary fatal female figures, but through her close reading of Genesis she restores an important and neglected aspect to Eve, showing that her vitality is as evident as her fatality. Ranging from the visual arts movements of symbolism and decadentism to early cinema, Jess Sully’s essay traces incarnations of Salome, showing how these figures intertwine tradition and modernity, femininity and androgyny. Joy Ramirez then locates the emergence of the diva figure within Italian silent cinema, drawing attention to the ways in which the diva embodied both formal and cultural contradictions in the influential diva films, which navigated anxieties about modernity and change. Rosie White’s essay on Mata Hari also addresses these tensions around femininity and modernity, exploring a case study in myth-making: Mata Hari. She investigates the exaggeration of Mata Hari’s activities as a spy and the fabrication of her identity as an exotic figure. The essays in Section Two all focus in different ways on how the meanings and performances of stars interact with figurations of the femme fatale in specific film-making contexts. Through close formal analysis of mise-en-scène, framing and performance Susan Hayward explores how Simone Signoret can be read as a ‘queer femme’ in Henri Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955). Melanie Bell’s contextual analysis of fatal femininity in British post-war cinema offers fresh perspectives on stars (Greta Gynt), archetypes (female poisoners) and blended genres (the interaction between the crime and gothic films in Britain), all of which interestingly modify the image of the femme fatale. Olga Kourelou’s focus is on the politics of transnational stardom. She shows how Zhang Ziyi’s formation as a global star involves a crystallization of female archetypes from different genres and with distinct meanings. Kourelou argues that the way in which these are held together within Zhang Ziyi’s star image reveals the tensions between the global circulation of genres and culturally specific contexts. Catherine O’Rawe’s essay also addresses transnational cultural and critical transmissions, this time between European and Hollywood cinema: she analyses the ways in which ‘the national’ has been a key concept in critical constructions of Italian neorealism, while the presence of the femme fatale in a number of neorealist films evidences the influence of Hollywood cinema. O’Rawe’s analysis of the gendered star dynamics of Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti in Ossessione, and Silvana Mangano and American star Doris Dowling in Riso amaro, reveals new and ‘different national and cultural ways of knowing’ the femme fatale, and points up the critical boundaries of neorealism and film noir.

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Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe

Section Three includes essays which map the presence and use of the femme fatale in Spanish, Italian and Mexican cinema. Ann Davies argues that in Spanish ‘retro noir’ the femme fatale’s resistance to patriarchal oppression has a wider political meaning as a repudiation of Francoist values. Mary Wood’s essay, meanwhile, concentrates on the specificities of ‘la dolente’, the Italian femme fatale, a figure of suffering which modifies American film noir conventions to fit an Italian context. Wood notes how Italian film noir exposes social problems and works through political realities. She maps the ‘mutations’ of the femme fatale in a period which spans the initial influence of American noir in the 1940s through to the contemporary period, showing how the figure ‘metaphorize[s] existing social and political relations’. Marcie Rinka’s and John Marambio’s essay explores an oppositional paradigm between iconic figures in Mexican culture, the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche, a figure with an ambivalent cultural heritage, considered as a betrayer by some people and by others a figure unifying Spanish and Aztec cultures. Rinka and Marambio discuss how films such as Don ˇ a Barbara (Fernando de Fuentes 1943) exploited these ambiguities and succeeded in reworking the femme fatale to speak to a Latin American context. The focus of Section Four is Hollywood cinema. Steve Neale convincingly shows that the way in which femme fatale figures are accessed by viewers is dependent on the mode of narration. By contrasting Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) with Vicki (Gloria Grahame) in Human Desire Neale shows that character traits attributed to femmes fatales are conditioned by the extent to which knowledge of character motivation is communicated to or withheld from the viewer. Thus Neale offers a flexible and nuanced approach, which can account for the differences in a range of film characterizations. Julie Grossman argues that the strong cultural ‘ideation’ of the fatal woman has often distorted readings of women in film noir. She re-reads a range of independent female characters in 1940s American film noir, focusing on their qualities of ambition as a way to move out of an ‘interpretive dead-end’. Finally, Helen Hanson’s essay traces an overview of the currency of the American femme fatale in feminist film criticism. She notes the shifts in that currency and traces the place and value of the femme fatale as a complex body of ideas. To take another example of critical gender trouble, Shoshana Felman, in her seminal 1977 article on the critical debates over Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, debates which raged over the madness or otherwise of the female protagonist, and her reliability, observed how ‘pronouncements from the various sides of the controversy [ ... ] repeat

Introduction: ‘Cherchez la femme’ 7

unwittingly – with spectacular regularity – all the main lexical motifs of the text’ (Felman 2007: 19). Identifying the ways in which criticism on the novel responded to the ‘scandal’ of its psychoanalytic readings, and tracing the specular relationship between the textual tropes of violence, madness, scandal, the uncanny and unreality, and its learned readers, she noted how ‘the critical debate participates in and reproduces the terms of the text itself’, and how the critical language itself became a type of textual madness. Although we do not wish to make similar claims for the body of criticism on the femme fatale, there are, nevertheless, some striking congruences. It is true that we inevitably approach the femme fatale through the critical inheritance we have of her (Hanson demonstrates, in historicizing the reception of the cinematic femme fatale, how different critical issues have been at stake at different moments of her reception for different groups).7 But critical fascination with the myth of the femme fatale, whether with her ontological status, with her ‘generative potency’, to quote Felman on James (Felman 2007: 17), or with the possibility of her redemption in the demonstration by the alert critic of her symptomatic function in rupturing patriarchal structures, is, above all, a constant return to the femme, a manifestation of an endlessly unfulfilled desire. We, as critics, feel that something powerful is at stake here, manifested in the twin critical motifs of ‘finding’ the femme fatale in the text (in the sense of locating her within a representational history of fatal women) and of ‘saving’ her from the ‘scandal’ of her critical misinterpretation. In this collection we do not seek to arrive at a ‘true’ version of the femme fatale, but rather to recognize the ways in which our critical language rehearses, productively and uneasily, the tropes of the femme herself.

Notes 1. See Bronfen on the ‘critical prejudice which, by treating [the femme fatale] as a symptom of masculine anxieties and not as a subject of feminine desire, allows us as critics to avoid the tragic message she relentlessly embodies’ (Bronfen 2004: 115). 2. ‘Yet the problem with reading the femme fatale as a stereotype of feminine evil, as a symptom of male anxiety, or as a catchphrase for the danger of sexual difference is that it treats this tragic feminine heroine as an encoded figure who exists only as the phantasmic emanation of others, who is acted upon and, when necessary, extinguished, rather than treating her as a separate subject who has agency and is responsible for her decisions. In so doing, feminist critics unwittingly imitate precisely the gesture of fetishism performed by Walter Neff at the very beginning of Double Indemnity, when he

8

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe fixes his gaze on the golden bracelet Phyllis Dietrichson is wearing around her ankle, rather than acknowledging her as a separate human being’ (Bronfen 2004: 114). On the Romantic recuperation of Lilith by artists such as Rossetti, see Bullen (1999). See Gilman (1985: 30) on Mérimée’s Carmen (1845) as the quintessential Other: female, black, a gypsy, proletarian. See also Evans (2003: 129). Work by nineteenth-century positivist criminologists such as the Italian Cesare Lombroso linked femininity, deception, performance and prostitution. See Dalle Vacche (2008: 131). In this way we are always obliged to perform a ‘reading of the text that will at the same time be articulated with a reading of its readings’ (Felman 2007: 22).

Works cited Bronfen, E. (2004), ‘Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire’, in New Literary History, 35:1, 103–16. Bullen, J. (1999), ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Mirror of Masculine Desire’, in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 21, 329–52. Dalle Vacche, A. (2008), Diva: Passion and Defiance in Early Italian Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. Dijkstra, B. (1986), Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Dyer, R. (1998), ‘Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI, pp. 115–22. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven: Yale University Press. Felman, S. (2007), ‘Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation)’, in S. Felman, E. Sun, E. Peretz and U. Baer (eds), The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader, New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 15–50. Gilman, S. L. (1985), Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hanson, H. (2007), Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, London: I.B. Tauris. Huyssen, A. (1986), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaplan, E. A. (1998), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI. Martin, A. (1998), ‘ “Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!”: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI. Place, J. (1998), ‘Women in Film Noir’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI, pp. 47–68. Stott, R. (1992), The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death, London: Macmillan.

1 Ecoutez la Femme: Hear/Here Difference Griselda Pollock

Illustration 1 Image of Herbert Draper’s ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ from Bridgeman Art Gallery. Credit: Ulysses and the Sirens, 1910 (oil on canvas) by Draper, Herbert James (1864–1920). © Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery) UK / The Bridgeman Art Library. Nationality / copyright status: English / out of copyright.

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The Sirens appear in Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey. After returning from the underworld, Odysseus and his men are received by Circe, luring the men back to pure animality, but she turns helper, and prepares them for the next stage of their homeward journey. She warns them of several dangers ahead, one of which is the Sirens, who spellbind any man alive, whoever comes their way. Whoever draws too close, off guard, and catches the Sirens’ voices in the air – no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him, no happy children beaming up at their father’s face. The high thrilling song of the Sirens will transfix him, lolling in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shrivelling on their bones. (Homer, Odyssey, Book XII, 48–57) Although complex in their origins as singing sea nymphs or hairless bird-women hybrids, with etymological associations with bees (hence their honeyed voices), the Sirens, always plural, introduce into the imaginary of western culture a radical alterity that binds the feminine, as what is excessive to social order, and hence linked with the nonhuman but also the prehuman/prehistoric, with nature, material and imaginative domination of which alone produces the identity between the social, the cultural and the masculine. If the Sirens represent otherness to Man, the danger attributed to the allure of that otherness consolidates a particular construction of the human subject as he who can resist their dangerous seduction. Thus the human subject is produced firstly in terms of gender, that is, in the masculine, but also in terms of a historically specific mode of a widespread socio-political-economic system: heterosexual patriarchy. For the temporarily wandering man (the Odyssey as allegory of the nobody – Odysseus’s name can also mean ‘nobody’ – undertaking the ordeal of his own re-formation, rediscovery), who listens to the Sirens’ song, there is no return to/or arrival at the oikos, home, no return to or arrival at his varied servants and dependents, no mirroring back through women and children of his consolidated subject position signified by the terms/positions of husband, father, proprietor and overlord. Thus the Sirens’ song and the words they sing offer something radically dangerous, beyond pleasure, suspending time, without labour, which the subject created in resistance to them considers jouissance, and, hence, death. It is experienced as a kind of going back, rather than going home to the proper place of the proper man. The lure of the Sirens can be translated into the fatal woman precisely when jouissance is linked to death and identified with

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what man qua man must leave behind in order to move on, into life, his life or production, his work of domination and dominance. I would like to draw attention to three things in the iconic image created by the Homeric text cited above. The Sirens are an image of enchanting sound, not of sight. Sound travels across space but is also a call from and back to the past. Through sound and its capacity to travel from its source, enter and vibrate within the subject, stirring his own body and memory, they can spellbind and transfix if a man draws too close – lured by sound to its oral and buccal source. Their sound suggests not only what comes forth from the body’s orifice but also what is made within its throat, that cavity that is associated, transposed with the genital cavity of the female body.1 Secondly, the Sirens loll in a meadow. This idyllic, Edenic image is, however, turned vile by the evocation of a surrounding field of the unburied dead. Their meadow is an eternal cemetery that is at the same time an eternal Elysium. There is no mention of rocks or death by shipwreck – nor even cannibalism. Therefore, the Sirens appear to represent a wasted, pointless consumption of life, resulting from what, however, appears delightful – the high thrilling song whose appeal leads to the antithesis of the patriarchal discipline of the productive, domestic, settled, self-lording man of property with hearth, wife and children to welcome him, to individuate him as a manly person in contrast to this annihilating reduction to the vulnerability of his gender (as positive difference) to the primal Sirens’ voices, dragging him back to a preformed, atemporal state of oral and acoustic bliss, recapturing the air of childhood, if not of the infantile. The Sirens register in the western patriarchal imaginary the dangerous lure of a regressive memory. How does this pagan epic, The Odyssey, offer anything relevant to a study of the femme fatale in the cinematic imaginary of the twentieth century? To answer this question, my paper will explore two cinematic case studies in the wider context of modern visual culture and return to a modern reading of the Sirens in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, whose arguments about the patriarchal society represented by Odysseus will further be examined through feminist rereadings aided by psychoanalysis.

Two Case studies in cinematic sirenry: Gilda and Niagara In one of the biggest box office hits of 1946, the dazzling redhead Rita Hayworth played the title role of Gilda (Charles Vidor), which must

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represent one of the classic cinematic presentations of the American cinema’s construction of the femme fatale. 2 During the story of a tempestuous love/hate relationship between singer Gilda and smalltime gangster and casino manager Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), Rita Hayworth performs (her voice dubbed by Anita Ellis) an infamous song written by Doris Fisher and Allen Roberts: ‘Put the Blame on Mame.’ Mame, an American familiar for the given name Mary, its doubled ‘m’ associating it also with mother, is, of course, a synonym for Woman – defined within a patriarchal system. Running through a series of natural disasters from earthquakes to snowstorms and including the great Chicago fire, the song returns in each chorus to its refrain: Put the blame on Mame. History and politics are displaced as explanations of major events which are, almost mythically, the effect of the ‘sexual’ movements of a feminized Earth-woman/mother, who appears to be now so embedded in popular culture that an explicit frame of mythological thought is no longer needed to provide the ground for ideas that should have long since been displaced by science, the Enlightenment and Modernity, let alone Christianity’s long theological domination of the western imaginary. 3 But here we have, alive and well, good old paganism. It is this persistence that allows us to go back to Homer while also finding his world realized in the modern West. When they had the earthquake – in San Francisco – back in 1906 They said that old Mother Nature – was up to her old tricks. That’s the story that went around, but here’s the real lowdown – Put the blame on Mame boys, put the blame on Mame One night she started to – shim and shake– that brought on the ‘Frisco quake So you can, Put the blame on Mame boys, put the blame on Mame. Sung the first time round in an empty casino, with a melancholy slowness, accompanied by a solo guitar, to a bemused and adoring Uncle Pio (Steven Geray), the men’s toilet attendant who will finally save Gilda and Johnny from death, the song returns much more raunchily in one of the violent climaxes when, sheathed in a strapless black satin tube and black gloves, Gilda flauntingly performs the beginnings of a striptease to an excitable male audience watched in mounting horror by her now alienated and punitive husband, Johnny Farrell. In this

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latter version, her movements and the phallically fetishizing nature of her split-up-the-thigh dress gesturally elaborate the lyrics, which translate, effectively, into the statement that every disaster, natural and social, is caused by the dangerous sexuality of woman spectacularly embodied by Gilda, from whose mouth issues a song which knows it all and tells it all. We shall see later that the idea of knowing all and from the beginning is also one of the attributes of the Sirens, and of that which the Sirens represent, which must be dominated if not repressed. In her founding essay of feminist film theory, Laura Mulvey famously identified a sexual division of labour with the cinema that served as a means of handling a psychological conflict between the drives, scopophilia in particular, and the formation of the ego, linked to narcissism and leading to identification (Mulvey 1989). To handle the oscillating active/passive pleasures in looking and being looked at in relation to the subsequent formation of the ego and ego ideal, a formation at odds with the passivity of being exhibited, Mulvey argued that, in a patriarchal culture, the exhibitionist display becomes identified with the feminine, and agency and identification with the masculine. She thus drew our attention to the way in which, in Hollywood cinema, the spectacularization of the image of woman, of woman as image, tends to interrupt, temporarily, the forward drive of the narrative, whose movement is typically identified with the activity of the leading masculine character. The suspension of action is often, in terms of storyline, justified by making the central feminine focus of the plot a showgirl who must perform for the internal as well as the external spectator, binding the diegetic space of the film and the cinematic space, which includes the spectator, into a single, eroticizing moment of entranced gazing. The linking of the exhibitionism of feminine performance with the voice, with singing, has, however, not been specifically elaborated, or linked with the Frankfurt School reading of the Homeric Sirens, which is what I want to plot out in this chapter.4 Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (1953) is a film that does not use the showgirl plot. In this film, released in early 1953, the still-aspiring star Marilyn Monroe was cast, not as the dumb blonde of her later 1953 hits such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks July 1953, where she is a very knowing singer) and How to Marry a Millionaire (Negulesco December 1953), but as a James M. Cain-style murderous wife, a former nightclub singer and waitress, Rose Loomis, conspiring cold-bloodedly with her lover Patrick (Richard Allan) to kill her jealous, psychologically

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damaged, war veteran husband George Loomis, played by Joseph Cotten. The most iconic image of Monroe, later used by Andy Warhol in his mournful homage to the prematurely dead star in the Marilyn series made after August 1962, comes from the Niagara-related photoshoots, which photographically completed the transformation of a pretty, smiling, brown-haired factory girl discovered in 1944 into a new kind of 1950s sultry cinematic icon of a golden fatal femininity that was created at the intersection of a range of physical, surgical, cosmetic, chemical, photographic and cinematic practices that had produced, and were in process of transforming, what Roland Barthes, writing of Greta Garbo in cinema’s golden age, had named ‘the faceobject’ (Barthes 1973: 56–7). The face-object, made possible through the cinematic innovation of close-up, is a purely cinematic effect, rich with ambivalent fantasies and underlying fears, managed by scopophilic fetishization that renders the cosmetically confectioned, and hence abstracted, female face an iconic signifier of both cinematic enchantment (loss of self as in an elixir of visual pleasure, according to Barthes) and cinematic danger, working precisely at the level of a willing yielding of the self into the gigantic field of the hugely expanded, dehumanizing, monumental but departicularized face, which can, indeed must, be read as an evocation of the primary face that haunts the human subject and lines his/her desire, namely the mother’s face (see Doane 2003; Kristeva 1979: 271–94). Visually, therefore, this cinematic moment of the encounter with beauty can be understood as the iconized form of that other enveloping memory of the maternal voice, and hence as Sirenic: it contains the lure of both loss of self and the offer of regression into a self-effacing state of yielding to a jouissance with and of the other, the m/Other. The problem is that this lure and promise are both exceedingly powerful and dangerous to the concept of the subject in the masculine, created in a phallocentric model, in which the continuing longing for contact with the primordial, archaic m/Other can only be experienced as threatening to the self consolidated by means of absolute separation from, and abjection of, what is degraded as merely the maternal body.5 In an attempt to deconstruct this suturing of fatality, deadliness and feminine beauty within the cinematic in order to open up other possibilities embedded in the Sirenic, I would like to move us beyond the usual iconographic and novelistic, or even the textual, readings of the femme fatale in cinema. Looking beyond plots, genres or characters, I want to offer an acoustic footnote to Laura Mulvey’s ever-fruitful

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founding feminist essay, whose opening words are these: This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. (Mulvey 1989: 14) If cinema replays to the subject by means of anthropomorphized storytelling the structural processes of the complex, ambivalent and sacrificial formations of subjectivity under determinate socio-historical conditions, it does so by both inviting regression and reinstating the law. At the level of film form, the tensions between narrative and spectacle, between the masculine/law and the feminine/otherness, are thus opened and put into dramatic motion. Mulvey, however, identifies the fascination as a key mechanism by which we are lured into this replay/ re-establishment. A close reading of two scenes from Niagara foregrounds the issue of sound, song and what I want to propose as the siren-like allure of cinematic fascination, which is anthropomorphized at the level of the iconic sign in the image of the singing woman. We have tended to focus this question of fascination exclusively on the gaze, the image and the spectacle. Mulvey explains it at the juncture of Freudian theories of the drive (scopophilia) and the Lacanian theory of the imaginary (identification) and the Symbolic, hinged by castration, through which the once-desirable sight of the exhibitionist feminine becomes a threatening bearer of the wound of castration against which the masculinized subject must defend himself through either fetishistic scopophilia (making the image distractingly beautiful) or sadistic voyeurism (using identification with a narrative of sadism to punish the woman). Here I want to suggest in addition that cinema bears the traces of the Homeric, textual origin of western concepts of feminine fatality precisely in the enveloping mixture of image and sound, especially through the binding of sexuality and music that uniquely produced a cinematic condensation in the audio-visual spectacle that is the singing ‘woman’ on screen. Although a thriller, Niagara has a core scene that places this condensation before the viewer, while also revealing the underlying drag of infantile memory that supports the apparently adult attractions and dangers of the femme fatale. Niagara Scene 6 opens with a close-up of a gramophone – the initial instrument for both recording and transmitting sound, that disembodied voice, isolating its power of seduction – to which a group of

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young dancers move in coupled pairs.6 One of these couples is Ray and Polly Cutler (Casey Adams and Jean Peters), nice, homely, bourgeois sales manager and wife on a second honeymoon. For the evening party under the stars, Polly Cutler is dressed in white with tidy hair in a youthful ponytail. The camera passes the closed door of Cabin B, the Loomises’, when the Cutlers take a break from dancing. The door opens and discloses, in close-up of face and body, an erotically, visually marked Rose Loomis (Marilyn Monroe) – whose shining, artificially blonde hair colour, brilliant red dress clearly worn over a virtually naked body, and solitude draw the viewer’s eye to their saturated visual beauty. Her exceptional erotic charge, visualized in the redness of the dress, is underlined by onlooker Ray Cutler’s comments to his wife about needing a fire hose. Rose Loomis hovers at the gramophone, and asks the disc jockey to play the disc she holds out – Kiss – the overt sexuality is underlined by the naming of its title by the young man as he sets it on the gramophone. Her sexual presence leads a young dancer to approach Rose Loomis, who, with a look at the menacing shadow of her jealous husband from behind the blinds of their cabin, refuses the offer and moves off to sit with the Cutlers. The film now moves into a different register, which will fade out the surrounding narrative context to linger on the close-up image of the face of Monroe singing, lost in her own remembered, desired or imagined pleasure, while offering the sight of it to the free-floating viewer, who, through dislocation offered through the close-up, vicariously shares the moment of absorption in the song – about love, holding and kissing: a now-eroticized repetition of a lost infantile memory. The camera has moved in, changed filters and focused onto the face of Rose Loomis/Marilyn Monroe, who joins in with the record, which is sung by a group of voices whose gender is hard to distinguish. She lays over their indeterminate ‘backing’ her own singular rendering, at a different, syncopated tempo, in her husky, erotically charged voice. The autoeroticism of her singing imaginatively replays the orality of a kiss as the camera focuses on the image of Monroe’s mouth pleasurably forming the words. This prolonged moment of cinematic absorption and visual contemplation is rudely interrupted by an eruption of the husband, George Loomis, and the source of the sound is broken in an indirect attack on the woman who loves the song and longs for the kiss of love. He violently breaks the record, wounding his own hand in the process. His pathology is expressed cinematically in his inability to endure the power of the song, which signifies, affectively, her sexuality and its excess, that is, its being unconfined within the

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marriage. Unlike the hero Odysseus, George Loomis is unbound and the only means of controlling the appeal of the Sirenic song is possession of the woman, reclaiming her from her courtesan status and subduing her as the wife, or her death. The scene changes and Rose Loomis is seen making a phone call – another acoustic technology in which voice and close-up of the mouth become important. She is humming the song, Kiss, again. She is making a clandestine call to her lover, and, after making the arrangements for the murder on the morrow, he returns to his boarding house room, humming softly the same tune. The song has now travelled ‘down the wires’ to acquire its own signifying freight, linking Rose Loomis diegetically with both clandestine, illicit desire and murder. This scene ‘frames’ the more labile longing witnessed in the previous close-ups, tying it, and hence the viewers, to the point of view of the suffering husband, who, however wounded, must resist and reassert domination against this evident flouting of the law. The song will make one final appearance – the tune will be used as what turns out to be a false signal that the murder of the husband has been successfully completed. The lover promises to play the tune from the bells of the great Niagara clock tower as the sign to Rose that it has been done. For reasons unexplained, Cotten/Loomis plays this song back ironically. The iconic dimension of the song – Kiss – its swaying and suggestive melodic form, attached indexically to Rose Loomis’s sexuality, her unknown past or her secret present, is finally attached to the great bells of the tower in which she will finally be tracked down by her husband, who survived the murder attempt and killed the lover, and now comes after her. Her murder takes place, however, beneath the silent bells, images of whose menacing forms and silent stillness are repeatedly and disconcertingly intercut with the death struggle. Although he kills his wife and almost kills Polly Cutler, George Loomis remains the tragic centre of the film, doomed by his war injury and the fatal encounter with a treacherously desirable woman, which this vital scene of the singing of Kiss codes not only visually but acoustically as a siren, luring him, if indirectly, to his watery death in the falls, which are, however, presented in the trailers for the films as one of two magnificent but dangerous and identified natural forces (Monroe/Woman being the other, or both being ‘Mame’). The opening scene of the film juxtaposes the puny figure of George Loomis to the massive Falls, while a voice-over asks what repeatedly draws him to this sight, which cinematically not only offers the reverse shot that signifies what Loomis is seeing, but

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does so from his reduced point of view so that the cinema spectator is lost, as in a close-up, in a disorienting and dislocated visual image of the sheets of falling water that flatten the image and become both sublime and impossible. In the theatrical trailer for the film, the Niagara Falls are twinned with Marilyn Monroe, as this poster tries to imagine. Against dissonant and violent chords, the voice-over speaks of her as ‘the tantalizing temptress whose kisses fired men’s souls.... like a Lorelei she lured men onto their eternal destruction... Joseph Cotten is helpless in her siren’s spell’.

The Sirens: Sound, voice, fascination In 1909, the now little-known Victorian painter Herbert Draper (1863–1920) painted a vast classical machine, Ulysses and the Sirens (Leeds City Art Gallery). Created on the cusp of the transition from the age of narrative painting to that of narrative cinema, this dramatic visualization of an episode from Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey radically misreads the mytho-poetical imaginary that generated the Homeric epic. In its place we are offered the post-enlightenment embourgeoisement of myth: namely, following Barthes, the naturalization of the ideological enacted through the ‘realist’ mode of representation that denudes a complex set of symbolic and poetic texts by means of an image offered to a reductive and confused vision. The painting is not merely ill-judged illustration; its distorting translation of the power of the Sirens’ sound into their erotic appeal to vision causes a radical loss of the ambiguity that is fundamental to its pre-text, Homer’s Odyssey. Some Edwardian reviewers easily saw what they anticipated and praised the painting for the ‘vivid contrast between these normal figures (Odysseus and his men) and the weird, unearthly forms of the singing sirens’.7 The same writer continues: ‘We are made to feel how soulless are these creatures of the cruel sea, whose faces are pitiless and whose very breath is the warrant of death.’8 Other critics condemned the painting’s empty glamorization: a thin disguise for erotic girlies’ bodies. An earlier Victorian representation of Homer’s epic by John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891, oil on canvas, 100 × 201.7 cm, location: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia), conceived the Sirens’ menace by representing them as the traditional bird creatures of Greek mythology, complete with large sinister black wings hovering around the ship: they become relatives of the bird/ woman Greek Sphinx. Yet they also hover and thus impinge visually.

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What is lost is the appeal of the off-screen sound as it carries from the distance and draws the passing mariners (back) to it. Positioned close to the boat as it is strenuously rowed through the emerald waters, the viewer of Draper’s painting is drawn into the picture by the luminosity and leaning lines of the lissom white bodies of three female nudes, one of whom has a luminescent, fishy tail. First problem: they clamber onto or sit on the boat: thus a pressing physical proximity of eroticized bodies replaces the Homeric image of the hauntingly distant, alluringly acoustic unseen, never seen, Sirens. The almost lost profile of these very visible Sirens, none the less, suggests the open mouths of song: turned now into a kind of sublimated voracious orality implied in the Homeric text by the terms of the phrase ‘honeyed voices pouring from our lips’. Their outpouring is visually directed longingly towards the staring figure of Ulysses, strapped to the central mast, who is reminiscent of the Christian representation of the figure of St Anthony undergoing gross temptation. Faces grim with effort and anxiety, some of the deafened rowing men in the painting are also, however, shown as wild-eyed, staring at these very present bodies that stimulate their sight even while the apparently overpowering song is unheard. In Homer, the rowers have their ears blocked with wax so that they cannot hear, and row on, untroubled, while here, although deafened, they are not blindfolded to the temptations offered by these very visible bodies. The palely luminous naked bodies of the nymphs attaching themselves to the ship are sweetly eroticized in that coy Victorian classicist’s use of the very young female body, which allows a visual sexuality without any sense of its self-knowing display. Innocence here becomes the protection of the viewer from the fatality implied in the subject of the female bodies that so voraciously threaten the captive men. The painting has translated into an eroticized, but menacing visual fantasy the Homeric Sirens’ vocal fascination. Thus, unless one hides one’s eyes and refuses to look upon Draper’s painting, the viewer is inevitably caught up in the eroticized act of gazing that is entirely alien to the textual source and thus to what it inserted into culture as a problem. We are returned to the scopic order Mulvey identifies in its elaboration in the phallocentric erotics of the cinematic gaze. I have chosen this painting because it is a visual exercise on the cusp of the coming of cinema. Cinema would progressively declassicize such topics at the level of the subject while translating mythic material into contemporary characters and plots – rather as modernist authors such as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf did. We may look back

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with embarrassment at the theatricality of Theda Bara’s overdramatized portrayal of Cleopatra or that by Elizabeth Taylor forty years later, which would continue Hollywood’s spectacular costume dramas and historical epics. But the fatal woman of cinema would have to shed Victorian rhetoric and refind its mythic power in non-mythic forms of stories from the secular, urban and everyday: in the form of tramp, the moll, the murderess, the modern non-domestic antitheses for Penelope, wife, mother, home-maker. Beyond any of these iconicities, however, the fatal allure of the feminine sexual difference would be installed in the fascination and danger of cinema itself as an enveloping, timesuspending audio-visual entertainment.

What is the enchantment of the Sirens’ song? The visual artist has to give a plastic account of two immaterial dimensions: sound and sexuality, inserted into western culture by Homer’s indescribable figures: Sirens who link femininity, sound and flight. It is their musicality, and specifically their singing, that is, women’s ludic voices with the memory of the first voice heard without comprehending the words, the mother’s voice, consuming their own beauty for their own pleasure that appears to present the danger. According to legend, when the Argonauts passed the three rocky islands of these creatures, Orpheus took out his lyre and sang a loud and ringing song to drown out their voices. When Ulysses passed by he stopped his sailors’ ears with wax but tied himself to the mast so that he could hear and yet survive the encounter. Psychoanalytically speaking, sound is a form of what Lacan theorized as extimacy, as a mixing of intimacy and exteriority. Sound travels from outside as other, yet, entering into the subject through the ear, vibrates and envelops from within. Patterned as music, sound becomes enchanting, capturing the subject in thrall to something vibrating within the subject’s bodily spaces, through which it furthermore generates a psychic freight, an affect in the subject, indissoluble from its sensory and moving colonization of, or rather its digestion by, subjectivity.9 Beyond music is song, words set to a melody, becoming semantic, giving verbal form to the affect generated by rhythm and then melody. Thus the subject is further enthralled by what the musically phrased words promise. But who is promissory? The Sirens? What are they? In relation to music, song words and promises? Clearly, as figurations, the Sirens register more than what might be and has been visually imagined by artists such as Draper and

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Waterhouse as slimy sea-creatures or treacherous, hybrid bird-women. Such picturing reduces the idea of the Sirens to an embodied, but fetishized, feminine form set apart by physical difference from the human, figured itself only by the male body to which this sound, which must have a body to utter it and transmit it, presents a castrating, deadly threat. Of what? Dying from pleasure perhaps? According to Ackbar Abbas, reading Adorno and Horkheimer on this tiny episode of the Sirens, the danger the Sirens represent is that of fascination – the fascination of the enthralling poetry of the epic, and of the artwork itself, and especially the cinematic, which will, for the first time, through its unique technologies, combine music, sound, voice, song and image, with the duration of narrativity that enthralls its de-subjected subjects in its momentary, enveloping imaginary spell (Abbas 1999). So we need to understand Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading. The most striking, challenging, relevant and well-studied discussion of the Sirens episode of the Odyssey, therefore, occurs in the Marxist analysis of modernity and its culture industry, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) by Horkheimer and Adorno where the authors focus on the episode of the Sirens in their elaborate analysis of the unexpectedly intimate relations between myth – which the Enlightenment seemingly disowned as superstition, magic and animism – and Enlightenment itself. They trace the beginnings of the delusions of the Enlightenment to the literature of and the work done by the Homeric epic in its evocation of a mythic prehistory over which the heroic individual will come to dominate. In what might appear a difficult anachronism, Adorno and Horkheimer can, therefore, define Odysseus, the heroic centre of the Odyssey, as the prototype bourgeois and patriarchal individualist. The issue confronting such a subject is a relation to time, that is, to progress: the subject must resist the lure of the past, which comes to stand as that which must be surmounted for him to become the self who is defined by domination. The entanglement of myth, domination and labor is preserved in one of the Homeric narratives. Book XII of the Odyssey tells of the encounter with the Sirens. Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past. The hero to whom the temptation is offered has reached maturity through suffering. Throughout the many mortal perils he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the identity of the individual, has been confirmed for him. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1994: 32)

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Adorno and Horkheimer offer a complex argument about how culture – art – can take the place of and compensate for that which must be given up within this order. The compulsion to rescue what is gone as what is living instead of using it as the material of progress was appeased only in art, to which history itself appertains as a presentation of past life. So long as art declines to pass as cognition and is thus separated from practice, social practice tolerates it as it tolerates pleasure. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1994: 32) The Sirens’ song resists reduction of the condition of art in bourgeois society. The Sirens’ song not only represents alluring sound; it promises infinite knowledge of what has been: But the Sirens’ song has not been rendered powerless by reduction to the condition of art. They know ‘everything that ever happened on this fruitful earth’, including the events in which Odysseus himself took part... While they directly evoke the recent past, with the irresistible promise of pleasure as which their song is heard, they threaten the patriarchal order which renders to each man his life only in return for his full measure of time. Whoever falls for their trickery must perish, whereas only perpetual presence of mind forces an existence from human nature. Even though the Sirens know all that has happened, they demand the future as the price of that knowledge, and the promise of the happy return is the deception with which the past ensnares the one who longs for it. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1994: 33) Adorno and Horkheimer are arguing, therefore, that the Sirens represent everything that men have to forego in order to become men: namely, a certain kind of virile, individuated subject. The Sirens represent real power that must be sternly resisted. But the allurement of the Sirens remains superior [to Circe’s magic]; no one who hears their song can escape. Men had to do fearful things to themselves before the self, the identical, purposive, and virile nature of man, was formed, and something of that recurs in every childhood. The strain of holding the I together adheres to the I in all stages; and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to maintain it. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1994: 33)

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The Sirens’ offer of pleasure and knowledge has as its verso, however, a loss of the forward-driving self that distinguishes itself from the world of nature, and especially death, identified retrospectively with origin, hence with the maternal womb from which the phallic subject must separate itself by abjecting the maternal as unsignifiable, hence the unmarked, undifferentiated Thing which, none the less, and as a result, is bathed in an intensity of longing that must be resisted by being represented not as origin or life-giving encounter but as its antithesis: death, nothing, non-being, not-being-I. Against this, ‘civilization’ establishes barriers and disciplines, allowing a tiny remnant of the lost other in the form of a ‘devitalized beauty’. Hence the vitality of what is to be rejected and abjected should also be understood as representing a vital beauty that is entwined, in this phallic imaginary, with deadliness. The dread of losing the self and of abrogating altogether with the self the barrier between oneself and other life, the fear of death and destruction, is intimately associated with a promise of happiness that threatened civilization in every moment. Its road was that of obedience and labor over which fulfillment shines forth perpetually–but only as illusive appearance, as devitalized beauty. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1994: 33) Odysseus represents both a recognition of this quality or power – hence he does not take another route to avoid the islands but insists on sailing as close by as possible to hear the song – and a will to master himself in order to hear and resist at the same time. Thus he has himself bound to the mast, which is an image of both virile erection and bondage, and of submission to the discipline of the order that will ultimately vanquish this power, this radical but utterly luxurious and knowing otherness, represented by the Sirens. His men, who must do the hard labour of rowing the ship past the islands, have their ears stopped so that they, in their subordination to manual, physical labour, must work but never hear/dream/long/be tempted/ enjoy, but also so that they cannot hear his pleas to be released as the power of the song, and its words full of another promise, plays its magic on him. Thus the image of the passage, the deafened workers, the bound master, and the song rendered impotent to the pacified and constrained passer-by becomes the condition of art in bourgeois civilization, whose kernel already appears in the figure of Odysseus, who must confront the world imagined through myth but ultimately

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conquers it to become himself again. The Sirens have their own quality but in primitive bourgeois history it is neutralized to become merely the wistful longing of the passer-by. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1994: 59) Having been prepared by Circe as to how Odysseus can hear this destructive song and survive, his story of his endurance itself, as Renate Salecl has argued, becomes the basis of the poetry that silences the song that is in effect never fully inscribed in the epic poetry that reports on its power. Odysseus ties himself erect to the mast, while his sailors must labour with ears blocked to the allure of the Sirens’ song. They are prepared for its danger by a sudden eerie calm, a mysterious power that hushed the heaving swells. The song is given thus: Come closer, famous Odysseus – Achaea’s pride and glory – moor your ship on our coast so that you can hear what we two sing! Never has any sailor passed our shores in his black craft until he has heard our honeyed voices pouring from our lips, and once he hears to his heart’s content sails on, a wiser man. We know all the pain that the Greeks and Trojans once endured on the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so – all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all. (Homer, Odyssey, Book XII, 235–48) Thus we never hear the song, only the invitation to come closer to hear it. It is a lure offered by creatures who claim to know all. Odysseus relates that they sent their ‘ravishing voices out across the air’ and ‘the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer.’ Here the promise of knowledge of life and death associates the Sirens’ rising voices with the Hebrew Havvah – Eve, who is named ‘the mother of all living things’, and is thus linked with the most ancient of human mythic fantasies that took the form of the mother goddesses, the worship of the all-containing EarthLife, but who became a character because she dared to know good and evil.10 At the same time, the Homeric text suggests that the male body itself reacts by the pulsation of a sublimated sexual arousal to the lure of the voice promising this comfort of the return to the bosom of/offering all knowledge, that is to say the lack of need for the quest, the separation, for becoming other than the generating Mother. In a Lacanian reading of the Sirens as both the trauma of the drive and autonomous and indifferent feminine jouissance, Renate Salecl reminds us that the story of the Sirens has been interpreted by various

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scholars as placing the Sirens not only as a menace to certain men’s lives through this bodily susceptibility, but as a threat to the social order as such, especially the family structure, for the lure of this otherness takes men into a suspended time unrelated to production and reproduction away from the oikos, the domestic Oiko-nomy/economy on which the patriarchal state appears to itself to rest (Salecl 1997: 15). Salecl furthermore lists three scholarly explanations for the imaginative centrality of this tiny episode and its core emptiness: the void of the song that is never really described or inscribed into the Homeric text. The first is that of Pietro Pucci, who argues that ‘the Odyssey presents the Sirens as the embodiment of the paralyzing effects of the Iliadic poetics because their song binds its listeners obsessively to the fascination with death’ (cited in Salecl 1997: 16). Thus art itself is to be understood as sirenic, hence feminized and spellbinding, a distraction, suspending the time of labour and production for enjoyment. (For Adorno and Horkheimer, this too has been pacified by silencing art’s cognitive criticality in favour of passively consumed devitalized pleasure.) Pucci has a second explanation, that ‘the Sirens’ song is the negative, absent song that enables its replacement – the Odyssey – to become what it is: poetry – the reiterative narrative takes the place of the unspeakable song.’ Finally, Salecl offers Todorov’s interpretation that ‘the song of the Sirens is that poetry which must disappear for there to be life, and that reality that must die for literature to be born’ (cited in Salecl 1997: 15). The Sirens, therefore, represent singing itself, in contrast to the Homeric representation in song; in Salecl’s Lacanian reading, the Sirens represent an instance of the traumatic Real, the unsymbolizable kernel around which the Symbolic forms itself: a pressure of the corpo-real, of a jouissance of the unknowable, and therefore known to any feminine subject, feminine Other. In the dichotomous phallic constructions of sexual difference, there is the One and its Other. The phallocentric Symbolic does not comprehend the possibility of competing or complementary Symbolic or Imaginary systems in which phallicism and another, sexual difference from (rather than of) the feminine could coexist. Phallicism installs an asymmetrical masculine and feminine binary in such a way that the feminine is created as a structuring, asemic negative – Other and Thing, which, however, as a result of such an exclusion as founding trauma, unsignifiable Real, produces a permanent menace or potential threat to the Symbolic order because it also exceeds that mere, primordially repressed negativity, and always promises an as-yet-unsignified otherness of its excess to the phallic.

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Let me make this abstract idea more concrete through another literary reading. In a study of the figure of Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard’s novel She (1887), a novel about which Freud himself dreamed, John Goode analysed the struggle played out in a story that ostensibly sets a young handsome man, Vincey, and an old embittered man, Holly, to destroy a fatally destructive but powerfully attractive woman – a witch who, defying time and order, eternally rules an Amazonian kingdom of autonomous women. Even though She is ultimately destroyed, the lesson of this masculine ordeal is presented thus in radical contradistinction to the Homeric installation of a patriarchal imaginary: The glimpse into the ‘possibilities of life’ that Holly and Vincey have through Ayesha changes them completely as they are estranged from the world they have set out from and whose values they have seen triumph as ‘eternal law.’ What makes this transformation possible is the dramatization of Holly. Ugly, rejected and in terror of women, he comes to love Ayesha for the beauty and knowledge she represents, because of the vision she imparts, a supreme fiction. The journey outward becomes not a release from the past (the revenge intention) but a journey back to that past to reveal the puniness of male fear and its uncomfortable accommodation within the eternal law, so that there can be no return journey. The fatal woman is not here, as in Lilith, [George MacDonald, 1895] destroyed to make way for the eternal mother, but to affirm the law which as a result becomes unacceptable. Holly cannot accept that She has been finally destroyed; the unsought vision he has gained compels him to challenge the eternal law as She challenges it. Thus She is not merely allowed to speak for herself; She is brought into a relation with the reader via Holly. Her subjectivity modifies ours because it affirms the unity of knowledge and love. She is a fine novel because it brings us to ask the question of its project: what does the destructive woman destroy, ourselves, or ourselves’ subjugation. (Goode, cited in Mitchell and Oakley 1976: 236–67) Goode’s final sentence is profound: it links the promise offered by the Sirens to the figure of the femme fatale, inverting the menace projected into her image to reveal the real terror, the terror of phallicist masculinity attached to its own subjugation and afraid of any other ordering of being.

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In a phallic structure, Salecl places the Sirens as possible signifiers of feminine jouissance, its allure and, above all, its ultimate indifference to the masculine, its deep ignorance of the Other, and its baffling self-sufficiency. This analysis, however, places at the basis of the feminine a structural absence of subjectivity, as if the feminine lies beyond all symbolization and hence meaning-production. Goode suggests that the horror heaped upon the figure of the fatal woman is the patriarchy’s fear of its own prison house that refuses the possibility of another law than that of the productive, nature-dominating, women/ worker-subordinating capitalist–patriarchal bourgeoisie – anticipated, as Adorno and Horkheimer argued, in their vision of Mr Odysseus – the modern hero on the urban seas of female sexual danger.

Conclusion As an addendum to their annual research symposium on Fatal Women in cinema, the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Bergen in 1999 invited Bracha Ettinger to contribute some thoughts from her theoretical innovations in feminist psychoanalysis, which, although deeply honouring Lacan’s thought, radically transgress the limitations that his phallicism imposed upon the possibilities his model itself generated for theorizing another jouissance, and feminine sexual difference (Sondheim 1999). Drawing on both her artistic practice and clinical experience as an analyst, Ettinger has intuited and then formally theorized in the field of psychoanalysis a dimension of human subjectivity that not only is not ruled by an exclusively phallic signifier and hence by the mark of castration with its accompanying abjection of the maternal. Her model offers a way to imagine and think a human sexual difference from the feminine which does not relegate the feminine to the archaic, regressive, hence threateningly unsignified otherness of death in the Lacanian trio: Woman/Other/ Thing, which, recast in post-Oedipal storytelling and image-making, becomes the femme fatale. Ettinger proposes a stratum of human subjectivity that she names matrixial, incited by a primordial encounter that creates, as its initiating psychic space, a borderspace shared, but differentially experienced, by the partialized partners in this archaic encounter-event that is the effect of human becoming in the incestuous intimacy of the sexual specificity of the feminine body-subject. Nothing to do with organs and internal spaces, not in any way contravening feminist claims for women’s rights over their own bodies, not essentialistically dependent on

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body parts, matrixial theory nonetheless names this encounter-event Matrix, the Latin for womb and structure, in honour of the generating of a structure within human subjective potential by means of the encounter between the pre-natal and the pre-maternal elements of a partnership in difference, a proximity in distance. What matters here is the legacy of this traumatic Real of the archaic encounter-event for subsequent fantasy and thought, reactivating the unremembered and never-forgotten archaic event that none the less leaves its traumatic imprint on the becoming human subjectivity. For the pre-maternal subject being affected with the becoming of this living other, the experience has the quality of the traumatic, which we understand as the belated and secondary event that is both iteration and effective origination of what was hitherto unarticulated, unthoughtly known. For the pre-natal subject, it is laying down sensorially seeds that will be later garnered when a psychic apparatus is developed through which to make sense of certain impressions of jointness in difference. Under both phallocentric culture and phallically policed psychoanalytical theory, any sense that the sexual specificity of the feminine might lend anything significant to the nature and formation of human subjectivity is rigorously censored, so that even daring to think about the significance of the pre-natal/ pre-maternal relationship is deemed to be beyond the limits of psychoanalysis, in the realm of biology and dismissed even by feminism as probably essentializing. For the conclusion of this argument here, I want simply to show how the matrixial shift of the phallic paradigm allows us to escape the prison house in which becoming an I, a subject, can only be achieved by the abjection of the maternal as body, as other, as death, a nonbeing, which is, none the less, haunted by a dreaded sense of a certain luxurious, almost symbiotic, pleasure, which is then figured by the iconization as the fatal woman, as sexually desirable but deadly. Instead, we need to be able to acknowledge another level or form of non-Oedipal desire, matrixial, in which we can live with a certain longing for connectivity, which is not the same as the loss of self in the enveloping, asubjective nothingness of the Woman/Other/Thing. If the primordial, archaic m/Other was always already a subjectivity, fragilizing herself in compassionate hospitality to the becoming other with whom she shared the co-affecting, co-emerging eventencounter that is pregnancy, if we as human subjects always already co-emerged with an unknown other, a presence, sensed, heard, never seen, but which pulsated in our tiny bodies through resonance and

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vibration, through movement, rhythm and even sound, it is possible to imagine why we find pleasure, beauty even, in a longing for this re-encounter with a kind of non-fused, co-affecting connectivity with what is radically other. Matrixial theory, it must be stressed, is not about mothers and babies, already shaped by relations of subject/ object and postnatal psychic structurings over which hover separations and losses that will ultimately be caught up in and retrospectively defined by castration. The partners in the matrixial encounter are partners in ineradicable difference, but that does not mean that they cannot know something of and for the other. If it offers pleasure, or even solace, it can also make us vulnerable to the pain of the other. Ettinger writes: Matrixial awareness engenders a disturbing desire for jointness with a foreign world, with an unknown other, the uncognized, the stranger who by definition is never a total stranger when unthoughtly known and traumatically accessed. Matrixial awareness channels the subject’s desire towards the beauty and the pain, the trauma of others. My awareness cannot master you via your traces in my psyche, and there is no joining without separation or separation without joining. The desire to join-in-difference and differentiate-in-co-emerging with the Other does not promise any peace and harmony, because joining is first of all joining with-in the other’s trauma that echoes backwards to my archaic traumas: joining the other matrixially is always joining the m/Other and risking a mental fragmentation and vulnerability. A matrixial gaze arouses its own desire, which can generate dangerous encounters. It proposes no fixed settlement, no homogeneous mixture, no incision, but returning and im-pureness. The impossibility of not-sharing, the transgressivity, demands its price and originates its beauty; it has its solaces and its moments of grace, but it is profoundly fragilizing (Ettinger 2001: 108). In lieu of the binary opposition of one and the other, subject and abject, separation or fusion, singularity or symbiosis, Ettinger proposes a matrixial sphere, which refuses this logic of present/absent, plus/minus and seeks to make language bring to our understanding this other dimension which offers both beauty/solace/grace and openness to the pain of the other/fragilization of the boundary of the one-self. I am suggesting here something more than iconographic deconstruction of the femme fatale or ideological reading of the culture that produces and circulates it. Through matrixial theory we can reread what is registered

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in phallic culture through the Sirens and draw out from that trace a matrixial reading of the ordeal, allure, promise and beauty condensed into the im-pure Sirenic figures of appeal, memory, transgressive extimacy, traumatic, archaic partnership. In the Homeric text, and its modern interpretations by philosophers and cultural analysts, we find the precise description of the patriarchal– bourgeois–capitalist phallocentric model of the one human subject – Man – whose becoming exacts a price of fear and longing, projected onto the allure of, and deflected by the horror at, the fatal woman. The fate of women is then to have to live out the stories and social laws of this system, which its cultural schemata encode as the matching images of woman as fatal temptress or domesticated wife. To transform this logic and disturb this economy, to which Odysseus returns and thus returns to himself as Odysseus (and not nobody), feminist theory must pierce its very formations. But more, we must also try to understand the human subjective trauma that it genuinely embodies. If we read it not just from resisting women’s/ feminist point of view, but from a perspective that allows subjects of both sexes, including the feminine, to know something, differently, of our archaically forged longings for rapport with the m/Other, with the mother of living things, with the knowledge of everything, we can really begin imaginatively to remake culture. Thus in the cases of the famous cinematic images of the femme fatale, beyond all the coding of danger through red dresses, fetishized eroticized visual displays of the female body, plots in which they murder or menace vulnerably susceptible men, there is their beauty, or in the case of Marilyn Monroe, what I could call, following Kristevan readings of both the maternal and Ettingerian matrixial aesthetics, loveliness. When I watch her sing Kiss, the fascination of cinema is not only retelling me the story of phallocentric castration – which will narratively have to kill off Rose Loomis and make me party to her murder as the price of the pleasure of the film’s return to the law. It is suspending time and offering me, a woman spectator, and anyone else willing to draw near and hear the beautiful sound memories of archaic pleasures as well as the pain of our inevitable sense of loss and estrangement. The Sirens, the Homeric two and the Ovidian three, might not have been surrounded only by rotting flesh of those who ceased to be men. It is up to women now to create aesthetically a different knowledge of the dilemmas and ordeals of, but also the grace and beauty resulting from, human subjective becoming in a matrixial intimacy with

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the unknown other so that all that is other is not translated, as in the phallic law, into the monstrous, the menacing, the face of death. The m/Other whose sound the Sirens embed in western imaginary was like Cixous’s laughing Medusa, not grotesque and deadly, but beautiful, and singing.

Notes 1. The classic instance of this displacement occurs in psychoanalytical literature in Freud (1977: 61) (‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria [“Dora”]’). See also, in the pornographic field, the infamous film Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano 1972) with Linda Lovelace. 2. On Gilda see Doane (1991: 99–118). 3. I shall elaborate this argument later. I am drawing on Horkheimer and Adorno (1994), who in turn draw extensively on Nietzsche. This concept of paganism’s persistence and role in generating the dialectic within the Enlightenment itself as a release from the Christian Orientalism but also divided in itself is elaborated furthermore by Aby Warburg, himself influenced by Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872). 4. Silverman (1988) is a major text on the female voice in cinema, extending the Mulveyan psychoanalytical reading of the image of woman in relation to castration. She references Guy Rosolato, Doane (1991), and Chion (1999). 5. The concept of the m/Other is formulated by Bracha Ettinger in her dialogues with Lacan, who places Woman with Other and Thing in the primordial realm of the Real, beyond signification and fantasy, hence in the realm of non-sense and death. By qualifying this Lacanian Other as m/Other, she is supplementing the purely phallic account of human subjectivity with what she names the Matrixial: this defines a pre-natal/pre-maternal severality in which primordial intimations of subjectivity and subjectivizing occur through an encounter between the becoming mother and the becoming infant, an encounter sustained in the prolonged period of the pre-natal sojourn. The archaic Other is thus not non-human, or without anything to donate to human subjectivity. It is a feminine sexual difference, marked as matrixially maternal by the ‘m’ that qualifies the Other of the realm of the Real. Drawing on later Lacanian thinking about the possibility of feminine sexual difference and about the passage of affects from the Real/Trauma into fantasy and thought, Ettinger’s initiating arguments were put forward in Ettinger (1992). See also Ettinger (2006). 6. I am indebted to Barbara Engh for her work on the gramophone and the voice in cultural theory. See Engh (1997). 7. Toll (2003: 141), citing Henry Blackburn in Academy Notes (1909). 8. Ibid. 9. Jacques-Alain Miller’s concept of extimacy, taken from Lacan, is elaborated in Miller (1994). 10. This is a complex subject, the meaning of Havvah/Eve in the Hebrew Bible. For a brilliant reading see Bal (1987). See also Gimbutas (2001).

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Works cited Abbas, M. A. (1999), ‘Dialectic of Deception’, in Public Culture, 11:2, 347–63. Bal, M. (1987), ‘Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character’, in Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 104–30. Barthes, R. (1973), Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London: Paladin. Chion, M. (1999), The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorman, New York: Columbia University Press. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory and Psychoanalysis, New York and London: Routledge. Doane, M. A. (2003), ‘Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 14:3, 89–111. Engh, B. (1997), ‘Adorno and the Sirens: Telephono-graphic Bodies’, in L. C. Dunn and N. A. Jones (eds), Embodied Voices: Female Vocality in Western Culture, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 120–35. Ettinger, B. (1992), ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, in G. Pollock (ed.), Trouble in the Archives, special issue of differences, 4:3, pp. 176–208. Ettinger, B. (2001), ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze: From Phantasm to Trauma, from Phallic Structure to Matrixial Sphere’, Parallax, 7:4, 89–114. Ettinger, E. (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Freud, S. (1977), ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria [‘Dora’], Penguin Freud Library Volume 8, Case Histories I, London: Penguin Books. Gimbutas, M. (2001), The Language of the Goddess, London: Thames and Hudson. Homer (2006), Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles, London: Penguin. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (1994), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York: Continuum. Kristeva, J. (1979), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art, trans. Leon Roudiez, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miller, J.-A. (1994), ‘Extimacy’, in M. Bracher (ed.), Lacan and the Human Sciences, New York: New York University Press, pp. 74–87. Mitchell, J. and Oakley, A. (eds) (1976), The Rights and Wrongs of Women, London: Pelican. Mulvey, L. (1989), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 14–28. Salecl, R. (1997), ‘The Sirens and Feminine Jouissance’, in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 9:1, 14–28. Silverman, K. (1988), The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sondheim, K. (ed.) (1999), Fatal Women:Essays on Film Noir and Related Matters by Joan Copjec, Bracha Ettinger, Kristine Hasund, Renata Salecl, Slavoj Zizek, University of Bergen: Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, Volume II. Toll, S. (2003), Herbert Draper: 1863–1920 A Life Study, London: Antique Collectors’ Club.

Part I Literary and Visual Archetypes

2 The Mother of All Femmes Fatales: Eve as Temptress in Genesis 3 Karen L. Edwards

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, not to read the Bible through a veil of received interpretation, a proposition demonstrated with particular forcefulness in the case of Genesis 3. Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit (whether understood literally or figuratively) is popularly regarded in Christian cultures as signifying the primal sin, the ‘first disobedience’, which ‘[b]rought death into the world, and all our woe’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.1, 3). Allusions to the story of the Fall regularly assume Eve to be the archetypal femme fatale: she tempts Adam to participate with her in a divinely forbidden act in order to gain illicit knowledge, thus luring him to his death, and with him, the rest of humankind. Biblical scholarship has vigorously protested against this characterization; and, especially since the second half of the twentieth century, feminist scholars in particular have employed a range of methodological approaches to refute the notion that the Bible represents Eve as a temptress. What we now see as the first wave of twentieth-century feminism simply denounced Genesis 3. In Sexual Politics (first published in 1969), Kate Millett does so with particular vividness. ‘To blame the evils and sorrow of life – loss of Eden and the rest – on sexuality, would all too logically implicate the male, and such implication is hardly the purpose of the story, designed as it is expressly in order to blame all this world’s discomfort on the female. Therefore it is the female who is tempted first and “beguiled” by the penis, transformed into something else, a snake’ (Millett 1969; 1970: 53). A second wave of feminist scholarship attempted rather to reclaim the story in Genesis 3 for its representation of the evils of misogynistic patriarchalism. Thus Phyllis Trible concludes that ‘the Yahwist narrative tells us who we are (creatures of equality and mutuality); it tells us who we have become (creatures of oppression); and so it opens possibilities for change, for a return to our true 35

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liberation under God’ (1979: 81). A third wave of feminist scholarship declared that Genesis 3 has little to do with patriarchalism and much to do with the formation of humanness, an approach heavily relying on linguistic analysis, as discussed by Mieke Bal (1987).1 I will argue in this essay, however, that a better feminist strategy might be to accept and reconsider rather than to deny Eve’s role as the archetypal femme fatale. It is worth noting at the outset of such a project that Hebrew terms for ‘fall’, ‘sin’, and ‘disobedience’ appear nowhere in Genesis 3. Their absence encourages us to question the assumption that Eve’s ‘temptation’ is aimed at Adam’s destruction, and that the knowledge she offers him is fatal. On the contrary, I will argue, the knowledge she offers ought to be called ‘wisdom’, and the aim of her ‘temptation’ is not destruction but adulthood. Reassessing the archetype itself, that is, gives us grounds for reassessing the generations of modern femmes fatales who trace their descent from Eve. The opinion first put forward by nineteenth-century German scholars – that the book of Genesis complexly weaves together texts of diverse origins and theological perspectives – is now widely accepted. 2 The book begins with two very different accounts of Creation. The second of these includes the creation of Eve and proceeds seamlessly to the story of the Fall. I will argue in this essay that the first account of Creation also contributes to our understanding of the nature of the first femme fatale, although how it does so is not immediately apparent. Genesis 1–2.4a, the first account, belongs to what is now called the Priestly (or P) source because of its emphasis upon ritual and the importance of the priesthood; Genesis 2.4b–25 belongs to the Jahwist (or J) source, so called from the German spelling of the name it uses for God, YHWH (or Yahweh), usually translated into English as ‘the Lord God’. The Priestly account, which uses the name Elohim for God, 3 describes the creation of the natural world, including humankind, as the result of a divine performative utterance. After proclaiming the first act of Creation – ‘Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light’ (Genesis 1.2) – P moves through Elohim’s creation of the whole of the universe and its culmination in humankind: 26 Then God said, Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness ... 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1)4

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The Yahwist account, in contrast, is solely concerned with the creation of humankind. The rest of the natural world is mentioned only in passing as J tells of Yahweh’s kneading the earth to create man and then forming woman from the man’s body: 7 then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. * * * 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. (Genesis 2) Although it appears after the Priestly account, the Yahwist account is almost certainly older. The fact that it comes second means, in effect, that it has been placed in an interpretive framework conditioned by the P material. Scholars have devoted considerable energy to investigating the implications of this placement. For the time being, we may observe that the Yahwist account represents God as working in conjunction with the earth in order to create, whereas the God of the Priestly account calls the universe into being with his word. Indeed, the name ‘Adam’, used by the Yahwist but not the Priestly source, comes from the Hebrew word haˉd’aˉdaˉm meaning ‘earth’. 5 As biblical scholars have noted, in thus representing a God who creates human beings out of clay and breathes life into them, the J source echoes Near Eastern myths.6 Yet Judaism established itself in contradistinction to the religions of neighbouring Canaanite tribes as a monotheistic religion whose God is spirit, unique and invisible. Hence, perhaps, P’s attempt to render secondary the Yahwist account, with its hint that earth is a partner in Creation – though it should be noted that P also represents God acting upon ‘matter’, as the ‘formless void’ or ‘deep’ of Genesis 1.2 points to a watery abyss rather than to nothingness or emptiness. Finally, while P repeatedly asserts that God declared ‘good’ what he had created, J represents the events of Genesis 3 as being inseparable from and indeed a continuation of the account of Creation. Establishing this biblical context is crucial for an investigation of Genesis 3 and the first lethal woman. Let us look more closely now at the biblical account of the eating of the fruit, concentrating on

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three issues crucially related to the construction of the femme fatale: motivation, storytelling and mortality. (A fourth issue, attractiveness, which some would say is the chief attribute of the femme fatale, will be dealt with later, although we may note here that Adam expresses his attraction to Eve at Genesis 2.2, when he calls her ‘bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh’. He is speaking literally, according to the origin myth). 1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ 2 The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” ’ 4 But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. (Genesis 3) This section of Genesis 3 is followed closely by God’s actions in response to Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit, a section sometimes called ‘judgement’ and sometimes ‘punishment’. Assessment of motivation is relevant to the Judeo-Christian legal tradition, but the fact that we cannot be certain of the woman’s motivation, even when she seems to reveal it, is an essential aspect of the femme fatale. Indeed, one might argue that it is crucial to her allure. Oddly and appropriately, there is no mention of motivation in the definitions of femme fatale found in the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: the former defines her as ‘a dangerously attractive woman’, the latter as ‘an irresistibly attractive woman, esp[ecially] one who leads men into difficult, dangerous, or disastrous situations; siren’.

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Why, we want to know, does the femme fatale lead men into such situations? Why does Eve do so? Genesis 3.6 offers an answer. Eve eats the fruit because she thinks, so verse 6 states, that it has nutritional value, that it looks delicious and that it will make its eaters wise. It is a remarkable verse. Thoughts, especially those of a woman, are rarely reported in the Old Testament, yet verse 6 shows Eve thinking carefully and rationally before reaching her decision. The narrator provides no such thought process for Adam, who simply takes the fruit from her and eats.7 Moreover, verse 6 grants her a certain independence from what the serpent says in verses 4 and 5. If you eat the fruit, the serpent says, you will not die; your eyes will be opened; and you will be as God, knowing good and evil. Eve omits any reference whatsoever to death; she does not even dismiss it as a threat. This may mean that she accepts what the serpent says and now has no fear of dying. But it may also mean that she disbelieves the serpent and eats the fruit anyway, knowing that she will die. These possibilities are important in relation to the last part of verse 6: ‘she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate’. Her ‘gift’ could be, and has been, interpreted as infidelity (or, more precisely, lack of love for Adam), but the Bible is silent here about Eve’s motives – unless, that is, one assumes that her reasons for giving the fruit to Adam are identical to her own reasons for eating it: ‘that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise’. Some additional light is shed on her motives later in Genesis 3, when Eve tells God what has happened. 8 They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ 10 He said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ 11 He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ 12 The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’ 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’

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Commentators note that Adam’s response to God’s question not only sounds childish, even petulant, but implicitly blames God for the dilemma: ‘the woman whom you gave to be with me ...’ Eve accepts at least some responsibility for what she has done by admitting that she let herself be tricked, nor does she blame God for creating subtle serpents. We need to ask, however, if her story is true: did the serpent trick her? Genesis 3.6 suggests otherwise. Yet surely Eve would not knowingly ‘eat Death’, as John Milton puts it in Paradise Lost (9.792). Death – fact or threat – is the shadow hanging over Eve’s actions. God says that Adam and Eve will die if they eat the fruit; the serpent says they will not die. Let us collect all the statements, some of them contradictory, made by various characters (including the narrator) about what will happen, or does happen, upon consumption of the fruit. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Adam and Eve will die. (God) Adam and Eve will not die. (Serpent) Their eyes will be opened. (Serpent) Their eyes were opened. (Narrator) They will know good and evil. (Serpent; Eve) They will become wise. (Eve) They knew they were naked. (Narrator)

If we look at this list of consequences without concentrating on questions of guilt and innocence, it looks very like a description of puberty, that time in life when a child’s body and understanding change quickly and obviously. The aging process, we might say, becomes dramatically apparent during puberty, and it becomes impossible not to know at some profound level that the end result of aging is death. Yet theoretical knowledge (I will grow old and die) is contradicted by immediate experience (I am entering into full adult life), which suggests that both God’s assertion and the serpent’s are true. Having one’s eyes opened, and knowing that one is naked, point to a new consciousness of one’s body, a consciousness that children do not have. The ability to know good and evil, right from wrong, is of course the basis for legal distinctions between children and adults. If we read Genesis 3 as a mythic rendering of the change that human beings undergo as they move from childhood to adulthood, then it becomes clear that the archetypal femme fatale of western culture appears in a myth about growing up. Considering her response to the serpent not as the initial step in a temptress’s progress but as the prelude to growing into maturity

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highlights the fact that Eve’s first action in Genesis 3 is to tell a story. In answer to the serpent’s question, she says: ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” ’ Eve has been condemned for embroidering God’s prohibition, for making it even stricter, by adding ‘nor shall you touch it’ to God’s original command, ‘[B]ut of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat’ (Genesis 2.17). She has also been praised for making a logical deduction, for it is impossible to eat the fruit without touching it (Williams 1948: 119–20). Again, rather than seeing the phrase in terms of guilt or innocence, let us see it in terms of employing a story to respond to a situation she is not in control of and does not fully understand. That is, Eve tells a story in order to play off one powerful male figure against another. We need to pause here on the question of the serpent’s identity. Guided by the book of Revelation, Christianity interprets the serpent as Satan: in chapter 20, an angel ‘seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit’ (2–3). But the serpent that addresses Eve at Genesis 3.1 is more ambiguous in its intentions than the satanic serpent construed by Christianity. John Barton and Richard Muddiman note that ‘[s]nakes played a significant part in the mythologies and religious practices of the ancient Near East, as objects both of fear and worship’ (2001: 44, emphasis added). They were associated with fertility, ‘the restoration of vitality’, and longevity, as well as with death (Joines 1974: 97).8 In the face of uncertainty about the nature of the extraordinary creature that addresses her, Eve’s caution (for her story buys time) seems well advised. If her first story parries a question from the mysterious serpent, her second story – ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate’ – parries a question from Yahweh. Let us ask again if this second story is true. Undoubtedly, in the realm of judgement and punishment, the truth-value of statements (and motivation) is primary. But consider Eve’s situation. She is speaking to almighty God, and she does not know why he is asking her what she has done, or how he will respond to her answer. Unlike Adam, who blames another human being and looks the worse for it, she blames a beast, which apparently causes no offence to God. Moreover, she candidly admits, ‘I ate’. It is true that she does not mention offering the fruit to Adam, but should she have? Does her survival not depend upon her telling a good story, an attractive story? Eve’s ‘stories’ are responses to particular, probably threatening, situations;

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her storytelling demonstrates her resourcefulness. It is aimed to ensure her survival (in the largest sense) – and it is successful. Death is deferred until Adam and Eve’s children are born. Eve’s, after all, is the last story God hears (Genesis 3.13) before he proceeds to state the consequences of their eating the fruit (Genesis 3.14), beginning with the condemnation of the serpent (‘Because you have done this, / cursed are you among all animals / and among all wild creatures; / upon your belly you shall go, / and dust you shall eat / all the days of your life’). We may thus read this sequence of events as demonstrating the persuasiveness of Eve’s story. We are now in a better position to consider whether Eve believes God’s statement that she and Adam will die, or the serpent’s statement that they will not die, if they eat the fruit. Is it not possible that she believes that both statements are true? That is, may she not perceive that any action attracting such a powerful and dangerous conjunction of consequences must also be creative and vital? And so with wisdom and courage she eats the fruit. Let us remember that the Yahwist account of Adam and Eve’s eating the fruit seamlessly follows the account of Creation in Genesis 2.4b–25, and both of these accounts are framed by the Priestly account of Creation in Genesis 1–2.4a. ‘Perhaps the most striking thing about the Priestly creation account’, one scholar notes, ‘is its positive tone. Everything is good. The origin of sin and evil is not addressed’ (Collins 2004: 77). We need to consider the possibility that, by placing this account first, priestly redactors meant not to create a contrast with the state of events at the end of Genesis 3 (Creation was perfect until Adam and Eve disobeyed); instead, they were signifying that when human beings become adults (with the opportunity to labour fruitfully, to multiply and finally to return to their mother earth), only then are they fully able to participate in God’s good Creation. The Priestly account of Creation (Genesis 1.1–2.4a) ends with God’s resting on the Sabbath; the Yahwist account ends with the acknowledgement that to create life is also to embrace death, itself a form of resting. Perhaps as a symbolic parallel to the linking of life and death in both accounts of Creation, there are two trees chosen by God for special comment in the J source (Genesis 2.9): the tree of forbidden knowledge, which we can call the tree of death, and the mysterious tree of life, about which no one seems to know very much. It would not be a mistake to see them as the same tree. An answer to the question as to why Eve offers the fruit to Adam now emerges more clearly. Verse 6 states: ‘she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.’ When

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Eve offers the fruit to Adam, she makes him a partner – in crime, many would say. Tempting a man is the defining action of the femme fatale: as Webster’s definition puts it, she ‘leads men into difficult, dangerous, or disastrous situations’. What is more difficult, dangerous, or (potentially) disastrous than growing up – except not growing up? Eve does make Adam a partner, but a partner in adulthood. If we read the story of Genesis 3 as being about growing up rather than original sin, then Eve ‘knows’ that for the two of them to survive (that is, to have children and raise them), they must grow up, which means, eventually, returning to earth. She is, in this reading, a ‘knowing’ woman whose knowledge is wisdom.9 That her action and its consequences signify growth into adulthood and hence full humanness is indicated by God’s gift of clothing to Adam and Eve at Genesis 3.21, observes Bernard Batto: ‘Only as the narrative progresses is the difference between animals and humans clarified. As humans acquired wisdom, that is, became more god-like, they began to wear clothes, the symbol of a distinctive humanness’ (1992: 29).10 Webster’s definition speaks of the femme fatale (singular) and men (plural). Does this imply that all men, or just some men, are attracted to the femme fatale? Genesis 3 represents Adam as being passive; verse 6 does not record his thoughts on being offered the fruit. He simply eats it. Why does he do so? We may speculate that Eve’s attractiveness is precisely that she offers him the chance to be an adult man, to be the partner of an adult woman. Afterward, he blames Eve for what must have been his decision, as there is no suggestion that she uses force or violence in verse 6. Passivity, a refusal to accept responsibility, even an inability to resist attractiveness – these are coded (or not so coded) forms of emotional immaturity. Genesis 3, in other words, allows us to add the qualifier ‘immature’ to Webster’s definition of the men who are led into difficult, dangerous or disastrous situations. Their immaturity makes the woman attractive to them, but it also causes them to see her as a femme fatale rather than what she really is, a femme vitale, a woman who offers the chance to live an adult life. In Genesis 3, Eve offers Adam a choice: be my partner (that is, a man), or remain a child. Adam seems to choose to be a partner, but the choice turns out to be too frightening, and he repudiates it and her.11 It seems that committing himself to a fully adult relationship is so terrifying that it is easier to blame Eve and (symbolically) kill her off than to share the ‘blame’ with her. The femme fatale, one might say, is most fatal to herself. Webster’s definition should thus perhaps be amended as follows in light of what Genesis 3 allows us to see about the archetypal

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femme fatale: a knowing woman, skilled at telling stories, irresistibly attractive to an immature man, whom she leads into the difficult and dangerous possibility of growing up, a possibility he first embraces and then rejects, with disastrous consequences for himself and for her. It is a redefinition that heightens rather than diminishes the allure of the femme fatale.

Notes 1. It would be fair to say that since the 1990s feminist perspectives have been fully integrated into mainstream biblical scholarship, aided by an ever-growing awareness of the relationship between Genesis and Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern creation myths, an approach reflected in this essay. 2. The classical Documentary Hypothesis holds that Genesis is composed of strands of material attributable to three written sources, called the J (Jahwist or Yahwist), E (Elohist) and P (Priestly) Codes or Works. (A fourth source, D [Deuteronomic] is not present in Genesis but is important for other books of the Pentateuch.) This hypothesis was accepted for over a century but has been vigorously debated in the last twenty years. No new hypothesis has prevailed, however, and the presence of (though not necessarily the relationship between) J and P in Genesis 1–3 has not been challenged. For an authoritative discussion of the origin, development and reassessment of the Documentary Hypothesis for the Pentateuch in general and Genesis in particular, see Barton and Muddiman (2001: 13–39). 3. It would be more accurate to say that P avoids using the name YHWH (see Barton and Muddiman 2001: 17). 4. I am using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible in Metzger and Murphy (1999). 5. Mieke Bal suggests that the Hebrew word should not be translated ‘Adam’, as if it were a proper noun, but ‘earth creature’ (1987: 113). 6. ‘In Egyptian mythology the god Khnum fashioned living creatures on a potter’s wheel ... , while in the Babylonian tradition the wild man Enkidu [in the Epic of Gilgamesh] was fashioned from clay’ (Barton and Muddiman, 43–4). ‘In the Babylonian myth of Atrahasis, humanity is also made from clay, mixed in that case with the flesh and blood of a slain god’ (Collins 2004: 67–8). 7. Nonetheless, patristic and Renaissance commentators tend to condemn her for irrationality and gullibility. See, for instance, Williams (1948: 119–20). 8. Its apparent ability to renew its youth by shedding its old skin explains why the serpent was the symbol of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, and why the symbol of the modern medical profession, the caduceus, consists of two serpents winding around Asclepius’ staff. 9. It is possible to see in Eve’s action a symbolic enactment of the whole thrust of the Yahwist narrative of Israel’s history: ‘Israel’, J repeatedly asserts, ‘is

Eve – The Mother of All Femmes Fatales 45 YHWH’s own people, which he brought into being, protected, and settled in her land’ (Barton and Muddiman 2001: 26). 10. Batto further observes that God made their garments from animal skins, ‘perhaps to remind the humans that they still retained a kinship with the animals’ (1992: 29). 11. As John Collins remarks, an instructive parallel to this aspect of the Adam and Eve story may be found in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, when Enkidu (who has been roaming with wild animals and eating grass) ‘is tamed by a harlot’. After intercourse with her, he returns to his animal companions, who flee from him, as he is no longer one of them. The harlot teaches him to consume human food and drink and to wear clothes. When, later, he learns that he must die, he ‘curses the harlot’. But Shamash the sungod reminds him of what he has gained by becoming human (food, wine, clothing, friendship), and Enkidu ends by blessing the harlot (2004: 71).

Works cited Bal, M. (1987), ‘Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow: The Emergence of Female Character’, in Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barton, J. and Muddiman, J. (2001), The Oxford Bible Commentary,, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Batto, B. F. (1992), ‘Creation Theology in Genesis’, in R. J. Clifford and Collins, J. J. (eds), Creation in the Biblical Traditions, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 24, Washington DC: The Catholic Biblical Association of America. Collins, J. J. (2004), Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Joines, K. R. (1974), Serpent Symbolism in the Old Testament, Haddonfield, NJ: Haddonfield House. Metzger, B. and Murphy, R. E. (eds) (1999), The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, New York: Oxford University Press. Millett, K. (1969; 1970), Sexual Politics, London: Sphere Books. Milton, J. (1667; 1998), Paradise Lost, (ed.) A. Fowler, 2nd edn, London: Longman. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (1989), (ed.) J. A. Simpson and E. C. S. Weiner, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trible, P. (1979), ‘Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread’, in C. P. Christ and J. Plaskow (eds), Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, New York: Harper and Row-Harper Forum. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1989), New York: Portland House. Williams, A. (1948), The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527–1633, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

3 Challenging the Stereotype: The Femme Fatale in Fin-de-Siècle Art and Early Cinema Jess Sully

Why did the femme fatale rise to prominence in the late nineteenth century? In her study of the femme fatale in fin-de-siècle literature, Rebecca Stott suggests that the femme fatale ‘is fabricated, reconstructed in, and apparently necessary to, the cultural expression’ of the nineteenth century (Stott 1992: viii). The term ‘cultural expression’ suggests a range of emotions, from horror and hatred to admiration and desire. But the majority of previous scholarly studies of the femme fatale have radically overemphasized the role played by fear and hatred in depictions of the femme fatale. Stott, Mary Anne Doane and Bram Dijkstra all suggest that male anxiety regarding the lower classes, foreign invasion and feminism influenced nineteenth-century depictions of the femme fatale, and it is clear these factors are vitally important to a study of the fatal woman (Dijkstra 1986; Doane 1991). Yet Stott, Doane and Dijkstra offer a view of the nineteenth century as a period characterized by intolerance, anxiety and apprehension, ignoring the spirit of exploration and innovation which also distinguished the age. Nowhere in their work, for instance, is the growing interest in ancient mythologies and esoteric religions discussed, but these, as I will later show, were also a vital influence on depictions of the fatal woman. Furthermore, the majority of scholars propose that all femmes fatales were created under the same circumstances and with the same intentions, regardless of the fact that very different artistic and literary groups existed in the nineteenth century. Dijkstra stresses the similarities between paintings, ignoring or minimizing the differences. Yet not all artists intended their work to be regarded in the same manner, and, as a result, they did not depict the femme fatale in the same way. The 46

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nineteenth-century fatal woman, then, is a more complex archetype than has been suggested by previous scholars. In the literary and artistic work of the Symbolists, she is an amalgam of cultural fears and preoccupations, at once threatening and fascinating the artists and writers who depicted her. In this chapter, I will trace the development of this femme fatale from the canvas to the moving image: from the art of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, through the phenomenon of the Oriental dancer, to the fatal woman’s appearance in early American cinema. Two distinct types of fatal woman remain constant throughout: the stereotype that appeared in Academic art and populist cinema, and the less well-known but more complex figure represented by Symbolist artists and avantgarde film-makers. My discussion moves from European artistic circles to Hollywood because the femme fatale appears principally in the culture of the dominant world power, which in the late nineteenth century was focused in Europe and Britain, migrating to North America in the early twentieth century. The exotic, sexually promiscuous ‘otherness’ of the femme fatale threatens to destabilize the established cultural order: as Diane Negra notes, just as the ‘sexually insatiable woman might somehow enervate seminal substance, the ambitious immigrant might drain the country’s resources dry’ (Negra 2002: 379–80).

Academic art versus symbolism Before examining the figure of the femme fatale in late nineteenthcentury art, it is first necessary to define Symbolism. However, providing an accurate description is notoriously difficult, as the term is characterized by deliberate ambiguity and a lack of precise meaning. It is also closely related to Decadence, and the boundaries between the two often become blurred, eluding scholars and even Symbolists and Decadents themselves. In the unofficial manifesto of literary Symbolism, ‘Le symbolisme’ (1886), the avant-garde poet Jean Moréas acknowledges that many of the themes and motifs found in work by Symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine originated from earlier ‘Decadent’ writers, specifically Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans (Moréas 1994: 151). The older generation of Decadents were idolized by the younger generation of Symbolists, such as Jean Delville and Fernand Khnopff. In turn, the British and Irish Decadents of the fin de siècle, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley, were deeply influenced by Continental Symbolism.

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Rather than definite movements, ‘Decadence’ and ‘Symbolism’ should, then, be regarded more accurately as appellations under which disparate artists and writers with shared sympathies can be grouped. The majority of Symbolist work was created in a serious attempt to suggest the spiritual and infinite, whilst most Decadents were more interested in exploring humanity’s vices, yet Decadents and Symbolists both refused objective representations of the world, employing fantasy, myth and allegory as their chosen subjects. They desired to escape the mundanity of commonplace existence and were interested in altered states of reality. It would be simplistic to suggest that all Symbolists stood in complete opposition to the tradition of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of the European Academies, particularly the French Académie des Beaux Arts. In practice there was a certain fluidity, whereby artists who identified themselves as Symbolists (or who have since been identified by scholars as showing Symbolist tendencies) retained connections with their Academic origins. Not all of these artists would have been as damning of Academic art as G.-Albert Aurier, a champion of the Symbolists, who spoke scathingly of ‘the fatuous portrayal of nature’s warts, banal observation of the trompe-l’oeil variety, the sterile ambition to be as exact and faithful as a daguerreotype’ (Aurier 1972: 166). But, to a lesser or greater extent, the more radical artists of the time viewed the teachings of the Academies as overly rigid and dogmatic, leading to the production of works which, whilst technically brilliant, were without individualism, soul or insight. The difference between the Academic and the Symbolist conception of art is demonstrated by Wilde’s reactions to two paintings of Salome, as recorded by Enrique Gomez Carillo, a friend of Wilde’s, in an article of 1902 (Carillo 1979). By the time Wilde came to write his play Salomé at the close of 1891, his knowledge of the iconography of Salome was immense, from paintings by Bernardino Luini and Peter Paul Rubens to more recent works by Henri Regnault and Gustave Moreau. It is on the contrasting conceptions of Salome by Regnault and Moreau that I wish to concentrate. In Carillo’s article, Wilde dismisses Regnault’s Salome (1870) as nothing more than ‘a gypsy with the skin of an Englishwoman’ (Carillo 1979: 195). To Wilde, she was a vulgar, coarse seductress rather than the elegant princess of his imagination. Tellingly, it appears that, at different stages of its development, Regnault called his work variously Poetess of Cordoba, Herodias and Favourite Slave: it was of no matter whether she was Spanish or Middle Eastern, queen or slave, only that she was

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Exotic.1 Regnault won the Prix de Rome at the Salon of 1866, so was at the height of his popularity when he exhibited Salome at the Salon of 1870. Academic artists such as Regnault painted with the tastes of the majority always in mind. They could not afford to offend, shock or confuse the buying public, and as a result their art presents myths in their most familiar guises. On being granted a commission by Benoît Fould, a prominent politician and banker, the mystical artist Moreau wrote dejectedly in 1856 that ‘When one is asked to paint a pretty woman, one understands what is meant – no muscles, just something pleasant to look at’ (cited in Wright and Moisy 1972: 70). In Academic art, the femme fatale’s depravity provided an excuse to portray a lascivious woman, often nude, whilst her mythical origins allowed the artist to do so without incurring charges of obscenity. Moreau achieved mainstream success, exhibiting at Salons and producing commissioned works for collectors like Fould; in 1892 he became a Professor at the École des Beaux Arts. Yet over the course of his career he developed a highly distinctive, ornate and paint-encrusted style, and was an important influence on following generations of both Symbolists and Decadents, who admired the esoteric and often sinister nature of his work. Moreau’s work therefore exists in a strange position, located in a space between the conventions of Academic tradition and his own highly personal fantasies and obsessions. In Huysmans’s À Rebours (Against Nature) (1884), one of the most significant works of Decadent literature, Moreau is the only artist who sends the hero Des Esseintes into ‘raptures of delight’ because he ‘shut out the modern world so completely as to behold [ ... ] the awful visions and magical apotheoses of other ages’ (Huysmans 1959: 63, 69). Of all Moreau’s paintings, Des Esseintes is most fascinated by Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876) and its companion watercolour, The Apparition (1876). In Salome Dancing Before Herod, the figure of Salome is not explicitly erotic. The painting is set in the confines of a sombre, dimly lit palace resembling a temple. If the subject of the painting were unknown to the viewer, it might be guessed that it represents a ritual performed by a sacred priestess in honour of a throned deity. Salome wears a domed headdress and is weighed down by jewels. Her arms provide the only visible flesh, and she is pictured in a hierarchic pose rather than in the middle of a frenzied dance. The sensuality of this piece lies more in the heavily incensed atmosphere and decorated surfaces of the palace than in Salome’s dignified dance.

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Salome is more scantily clad in The Apparition, but the subject of the picture is so unsettling that the viewer understands that this is not simply intended to be an erotic study of Salome. The idea of Salome experiencing a vision of John’s decapitated head is of Moreau’s own invention: a strange and ominous image. There are five figures in the painting, but Salome is the only one who sees the apparition. Is she being punished for her cruelty in asking for the head of the Baptist, or something more complex? Is the apparition a symbol of her guilt as she realizes the depravity of the act she has committed? Most Academic artists showed Salome either waiting eagerly with the platter – like Regnault – or gloating over the decapitated head. In these works, Salome is a cruel and entirely reprehensible figure, but Moreau portrays her more ambiguously. His paintings of Salome do not simply offer ‘something nice to look at’: they stimulate the imagination as well as the eye, and suggest the uncanny nature of nightmare. Carillo tells us that Wilde likened himself to Des Esseintes (Carillo 1979: 195). Accordingly, Moreau’s paintings were the only portrayals of Salome that rendered clearly Wilde’s ‘dreams of the soul of the legendary dancer-princess, the divine daughter of Herodias’ (Carillo 1979: 195). Carillo’s use of the words ‘soul’ and ‘divine’ is significant: Wilde found the mystical and the spiritual aspects of the painting to be of greater importance than the physicality of the dancer’s body. According to Charles Ricketts, Wilde specified that ‘My Salomé is a mystic, the sister of Salammbô, a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon’ (Raymond and Ricketts 1932: 51–2). Throughout Wilde’s play, published in French in 1893 and in English in 1894, Salomé is likened to the moon, appearing to be its earthly incarnation, as if she were a priestess and the moon a goddess. ‘She has never defiled herself,’ says Salomé with relish, looking up to the moon. ‘She had never abandoned herself to men, like the other goddesses’ (Wilde 1995: 68). It is, of course, highly significant that Salomé is herself a virgin. As each of the seven physical veils is removed during the dance, Salomé conversely veils her true self. Salomé is not a femme fatale, but as she dances she puts on the likeness of a femme fatale. She, like the moon, is ‘cold and chaste’ (Raymond and Ricketts 1932: 52). Wilde’s allusion to Salammbô is also important. In Flaubert’s novel of 1862, Salammbô is a Carthaginian virgin and devotee of the cult of the veiled goddess Tanith, and at one point during the novel performs a nude ritual dance beneath the moon. If Wilde considered Salome to be the sister of Salammbô, he might consider her dance to also be a form of ceremony, a way of communing with her beloved moon goddess.

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Mysticism is entirely absent in Academic portrayals of the femme fatale.2 It appears in the works of Symbolist writers and artists because of their greater appreciation of the spiritual and mystical dimensions of women’s existence through their studies of pagan religions. The combination of sensuality and spirituality present in Symbolist femmes fatales appears paradoxical, but only when one regards it through the lens of Christian morality. Symbolists believed that ‘Christianity’ meant the repression of natural impulses and desires, whilst ‘paganism’ meant the sanctification of all aspects of life, including the sensual. The almost transcendental nature of some victims’ experiences at the hands of a femme fatale implies that their encounter with the fatal woman offers a spiritual as well as erotic awakening; the victim undergoes sex as a ritual act. In this context death becomes a liberating event, an allegory of the artist’s or writer’s desire to break free from material considerations and approach a form of spiritually pure art or literature.

Salomania In the early twentieth century, Symbolist and Decadent motifs began to be utilized in inferior, mass-produced work. The fatal woman, through her appearances on the covers of sheet music and book jackets, and in burlesque stripteases performed by dancers wearing generic Oriental costumes, became a cliché. The subtlety and complexity of the Symbolist femme fatale was lost; she was thoroughly devalued in the eyes of radical artists and writers. However, I want to examine the phenomenon of the Oriental dancer in more detail, because it retains a connection with the nineteenth-century femme fatale whilst also presaging the femme fatale’s appearance in early cinema. In December 1906, Maud Allan, a Canadian dancer, debuted as Salome in Vienna, and from there took her dance around Europe, culminating with performances in London in 1908. A fascinating reciprocal relationship exists between Academic art and Allan’s costume. Nineteenthcentury Orientalist paintings, such as The Dance of the Almeh (1863) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, provided apparently ‘authentic’ representations of Middle Eastern costume from which Allan clearly took inspiration. Although Allan’s costume is more heavily jewelled, its overall shape and the parts of the body it accentuates – breasts and stomach – remain the same as in Gérôme’s painting. In a further twist, Allan’s costume then began to influence painters. Prior to Allan’s dance, Salome was usually dressed in Academic works

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Illustration 2 Maud Allan as Salome, in the play by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Credit: Photo by Hulton Archive Getty Images.

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as in Regnault’s painting – a loose blouse, often revealing one or both breasts, material tied round the waist, and loose drapery. Post-1906, works begin to appear with Salomes wearing costumes that are recognizably based on Allan’s. This is particularly evident in a painting by Ladislas Ismailowitsch of approximately 1910.3 By producing an image of Salome based so closely on Allan’s appearance, Ismailowitsch clearly intended to appeal to the widest possible audience. Postcard reproductions further publicized paintings such as Ismailowitsch’s, allowing followers of Allan to display fine art alongside photographic postcards of their heroine. However, ‘Salomania’ reached its apex when, following Allan’s success, many other dancers and vaudeville artistes took up the role of Salome.4 Although Wilde’s play debuted in 1896, and Strauss’s opera in 1905, it was the Salome dancers who popularized the figure amongst audiences who would be unlikely to attend the theatre or opera: many of the American dancers went on national tours, ‘bringing sophistication to even the smallest towns’ (Kendall 1979: 75). The popularity of the Oriental dancers established Salome’s status as a glamorous, exotic fantasy figure for the masses, and prepared the way for her appearance in the populist medium of cinema. In 1908, at the height of the Salomania craze, the first cinematic version of Salome was produced by Vitagraph.

Contrasting femmes: Bara and Nazimova The fatal woman was a recognisable ‘type’ in early cinema, and the most significant femme fatale actress of the 1910s was Theda Bara. The titles of her films read as if they were a list of euphemisms for the fatal woman: The Devil’s Daughter (1915), The Serpent (1916), The Vixen (1916), The Tiger Woman (1917), The Siren’s Song (1919) and so on. Bara also played the title roles in Carmen (1915), Cleopatra (1917) and Salome (1918). From 1915 to 1919 she was under contract to the Fox studio, and in those four years she made 39 films. Although cinema was a new form, Fox exploited nineteenth-century imagery in its depiction of the Orientalist femme fatale. Bara had very pale skin and heavily lidded eyes accentuated with kohl, replicating the darkened, sensual stares of odalisques in Orientalist paintings.5 The heterogeneous décor of artistic Orientalism (partially Middle Eastern, partially Egyptian), which characterizes such works as The Death of Cleopatra (1874) by Jean André Rixens, is also utilized in Bara’s films. A publicity still from Cleopatra shows a backdrop filled with a recognizable approximation of Egyptian wall-painting, but Bara stands on a Persian rug.6

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After only five years, Bara’s films fell out of favour. In 1919, her contract with Fox was not renewed, and her career suffered without the support of the studio. In addition, audiences were tiring of watching the stereotypical femme fatale character; attention now turned to the ‘All-American’ girl – the innocent ingénue as portrayed by Mary Pickford, or the vivacious, high-spirited Clara Bow. Diane Negra notes how Bara and other ‘vamp’ actresses such as Nita Naldi, Lya de Putti and Pola Negri all ‘either emanated from southern and eastern European countries or were given fictional biographies to suggest such origins’ (Negra 2002: 390), concluding that the ‘fall of the femme fatale and the rise of the good girl’ were trends ‘that went hand in hand, paralleled by the displacement of the immigrant other by American purity’ (Negra 2002: 400). Although in her later films Bara attempted to diversify into ‘pure’ types, she was too typecast as an exotic vamp for this to bring success, and she retired in 1926. The one-dimensional femme fatale became a cliché in cinema as she had done in art. However, an attempt was made by the Russian actress Alla Nazimova to radicalize the Orientalist femme fatale in cinema. Paradoxically, she did so by returning to nineteenth-century art, but, significantly, not to Academic art but rather to Decadentism. In 1922, Nazimova produced and starred in a version of Salome. The subtitles to the film were taken from Wilde’s play, and costumes and scenery, designed by Natacha Rambova, were based on Aubrey Beardsley’s 1894 illustrations for the play. This is particularly evident when one compares one of Nazimova’s costumes, a long black and white gown with a curved train, with Beardsley’s Peacock Skirt. Even more explicitly, the publicity stills utilized Beardsley’s original drawing of the Peacock Skirt, but superimposed Nazimova’s face onto the figure of Salome. Set designers for Bara’s films aimed to suggest exotic authenticity by, paradoxically, combining objects from disparate cultures. In contrast, Rambova made no attempt to present an accurate version of the court of Herod. Nazimova’s film is deliberately stylized, like a dream or hallucination. Just as Beardsley utilized the sharp contrast of black and white to ensure that his drawings were easily reproducible in the printing process, so Nazimova’s insistence on monochrome ensured that costumes and sets appear strikingly vibrant within the medium of black and white film. There were further reasons why Beardsley’s drawings were so appropriate for Nazimova. Firstly, they had been considered radical pieces of design in the 1890s. Beardsley did not provide a literal translation of

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text into image, as had been traditionally the role of book illustration. Instead, he developed thematic elements already present in Wilde’s play, providing an enigmatic symbolism which suggests the content of the text without slavishly adhering to it. Beardsley’s subversion of the art of illustration would have pleased Nazimova, who, in Salome, attempted to subvert film in a similar way. She had a successful film career with Metro Studios in the 1910s, but in the early 1920s began writing and producing more experimental works which met with little popular success. Salome does not rely on conventional plot development, and appears more an attempt to convey, through deliberately mannered, stylized performances, the heightened fantasies and desires of the characters. The emphasis on sexual desire is also a significant factor in Nazimova’s appropriation of Wilde’s text: her film emphasizes the homosexual undertones of his play in order to implicitly suggest her own homosexuality.7 Even if one does not accept the rumour that the entire cast was gay or bisexual (Showalter 1992: 163), the film’s aesthetics are archly camp: supporting male actors wear spangled tights and pasties, and several female characters are clearly men in drag. The film also accentuates the affection in the relationship between the Young Syrian and the male Page present in Wilde’s play. William Tydeman and Steven Price argue that the deliberate campness of the film is directly linked to Nazimova’s lesbianism: Invading the space reserved for the aggressive – but heterosexual – woman in Hollywood, Nazimova’s Salome turns that convention against itself by the simple expedient of parodying its mannerisms, in a style analogous to the kind of camp performance of the male homosexual enacting a female role (Tydeman and Price 1996: 164–5). In other words, Nazimova is subverting the stereotypical femme fatale as portrayed by Bara, just as, in the previous century, Symbolists and Decadents subverted the stereotypical fatal woman of Academic art. Nazimova’s appearance played an important part in this subversion. Rather than being curvaceous and buxom, as the stereotypical femme fatale was supposed to be, she was tall and thin. The costumes she wears in the film, whilst certainly sensual, are not overtly erotic. In Bara’s films, the obvious female centre of eroticism, the breasts, are often accentuated by her costumes, either explicitly (serpent breastplates in Cleopatra) or implicitly (diaphanous costumes in both

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Cleopatra and Salome cover the nipples with darker material, serving to draw attention to what is ostensibly being hidden). However, in Nazimova’s film, the breasts always remain completely hidden. The most revealing of her costumes is a very short, sequinned tunic, yet, although Nazimova’s legs are almost wholly exposed, her figure is so boyish the effect is very different from the overt titillation provided by Bara’s costumes. The figure of the androgyne was significant to both Symbolists and Decadents. Because women with narrow hips and lack of breasts did not acquiesce with traditional notions of feminine beauty, the androgynous woman became a figure of fantasy for many avant-garde artists and writers.8 The ‘sterile woman’s frigid majesty’ is, according to Baudelaire, a glorious sight, ‘lit with gold, steel, diamonds’ (Baudelaire 1993: 56). Whilst a curvaceous woman’s body suggests fertility and corporeality, the slim woman is agreeably ‘sterile’: her body is aestheticized in much in the same way as a sinuous vase. In addition, an androgynous woman looks like a boy without being a boy, hinting at the possibility of homosexuality. Nazimova’s physical appearance was therefore very much in keeping with the Decadent spirit. The appreciation shown by Decadents towards Sarah Bernhardt, an actress with a similarly androgynous figure, suggests that they would have approved of Nazimova’s theatrical persona, which, like Bernhardt’s, relies on a compelling conjunction of asexuality and sensuality.9

Conclusion In The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature, Lothar Honnighausen proposes that the late nineteenth century was ‘an age characterized by the development of romanticism to modernism’ (Honnighausen 1988: 1). Accordingly, the Symbolist and Decadent femme fatale was a figure in which tradition and modernity combined. She was utilized to express contemporary ideas about spirituality, gender and sexuality, yet she originated in ancient legends and myths. She was reinvented, rather than invented, by Decadents and Symbolists. Nazimova’s Salome is also a transitional work. Instead of creating an entirely new, contemporary female character, she chose to explore notions of sexuality and sensuality by developing a fin-de-siècle version of an ancient myth. It would take the films of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo in the 1930s, and, even later, the film noir of Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, to bring the femme fatale entirely into the twentieth century.

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However, even in these later cinematic incarnations of the femme fatale, some of the preoccupations of earlier artists and actresses remain. Androgyny still acted, partially, as a signifier of homosexuality: Dietrich and Garbo, both tall and thin, were both rumoured to be bisexual. Their films allude to homosexuality through transvestism; in Morocco (1930), Dietrich, dressed in a tuxedo, finishes a number in a nightclub by kissing a girl on the lips; in Queen Christina (1933), Garbo is a sixteenth-century lesbian ruler of Sweden who dresses as a man to escape the restrictions of royal life. Bernhardt, Nazimova, Dietrich and Garbo all understood and exploited the element of gender ambiguity which lies even within the original legends of the femme fatale. The threat posed by the fatal woman lies ultimately not in her feminine beauty or eroticism but rather in the way in which she establishes rule over men by utilizing the apparently ‘masculine’ qualities of power and authority. The femme fatale, popularly perceived as a fundamentally feminine archetype, should more accurately be regarded as a figure in which feminine beauty and masculine power combines. Stott asserts that that the nineteenth-century femme fatale is almost exclusively a projection of male anxiety regarding feminism, foreign invasion and the lower classes (Stott 1992: 15, 44–5); similarly, Kristine J. Butler suggests that the ‘vamp’ character of early American cinema represents masculine fears of women’s rights, the perceived threat posed by immigration and ‘middle-and-upper-class fears of social mobility, particularly of the lower classes’ (Butler 2002: 202). However, although the stereotypical femme fatale clearly embodies these anxieties, more subversive variants of the fatal woman denote a much wider range of cultural preoccupations, allowing both men and women to explore complex notions of gender, sexuality and spirituality. The study of the intriguingly ambiguous femme fatale allows a subtler, more diverse reading of attitudes towards the fatal woman than has previously been maintained.

Notes 1. Archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Accessions and Catalogues, New York, cited in Pierre (2003). 2. See, for example, paintings of Salome by Pierre Bonnard and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (both c. 1890). In Bonnard’s painting, the near-naked princess gazes haughtily at the severed head, pressing her thumb dismissively into the dead saint’s eye; in a pose perhaps borrowed from Regnault’s painting, Lefebvre’s

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

bare-breasted Salome awaits the delivery of the head with her hand nonchalantly on hip. Ismailowitsch (or Ismailovitch) trained and exhibited in St Petersburg, specializing in representations of Biblical stories and Classical myths, many of which were reproduced as full-colour postcards. Mlle Dazie (Daisy Peterkin) mimicked Allan’s dance at the 1907 Ziegfield Follies, and by the summer of 1908 was training and sending out ‘approximately 150 Salomes every month into the nation’s vaudeville circuits’ (Kendall 1979: 75). See, for example, Odalisque (1870) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and The Harem Servant Girl (1874) by Paul Désiré Trouillebert. Interestingly, Moreau’s Salome paintings also feature heterogeneous details: the architecture is Moorish, Salome’s robes Phoenician, and the lotus blossom she is carrying an Egyptian and Indian symbol. Yet Moreau did not simply present objects from different cultures as interchangeable ‘props’: his intention was to combine symbols to produce a new sacred mythology. This heterogeneity would later be evident in such occult movements such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which referenced a range of religions from Christianity to ancient Egypt and Greece. Although Nazimova married Charles Bryant in 1912, this was widely believed to be a ‘lavender marriage’, a partnership between a gay woman and gay man. It was rumoured that she had affairs with a number of women, including Rambova. See Tydeman and Price (1996: 164). See, for example, Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1836), La Gynandre (1891) by Sâr Péladan and Monsieur Vénus (1894) by Rachilde. Significantly, Bernhardt would have played Salome in the first stage production of Wilde’s play in 1892, had it not been shut down by the English Examiner of Plays.

Works cited Aurier, G.-A. (1972), ‘Les peintres symbolistes’ [1892], in Œuvres posthumes, Paris: no publisher, trans. P. S. Falla as ‘The Symbolist Painters’ in G. Lacambre (ed.), French Symbolist Painters, London: Arts Council of Great Britain, p. 166. Baudelaire, C. (1993), ‘The way her silky garments...’ [1859], trans. and ed. in J.McGowan, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, K. J. (2002), ‘Irma Vep, Vamp in the City: Mapping the Criminal Feminine in Early French Serials’, in J. M. Bean and D. Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 195–220. Carillo, E. G. (1979), ‘Comment Oscar Wilde rêva Salomé’ (La Plume, 1902), trans. and ed. in E. H. Mikhail, Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, Vol. I, London: Macmillan, pp. 192–5. Dijkstra, B. (1986), Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture, Oxford and New York: University of Oxford Press. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Honnighausen, L. (1988), The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of Pre-Raphaelitism and Fin de Siècle, trans. and condensed by G. Honnighausen, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Femmes Fatales in Fin-de-Siècle Art and Early Cinema 59 Huysmans, J. K. (1959), À Rebours [1884], trans. Robert Baldick as Against Nature, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kendall, E. (1979), Where She Danced: The Birth of American Art-Dance, New York: Knopf. Moréas, J. (1994), ‘Le symbolisme’, Supplément littéraire du Figaro (18 September 1886), trans. as ‘Symbolism’ in H. Dorra (ed.), Symbolist Theories: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, pp. 150–2. Negra, D. (2002), ‘Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology,’ in J. M. Bean and D. Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 374–403. Pierre, C. (2003), ‘ “A New Formula for High Art”: The Genesis and Reception of Marcello’s Pythia’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2:3, http:// www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/component/content/article/73autumn03article/271-qa-new-formula-for-high-artq-the-genesis-and-reception-of-marcellos-pythia [last accessed 8th May 2010] Raymond, J. P. and Ricketts, C. (1932), Oscar Wilde: Recollections, London: Nonesuch Press. Showalter, E. (1992), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London: Virago. Stott, R. (1992), The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Tydeman, W. and Price, S. (1996), Wilde: Salomé, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilde, O. (1995), Salomé [1893], in P. Raby (ed.), The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, Oxford: Clarendon. Wright, B. and Moisy, P. (1972), Gustave Moreau et Eugène Fromentin: Documents inédits, La Rochelle: Quartier Latin.

4 Silent Divas: The Femmes Fatales of the Italian Cinema Muto Joy Ramirez

Illustration 3 Image from Assunta Spina (1915) Credit: Source BFI.

According to Roland Barthes in his study of myths, images are ‘frozen and eternalized’ in order to enter the realm of what he calls mythical speech (Barthes 1972: 124). Of all the reincarnations of the femme fatale, perhaps no other version better exemplifies the ‘frozen icon’ than that of the silent visual image of the cinematic diva. Both figures belong to that realm of aesthetic expression that presupposes an imaginative 60

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relationship to the material as if it always already existed, which may explain the unquestioned repetition of this mythical presence in art and literature. The attraction of the femme fatale myth is fully as much a function of our own familiarity with the myth as it is with the material itself. Almost twenty years after Mary Ann Doane’s seminal Femmes Fatales (Doane 1991), the figure continues to be a preoccupying theme for critics, despite being ‘frozen’ in the psychoanalytic discourse for so long. But a thawing out has begun to occur – a revision of the myth’s meanings and complexities, suggesting a promising new phase for this undeniably persistent female figure. The first divas – those of the Italian silent cinema – provide a kind of visual archetype of the notion of representational fatality connected to larger issues of desire and shifting cultural fantasies about women in art. The diva is a figure whose origins are located in the received repertory of images and themes from decadent novels and the Italian silent cinema. But, while it is possible to trace the origins of the phenomenon of ‘divismo’ in Italian cinematic production, this is only one aspect of the importance of this figure for art and representation. The diva, like the femme fatale, constitutes another example of the way in which a term has entered the realm of language and now stands in for something which has no objective existence in reality. In both cases we are dealing with a set of received images and constructed notions of femininity that have become so much a part of the collective consciousness that whether they have an essence in reality becomes irrelevant. The star system may function as a means of transforming the film personalities into ‘real’ versions of themselves, but it is ultimately only from the image that the myth derives any meaning. The association of women with divinity, especially when it comes to a woman who is in some position of power, whether it be performative or otherwise, is a common trope which runs throughout the history of the representation of women in art and literature. But is a diva always necessarily a femme fatale? And are the popular icons we call divas today even aware of the epistemological baggage the femme fatale carries along with her while at the same time being accepted by the world as a sign of strength and power? Are the two versions of powerful women mutually exclusive or are they just different variations on the same theme? And, in the Italian context, if the diva is closely associated with suffering and sacrifice, indeed if a diva is a pitiable figure, can she be a femme fatale? All these questions are meant to push the boundaries of the way the femme fatale is understood, but the result is the emergence of a term in language – and not just a term, but a whole set of related images and

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ideas, uncritically reproduced and unimaginatively perpetuated – for something with no epistemological validity. As much of the work done on the femme fatale demonstrates, film is a specific site for the confluence of representational traditions associated with literature, art, theatre and music. While theories of cinematic specificity or theories of the spectator have been important contributions to film criticism (Metz 1975; Mulvey 1975), my focus is on the emergence of the diva within the long tradition of representations of the femme fatale and its connection to the cinema as a particularly compelling medium on which the mythical discourse depends. For it is at the moment of modernism that the figure of the femme fatale in its foundational nineteenth-century configuration makes the transition from the verbal to the visual, or from text to screen, marking a shift in the representation of the figure that is both dependent upon and indifferent to its literary origins. As Angela dalle Vacche in her important new work on the early Italian divas notes: ‘This icon became a model of transition for Italian women and a figure of temporality for the society at large.’ Her shifting social roles were ‘a symptom of ambiguity and uncertainty about breaking away from the past and moving into the future’ (Dalle Vacche 2008: 3). Dalle Vacche adds her study to the list of attempts to account for why the femme fatale is so insistently a figure of fascination in the texts of modernity. Some have called attention to the emergence of new technologies of production and reproduction (photography and cinema) born of the Industrial Revolution and the role of the female body as a common site for playing out this change (Doane 1991). Others point to the emergence of psychoanalysis and the accompanying fears and anxieties prompted by shifts in the understanding of sexual difference in the late nineteenth century (Bernheimer 2002), while still others have called attention to the pseudoscientific discourses of evolutionary theory that perpetuated fictions about disease and the ‘deadly nature of female sexuality’ (Dijkstra 1996). What all these hypotheses have in common, however, is the sense of a shift in relations or thought that prompted a different perception of reality, one with profound repercussions on art and culture. But perhaps this mythical figure represents more than just a repeated thematic presence in art and literature, and is a necessary part of the structure that allows this particular theorization of the modern to be possible. One of the image’s most persistent incarnations is that of the diva of the early Italian silent cinema. The diva film occupies a special place in the history of cinema, and was, as Dalle Vacche notes, ‘at least as

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competitive with, and perhaps equal to, the historical film in popularity’ (Dalle Vacche 2008: 2). Surprisingly, though, it is a genre that still lacks its own complete study, one that would uncover and engage with not only its cultural and artistic importance, but also its relationship to more theoretical concerns about art and representation. Perhaps one reason the silent cinema is not taken as seriously as it should be is its more melodramatic, inward and self-consciously aesthetic form, juxtaposed against the more ‘authentic’ production of the Italian post-war period. The idea that the films, or the figure of the femme fatale itself, would not offer access to reality but pose instead a force subversive to coherent thought and truth is a reflection of the decadent themes on which the figure depends, as well as the element that links it to a more general discussion of art and representation. Indeed, the femme fatale and the silent cinema are like metaphor and aesthetic creation themselves insofar as they depend upon paradox and ambiguity for their disruptive and potentially subversive power. As Charles Bernheimer (quoting Richard Gilman in Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet, 1979) argued for the idea of decadence in art and literature, the same could be said of the figure of the femme fatale, one of its most persistent themes: ‘Its persistence is an illustration of the power of language and thought to keep the nonexistent in imaginary existence’ (Bernheimer 2002: 6). Moreover, the fact that the diva films pre-date the sound films, and for that reason are often marginalized purely for technical reasons, only adds to their enigmatic status and fascination. Of course the actresses themselves are a large part of what makes these films stand out in the collective imagination as vehicles of pure emotion and melodramatic symbolism, embodying for the masses the passion, drama and irrational forces that at the turn of the century preoccupy the modern consciousness. In fact, the absence of sound is not so much a lack as an integral and important aspect of the creation of the diva and her enduring representational force. The divas are fittingly and necessarily silent in so far as they do not need sound for the roles they play. Theirs is a purely physical, plastic and transcendent reality, which does not require language and is all the more effective because of its absence. The diva’s gestures and repertory of symbolic language, her eyes, her make-up, and the tropes of the theatre stage tell her story better than a verbal performance could. By all accounts the first diva of the Italian cinema, Francesca Bertini, received critical acclaim as the protagonist of Assunta Spina (1915), a role that established the myth of the cinematic diva as well as securing

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the actress’s own mythical status both in Italy and abroad. In this film, directed by Bertini and Gustavo Serena (who also plays the male lead), she plays a young Neapolitan girl caught between two lovers and a father in a passionate drama typical of the silent diva genre. Since she is at once vulgar and attractive, necessary and lethal, the diva embodies this dilemma expressed in the art and literature of the decadent period, but is modernized in the early twentieth-century film versions of her appearance. For example, the drama surrounding Assunta’s character is no longer that of the fantastic world of myth and religion or dreams, but has been brought ‘down to earth’ and into the confines of working-class Naples. Instead of the wildly imaginative scenarios of the decadent dramas that took place in exotic or ancient locales against sumptuous backdrops, here the attention is on the ordinary or commonplace kind of love that turns fatal in the midst of normal, everyday life. Assunta herself is introduced as the ‘la popolana appassionata e fatalmente peccatrice’ (the impassioned commoner, a doomed sinner) in the opening scene of the film, a curiously paradoxical designation that fits with the ambiguity of the femme fatale in all her different variations. Moreover, because of what has been called its crude, documentary photographic style, Assunta Spina is usually cited as an early example of silent realism (Bondanella 1983: 8). This is despite the fact that it is a realism that also depends on a high level of formal artificiality and over-representation, which aligns it more with the theatre than with the ‘new’ medium, despite its many innovations. The film is shot in the streets of Naples with natural light and the use of many non-actors, presaging the conventions of Italian neo-realism. This innovation, however, should not be confused with the overtly political agenda that would become so much a part of the Italian postwar cinema. My interpretation is at odds with the assertion that Assunta Spina is a ‘realist’ film and Bertini’s choice to be in it ‘a daring gesture’.1 On the contrary, the choice of ordinary working-class subjects and locations and the film’s reliance on a proto-realistic style of film-making does not necessarily make it a political film. A break with the historical epic it certainly is, but in terms of its content the film fits squarely into the tradition of diva films involving frivolous plot structures and formulaic melodrama in the service, ultimately, of the generic format we come to expect. Assunta herself embodies this ‘timeless cliché of beauty’ if for no other reason than because of her existence as mythical figure and focal point of the film. The formal device that structures the drama must also include exaggerated passion that quickly devolves into tragedy through jealousy,

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revenge and, in Assunta’s case, even physical violence. And, as is generally the case, the woman is always constructed as the site of an excessive and dangerous desire that leads to the destruction of everyone around her, including herself. A repeated set of aesthetic codes is employed in all the diva films, their plots varying only minimally while the performance of the actress becomes the central motive of the film. These overly stylized performances are clearly indebted to the theatre and are marked by the use of hyperbolic gestures and movements, props, heavy make-up and costumes that overdetermine the actress’s role as dangerous woman, in effect using her iconicity to transform her into spectacle and the personification of desire. The excess and overdetermination of the diva’s image are constituted by an exaggeration of the tropes of femininity that are reproduced in many of the diva films of the period. For example, her eyes are always emphasized, with dark circles underneath; her hair is left wild and unruly; and her garments are typically flowing and ephemeral, adding to the sense of otherworldliness her portrayal inspires. Thus it is in the opening scene of the film with Bertini’s famous use of the shawl, the camera fixed on her torso as it moves and sways with the Bay of Naples in the background and the historical, geographical subtext it inspires. All these tools of signification are combined to produce a seductive, provocative femininity, aided by the techniques of early film production, such as the use of close-ups and innovative camera angles, relatively new techniques in film production. It is worth remembering again that the tropes of the silent diva films did not arise wholly on their own but are the result of similar trends in artistic production, which culminated in the cinema but whose traces are clearly found in the nineteenth century. The aesthetic codes, tastes and ideas that emerge from these films are derived from the decadent sensibility that preceded them in art and literature. Flaubert’s Salammbô or Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, for example, provided the decadent imagination with many of the themes from which it was to draw its inspiration. And, as one historian of the period reminds us, the femme fatale ‘was indelibly associated with a rising fashion for a certain kind of exoticism in which we find (both) a concern for exact historical reconstitution, and a desire for escape into the nowhere land of dreams’ (Pierrot 1981: 27). As the diva films illustrate, the influence of decadent themes was not lost on the early cinema being produced in Italy. Bertini’s performance in Assunta Spina is one of the most revered in all the Italian silent period. Much of it is characterized by an ease and naturalness that bely the extreme stylization of her art. Her performance in front

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of the camera resembles the characterization of such decadent female figures as are found in Flaubert and Baudelaire, but also in the paintings of Gustave Moreau and the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. In the cinematic figure, as in the figure’s literary or artistic versions, the emphasis is placed on woman’s essentially futile nature as fundamentally immoral, cruel and perverse, as well as on the destructive nature of passion and the dangerous aspects of love that lead man to his destruction. Thus, Assunta’s role as a not-altogether-innocent woman caught between two jealous lovers, a sacrificial role wholly consistent with the diva plot formula as it is manifested in Italy, is nothing if not expected. What is unexpected, however, is the brilliance with which Bertini embodies this prototypical role and makes it her own. It is interesting that, in her treatment of the film, Dalle Vacche asserts that ‘Assunta’s Catholic name announces that her character will be no new woman of modernity, but a regional mater dolorosa’ (Dalle Vacche 2008: 165). Indeed, her lack of agency requires her to become a protective female figure, endangering herself in order to protect her lover. But is this really the work of a mater dolorosa? Or is she merely accepting the limitations of a genre that continually forces her into a tragic double bind: either be punished for her transgressions, or sacrifice herself to an existence at the hands of a man. It is clear that Assunta’s (and Bertini’s) only real agency is the one effected by her exceptional performance and skilful use of her art in the film. Again, the line between on-screen and offscreen persona is blurred as Bertini embodies this character with all the strength and passion of someone who is attached both personally and professionally to the film (as her co-director credit implies). This seriousness of purpose in the service of her art is evidenced not only by her performance in the film, but by Bertini’s long and illustrious career on the stage and in the cinema. In Bertini’s embodiment of the role of diva we recognize the tropes of the theatre stage: her exaggerated and dramatic gestures make her look larger than life, while her huge black eyes are often turned toward the camera and away from the other actors, as if acknowledging the camera’s crucial role in turning her into transcendent icon both on and off the screen. In this and in all the silent diva films, there is a magnification of the female star as the focal point of each scene at the same time as a reduction takes place in the scope of the set and space of the film. This type of contradictory movement is consistent with the figure in general, in the sense that she provokes mixed emotions and appears to blur the opposition between activity and passivity with

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regard to her actions and their consequences – another aspect of the Italian diva that sets her apart from her other European and American counterparts. In contrast to the historical epic films which glorified Roman subjects and were known for their aesthetic exploration of cinematic space – the long-shot was perfected by Giovanni Pastrone in La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy 1910) and Cabiria (1914) – the diva films, which directly followed these large-scale productions, were self-consciously small in scale and introverted in scope. Along with this new filming technique came an emphasis on the close-up, which became crucial in the organization of the cinematic narrative. The diva film presents us with a ‘larger-than-life’ image in the midst of a continuously reduced diegetic space and time that parallels the action of the close-up as it both brings the image closer and separates it from us at the same time. Barthes describes this phenomenon in relation to the face of Greta Garbo (who, incidentally, has been called one of the ideal heirs of Francesca Bertini (Brunetta 2003: 48)): Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced [ ... ] Garbo’s face represents this fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans towards the fascination of mortal faces, when the clarity of the flesh as essence yields its place to a lyricism of Woman (Barthes 1972: 56–7). Garbo’s face (and the cinematic tradition to which she belongs) represents an era –the ‘iconographic age’ as Barthes calls it – in which the face, rather than being the mark of individuality, is universalized, bringing with it all the essentializing notions of feminine sexuality that this implies. ‘The face of Garbo is an Idea,’ he writes (Barthes 1972: 57). This is especially true of the diva films, in which each female star becomes less and less individualized at the same time as she becomes known to the public through her performances in the films. She becomes known, however, not for her singularity or uniqueness, but for her portrayal of a type, or an idea. Thus the contradictory nature of the production of images meant to single out each star as the unique presence of the film, and the universalizing tendency of the camera that makes the face the common trope of femininity.

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If Assunta Spina marks the beginning of the full-length dramas in which the actor becomes the centre of the film, it also sets in motion the series of formulaic patterns that make up the ‘diva paradigm’ in Italian silent cinema, in which the female protagonists alternate between evil seductress and fatally doomed creature. Assunta is portrayed as an enigmatic and sorrowful ‘sinner’ who protects the lover who assaults her. She ‘provokes the final tragedy and then takes the blame for it in a generous yearning for redemption’, reads the intertitle. The tragedy occurs when her fiancé, Michele, thinks she is seeing another man, which causes him to accuse her and then commit the most serious of affronts: the ‘sfregio’ or the cut. The word literally means a disfigurement involving a gash or scar, but it also has a popular connotation in which a woman is marked or made ugly as a consequence of being unfaithful to her husband or lover. In the narrative of the film the act seems incommensurate with the events that lead up to it. However, when viewed within the context of the diva genre, the violence is a formal constraint that is given the appearance of being meaningful in its own right regardless of whether it is justified by the film’s content or plot. It is this tension between the form and the narrative that is constantly put into play in the diva films, which are, in a sense, driven by the fatality of the form itself. The form proves fatal in that the plot or narrative becomes secondary to the formal devices dictated by the genre itself. The aesthetic codes by which the diva is presented include not only the tropes of her physical appearance, as discussed above, but some of the classic elements of the genre – and the well-known genres that follow it, such as 1940s film noir – such as dark interior scenes, an authoritative father figure, an upright male protagonist who represents patriarchal authority, and a devious, seductive, if often unaware female who threatens the life, welfare or psychological well-being of the hero. Not surprisingly, then, we can see the link between the conventions of the early diva films and the American 1940s film noir, despite the many formal innovations.2 After slashing her cheek with a knife, Michele is arrested and Assunta pleads with the court for leniency, claiming to have seriously provoked him. When he is sent to jail in another town, Assunta gives in to the attentions of the lawyer, Don Federigo, who offers to help her get him transferred to Naples in exchange for her own sacrifice. In the end, he too ‘abandons her to her sad destiny’ and in the final scene of the film the tragedy is played out to its inevitable conclusion. Michele is let out of jail early and comes home to find Assunta and the table set for two.

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As Don Federigo, her awaited guest, walks up to the house, Michele stabs him and he staggers inside and falls on the floor, dead. When the police arrive, Michele is gone and Assunta, in the culmination of her sacrificial role, takes the knife and offers herself to police as the murderer. As discussed earlier, the trope of the self-sacrificing female is not alien to the femme fatale genre, but it offers a culturally specific twist on the figure’s ‘deadly’ nature. She is not exactly the suffering and exalted Virgin Mary, nor is she the devil incarnate. The juxtaposition, though, is clear between the innocent, virginal mother figure and the pitiable figure that Assunta evokes at the end of the film. It is one of the few possible endings that the femme fatale can meet – either she is destroyed herself as the inevitable consequence of the destruction she has caused around her, or she offers herself up for destruction at the hands of a man, by the law, or, in the more sensational ending, by going mad. This banishment of Assunta from society, thus restoring order to her provincial surroundings, is purely in keeping with the genre’s fatal endings. In this treatment of uncontrollable passion that leads to death and destruction there is an understandable desire to laugh at the excesses of the received repertoire of decadent themes that make up the silent diva films. It is easy to dismiss these films from a critical point of view and make sophisticated fun of the lifelessness of the worn-out tropes of femininity they perpetuate. It is not surprising, then, that a dearth of work exists – most notably in Italian – on the diva films and their protagonists. They recall a former aesthetic realm in which theatricality and excess were part of the allure of the genre but never without a certain amount of self-conscious irony or distance. When we watch them now there is a sense that they do not belong to a serious discussion of cinema or artistic creation; the same kind of dismissive judgment with which many of the works of the decadent period were treated. These were offbeat, extravagant works symptomatic of the late nineteenth-century psyche – appealing but dangerous, pleasurable but self-indulgent, exciting yet perverse and simply ‘degenerate’, as they were famously judged by cultural critics of the time.3 And yet there is undoubtedly something compelling and provocative about both the decadent works of art and their successive reinventions in the diva films of the silent Italian cinema. Do we love them or hate them? Perhaps it is precisely this contradictory status that allows the fascination to endure. There is a similar persistent ambivalence with regard to the theme of the femme fatale and its treatment in literary and film studies. Perhaps this ambivalence and attraction–repulsion anxiety express something

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fundamental about the image of the femme fatale itself that is inextricably linked to its theoretical treatment. In other words, there is a striking similarity between the effects the femme fatale is supposed to inspire – the ambiguous tension between awe and terror – and the theoretical anxiety that the figure represents. What is perhaps ‘new’ in this shifting paradigm of theoretical treatment of the figure in literary and film studies is the realization that in the very concept of the figure of the femme fatale we expect a mimetic and epistemological claim that the figure itself does not make. That is, inherent in the figure’s construction is a resistance to the theoretical claims to ‘truth’ it usually inspires. Thus, Francesca Bertini silently performs her agency in the film that made her famous. She is silent, though she is not quiet. In much the same way, Homer’s Sirens may be singing, but they say nothing to our hero. It is this transgression of the very structure that determines its existence that makes the figure a persistent topic of interest, both in artistic production as well as from a critical perspective. In the mixture of attraction and horror, of distance and separation that her image provokes, or of the undecidability of her theoretical importance/marginalization, the femme fatale or diva offers us a telling interpretation of a never-ending fatality that no other figure could inspire. It is the realization that it is not the diva herself who is ‘doomed’, but the structure that determines her representation, that marks the fatality of the femme fatale. The fatality of the figure lies in this impossibility of existence outside the confines of her legacy of representation. The re-emergence and frequent renewed interest in the figure, then, may result in ever-increasing options that exist outside the old structure of representation. The future of the diva, along with both her predecessors and those yet to be created, lies precisely in the more flexible and varied representational models and possibilities for interpretation yet to be discovered. Hence, in a line that could just as easily be spoken by Francesca Bertini in Italy as it was by Gloria Swanson in Hollywood, the dying diva proclaims at the end of Sunset Boulevard: ‘I am big. It is the cinema that has grown small.’

Notes 1. Dalle Vacche (2008: 164, 168). 2. Maxfield (1996) organizes his readings of various films of the noir genre in terms of these very same formal elements, which in the case of American film noir are translated into the detective dramas of the 1940s, such as Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), as well as

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Murder My Sweet (Dmytryk 1944), The Big Sleep (Hawks 1946), Out of the Past (Tourneur 1947) and White Heat (Walsh 1949). Though Maxfield does not acknowledge this, all these films, indeed the American noir genre in general, are clearly indebted to the early diva films, as a look at the films and their structure as well as the famous femmes fatales who emerged from them (Mary Astor, Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall, Jane Greer and Kim Novak, for example) demonstrates. 3. Max Nordau’s treatise, Entartung (the French translation, Degénérescence, appeared in 1894) on the ills of the fin de siècle artists and writers is the most prominent example. Also, from the standpoint of nineteenth-century ‘medical’ texts, another famous critic of decadence is Cesare Lombroso (1897).

Works cited Barthes, R. (1972), Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang. Bernheimer, C. (2002), Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bondanella, P. (1983), Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, New York: Continuum. Brunetta, G. P. (2003), Guida alla storia del cinema italiana 1905–2003, Turin: Einaudi. Dalle Vacche, A. (2008), Diva: Passion and Defiance in Early Italian Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. Dijkstra, B. (1996), Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood, New York: Knopf. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Lombroso, C. (1897), Genio e degenerazione, Palermo: Remo Sandron. Maxfield, J. (1996), The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir, 1941–1991, London: Associated University Presses. Metz, C. (1975), ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, in Screen, 16:2, 14–76. Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Screen 16:3, 12–13. Nordau, M. (1895), Degeneration, 6th edn, New York: D. Appleton. Pierrot, J. (1981), The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5 ‘You’ll Be the Death of Me’: Mata Hari and the Myth of the Femme Fatale Rosie White

Mata Hari, the infamous spy executed by the French during the First World War, haunts all subsequent accounts of women and espionage. The popular mythology that constructs Mata Hari as a classic femme fatale has produced a stereotype of the woman in espionage that rests on pejorative accounts of female sexuality and betrayal. Mata Hari’s real story is a morality tale of a different kind, as it maps the changing roles of women in modern Europe. In this regard she may be a feminist forerunner, but her myth is dependent on derogated accounts of gender, race and class. Above all, Mata Hari’s mythology feeds into the stereotype of the oriental villainess. In William Le Queux’s 1919 novel The Temptress a French femme fatale brings disaster with her fiendish plans to seduce and murder anyone who gets in her way. The temptress exhibits no motivation other than an inordinate desire for wealth and a lack of inhibition. Finally unmasked, she commits suicide with an overdose of morphine and the remaining characters are married off. Lord Hugh Trethowen, the central protagonist and victim, closes the novel: ‘I feel assured we shall now be happy and contented. Let us look only to a bright and prosperous future, and let us forget forever the grim shadow that fell upon us, the shadow of THE TEMPTRESS’ (Le Queux 1919: 250). Le Queux’s novel was published two years after Mata Hari’s execution, and employs that ‘shadow’ of continental femininity to naturalize its protagonist’s aristocratic Englishness, just as Mata Hari’s prosecutors mobilized gender and racial stereotypes to represent her as the source of France’s troubles. Mata Hari’s mythology fed into projections, fears and anxieties regarding women and modernity that emerged in the late nineteenth century (Huyssen 1986: 52). This archetypal female spy, like other femmes fatales, is thus ‘not the subject of feminism, but a symptom of male fears about feminism’ (Doane 1991: 2–3). This essay traces 72

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Illustration 4 Image of Greta Garbo in Mata Hari (1931) Credit: MGM / The Kobal Collection / Bull, Clarence Sinclair.

the metamorphoses Mata Hari was subject to during her lifetime and in her subsequent filmic reincarnations, in an attempt to map the fears embodied by this figure as an account of femininity unleashed.

Mata Hari (1876–1917): Female spy as femme fatale The femme fatale, like her sister the New Woman, refracts fin-de-siècle shifts in gender roles. The suffrage movements in Britain and America,

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together with legislative changes in marital property law and the development of university education for some privileged women, produced the distinctly middle-class phenomenon of the New Woman (Richardson 2004: 242–3). The femme fatale was less distinct in her class identity, often moving up the social scale through her immoral activities. Like the cities she inhabited, the modern femme fatale presented a fluid identity which combined new technologies and ‘primitive’ cultures: She is associated with the styles of Decadence, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau as well as with the attention to decoration and excessive detail linked to a persistent and popular Orientalism [...]. Her appearance marks the confluence of modernity, urbanization, Freudian psychoanalysis and new technologies of production and reproduction (photography, the cinema), born of the Industrial Revolution. (Doane 1991: 1) While Mata Hari was shot for her alleged activities as a spy, it would have been closer to the truth to cite the associations above. Unwittingly, Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, aka Mata Hari, had come to represent the most feared and desired aspects of modernity in the person of the modern woman, and for this reason she was executed. As a woman and as a public figure, Mata Hari represented a disturbingly mobile femininity. Her trial was an attempt to fix that mobility within the regime of French sexual and imperial relations. It was thus not important what Mata Hari had actually done, but rather what she represented. In these terms the profitable image that Margaretha had created became her worst enemy and, ultimately, the cause of her death. Effectively, Margaretha lost control of her public image and it became a text rewritten by her interrogators to secure her conviction (Wheelwright 1992: 60). In this she is not only a stereotypical femme fatale, enmeshed in the sexual politics of Europe before and during the First World War; she is also the stereotypical woman spy, existing in the half-light of fact and fiction. Born in 1876 into a middle-class Dutch family, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, or Mata Hari, is emblematic of the opportunities and dangers that fin-de-siècle Europe offered women. Margaretha arrived in Paris in 1904, following a disastrous marriage to Rudolph MacLeod, a Dutch colonial army captain twenty-one years her senior whom she met through a newspaper advertisement. Their son had been murdered by his Malay nurse in Sumatra, in revenge for disciplinary action

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MacLeod had carried out against one of his own soldiers, and Rudolph had taken their daughter, leaving Margaretha penniless. By the time she began her dancing career Margaretha was already a femme fatale, as a woman whose sexuality was not confined to marriage and as a divorcée who did not fulfil the maternal ideal. Whereas the fictional femme fatale is rarely given a history, Mata Hari’s background is well documented. Her mother died when she was fourteen, following a nine-month separation from her father, leaving Margaretha in the care of her godfather (Wheelwright 1992: 8–30). Margaretha was thus already modern in her experience of trauma, familial separation and migration. Margaretha’s response to Rudolph’s newspaper advertisement, despite its unhappy outcome, indicates her desire for activity rather than the passivity assigned to respectable middle-class women in this period (Dijkstra 1986: 26). This active role marks her out as not ‘proper’, not ‘feminine’; in her wifely behaviour as in her subsequent career she exceeded the bounds of her gender, class and race. Like the ‘hysterics’ who fascinated Charcot and Freud, Mata Hari performed femininity for a range of spectators (Showalter 1985: 145–64). Her final audience, the prosecution at her trial in Paris in July 1917, imagined her as the threat of unconfined femininity – worse, a woman who allegedly engaged in the masculine sphere of international intelligence. In these terms Mata Hari offers a transgender, transracial account of modernity, slipping between masculine and feminine, public and private, self and other, Occident and Orient. During their marriage the MacLeods had lived in Sumatra and Java. This brief encounter with the East was later mined for Mata Hari’s public persona. After her marriage Margaretha headed for Paris, initially existing on the margins of respectable society. The Paris of 1904 was the modern metropolis par excellence (Wilson 1991: 47–64). A first attempt to be an artist’s model sent her back to Holland, but she returned and, with the help of a French diplomat whom she had met at The Hague, launched herself in 1905 as a dancer in the Parisian salons (Wheelwright 1992: 13). Mata Hari placed herself beyond respectable middle-class femininity by entering a profession allied to that of the courtesan. Rita Felski notes the mythic position of the middle-class woman as angel of the house: ‘woman became a symbol of nonalienated, and hence nonmodern, identity’ (Felski 1995: 18). This bore little relation to an urban environment where many women were moving into modern forms of industrial labour (Wilson 1991: 49). The streetwalker epitomized such contradictions, combining commodification, sexuality and contamination

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(Felski 1995: 19). Such women exemplified the dangers and desires of the modern cities. Mata Hari, like the prostitute, was a ‘figure of public pleasure’, her artificiality visible in her use of veils, exotic make-up and props (Baudelaire, cited in Felski 1995: 19). Mata Hari’s persona fed into contemporary fascination with the Orient as a feminized and decadent territory where ‘nature’ in all its savagery still reigned (Wheelwright 1992: 14). This rich terrain was mined by other dancers of the period, such as Maud Allan, in her performances as Salome (Bentley 2002; Showalter 1990: 144–68). The perceived threat of the new dancers – whose number included Isadora Duncan – was rooted in their implicit and provocative questioning of the absolute separation between public and private life, as many of them performed both in theatres and in private salons. They also raised difficult questions about what their performances meant to different viewers: Male viewers might appreciate their form and applaud the rebellion of their naked limbs and fluid movements, but the men were disturbed when their wives or daughters imitated these steps. The dancer’s threat to the ‘sanctity of the fireside’ offered upper-class ladies the fantasy of release from stifling social constraints. (Wheelwright 1992: 23) For many women Oriental performances, literature and fashions were emblematic of an escape from modern constraints into a world of premodern pleasures and unconfined eroticism (Fawcett 2004; Felski 1995: 115–41). Yet this fantasy of an elsewhere beyond the modern worked to consolidate the ‘hegemonic centrality of the European perspective that it simultaneously [sought] to escape’ (Felski 1995: 141). It also played to dominant understandings of race and gender. Male members of Mata Hari’s audiences could view her performances as evidence of Woman’s innate atavism: turn-of-the-century men adored the stage spectacle of a woman who lapsed into self-induced fits of orgiastic transport – and all in the name of art. What could be more intriguing than to watch a woman, safely isolated from the audience, revert publicly to the ‘savage’ source of her being? (Dijkstra 1986: 246) Fin-de-sie`cle discourses of gender, sexuality and race thus gestured toward liberation but also served to reinforce a colonial politics that aligned women and non-Europeans as regressive and aberrant. Women

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were seen as more closely related to the mysterious East, particularly when that Orientalized version of the Other was perceived as harbouring some ancient thrilling secret (Stott 1992: 34). The fascination of fin-de-sie`cle scientists and sexologists with the mystery of women’s sexuality is thus allied to the fascination of imperial powers with their colonial spoils (Stott 1992: 35–6). Mata Hari embodied such Orientalist fantasies in her fictitious Eastern character and performances, which were loosely based on Margaretha’s memories of life in the Dutch East Indies (Said 1978).1 After early successes, Margaretha became fully absorbed in her new identity, outdoing rivals in her determination to continue the illusion beyond the stage door (Proctor 2003: 127; Wheelwright 1992: 17–18, 27–8). In interviews she created stories about her background, the sources of her inspiration, and the character of the oriental woman, fascinating audiences in Paris, Berlin and Monte Carlo. Once the novelty had worn thin and Margaretha began to get older, however, her performances as Mata Hari became increasingly problematic, and that persona was difficult to replace. Despite forays into Spanish dance and other forms Margaretha was unable to find an equally profitable act. Her role as a courtesan was a logical sideline. As a woman working in an unstable profession, Margaretha was practical about the financial realities of her situation, often attracting older men who could become her patrons. This was another aspect of her life that would play into the hands of her accusers; the seductive spy–courtesan was a potent myth – and one that Margaretha herself perhaps believed (Proctor 2003: 124–25; Wheelwright 1992: 28–39). By 1913 Mata Hari was already past her peak, and worried by the resurgence of interest in rivals such as Isadora Duncan. While the ‘divine Isadora’ played the grand theatres Mata Hari was consigned to a ‘café-chantant-cinema’ in Palermo where she performed in front of a rolling film on a bill that included a performing dog (Wheelwright 1992: 38). Mata Hari was literally and metaphorically out of place as the war began, stuck in Berlin. Struggling to get back to Paris, already accused of being a spy, she must have also been struggling to come to terms with the speed at which her fortunes had changed (Wheelwright 1992: 39–41). In a Europe already anxious about the New Woman and changing gender roles, the First World War brought scrutiny of any individual or group perceived as threatening the status quo (Ledger 1997). The woman as temptress, as a carrier of sexual disease and as a mother of fatherless children was of particular concern. New acts were introduced in Britain and France to regulate women’s movements and sexual conduct;

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few voices raised the issue of men’s role in sexual activity (Grayzel 1999: 121–56). Even before the war anti-feminist sentiments were circulating in popular literature and high culture. Michelle Perrot cites writers such as Franc¸ ois Mauriac and André Breton: ‘These men denounced the social and domestic power of women (as did Georges Deherme in Le pouvoir social des femmes, 1912) – perceived as an occult, diffuse and secret power for which men are mere playthings’ (Perrot 1987: 59). In the popular imagination female spies embodied such feminine power, crossing the line between domestic and public spheres. The war made Mata Hari’s exotic image a liability and it was only a matter of time before she was charged. 2 Remaining quietly in Holland for a year, she missed her Parisian life. Attempts to revive her career on the Dutch stage faltered and Mata Hari returned to Paris in 1915, travelling via England and Spain in order to gain access. In returning to France she was placing herself in extreme danger. Mata Hari’s foray into espionage was, like her dancing, motivated by a need for funds and was the performance of an amateur. Julie Wheelwright and Tammy M. Proctor recount Mata Hari’s attempts at espionage. Driven by the economic imperative of dwindling incomes from her stage career, Mata Hari sought to transform her contacts in the diplomatic and military services into hard cash by selling information. By all accounts she was neither organized nor successful, and her activities only served to draw the attention of the French and British authorities, attention that ultimately provided the scant evidence on which to try her as a spy. Proctor notes the lack of distinction between spying and prostitution in the public imagination, even through to the late twentieth century, as the female spy is seen as a means of using sex to gain access to political intelligence: ‘The female spy blurred the distinction of private and public (as did the prostitute) by performing “public” work in “private” spaces, making her both effective and dangerous’ (Proctor 2003: 124). In these terms, as in the case of Mata Hari, the female spy is a dangerous figure who crosses the boundaries of private and public life. Through her alleged sexual power, the female spy as femme fatale employs private means to influence public life, thus mobilizing fears about women’s domestic power across the board. Mata Hari fitted the stereotype and filled a convenient role as scapegoat: Mata Hari died not for her great success as a master spy but because she was a symbol of the contagion of decadence and treason that

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seemed to be undermining France, especially in 1917, when widespread mutinies infected the French armies at the front (Proctor 2003: 126). Arrested in her hotel room in Paris on 13 February 1917, Mata Hari was prosecuted by Captain Pierre Bouchardon, acting on information provided by Georges Ladoux, whom she knew as her contact in the Deuxième Bureau, French military intelligence. Ladoux had recruited Mata Hari as an agent at their first meeting in August 1916: Mata Hari had sought Ladoux’s help in getting a travel pass to visit her lover and, in the course of their meeting, he suggested that she could work for French interests, despite his alleged suspicion that she was already a German agent (Wheelwright 1992: 51–2). The assignments Mata Hari conducted between this meeting and her arrest were unsuccessful and she was indiscreet. Margaretha had little idea of how to go about being a spy, beyond perhaps some dramatic images rendered in popular fiction and theatre of the time (Wheelwright 1992: 50–64). As with Margaretha’s performances onstage as Mata Hari, it was the image of the spy that she attempted to reproduce, not a professional identity that was secure or authentically grounded in training. Ladoux was complicit in this, as from the outset of their relationship he insisted on seeing her as a seductive and dangerous femme fatale. Wheelwright argues that Ladoux used the Mata Hari case to justify his own position as head of French counter-intelligence during the war, and Bouchardon was a willing aide in this, regarding Mata Hari as a ‘savage’ and a ‘negress’. In her abject state as an exposed traitor and imprisoned woman, Bouchardon appears to have projected onto Mata Hari ‘the underside of the racist “Oriental” fantasy’ (Wheelwright 1992: 77). In addition to her symbolic importance as a representation of all that was rotten inside French culture itself – the reason for mutinous troops at the front – Mata Hari also served as a handy symbolic Other to civilized French European identity. She was implicitly condemned for being a woman whose nationality was not easily defined and as a woman whose sexuality had run beyond the bounds of bourgeois respectability. Neither the type, nor the character, nor her culture, nor her coloured skin, nor her mentality – nothing of her belongs to our latitudes,’ commented Inspector Alfred Morain, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner of Paris. ‘She had something of the primitive savage about her and at the same time something refined – sacerdotal.’ (Wheelwright 1992: 84–5)

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Morain, like Bouchardon, was aware that Mata Hari’s oriental persona was an invention, yet her abject role as prisoner and traitor appeared to necessarily entail identification with racial Others. This was aided, for such commentators, by their recognition that Mata Hari was no longer young. Bouchardon was disgusted by the deterioration in her appearance, as the grey began to show through her dyed black hair. He equated this appearance with her alleged racial difference and inferiority, as did the prison doctor, Dr Bizard. In the latter’s description of her ambivalent appearance he alleges that she is ‘not at all feminine’ (Wheelwright 1992: 85). Such accounts of her transgendered, transracial identity made it easier for her prosecutors to convince themselves that Mata Hari was not only guilty, but also less than human. Her sentence to death by firing squad on 15 October 1917 continues to be contested. Most biographical accounts now acknowledge that the French had little or no evidence on which to convict her, and that evidence was probably constructed to justify the prosecution’s case. The fictions created by Margaretha, which were later deployed by her prosecution, have proved resilient through her many mythic rebirths across western culture. It is no coincidence, as Mary Ann Doane noted above, that the rise of the femme fatale mirrors that of the new technologies of mass communication – in particular the prevalence of photographic and cinematic images. Mata Hari employed tinted photographic postcards as part of her publicity material and the power of that image has informed the films about her. These images present Mata Hari draped in the finery of the East, in the jewelled headdress and breastplates of her heyday, as an Oriental beauty. The Orientalist myth of Mata Hari continues into the film accounts of her life, most notably George Fitzmaurice’s 1931 Mata Hari starring Greta Garbo.3

Garbo and Mata Hari Mata Hari was one of Garbo’s early talking pictures. When sound arrived in Hollywood the studios were keen to capitalize on the ability of foreign stars to perform in English and foreign-language versions of the same film (Berry 2000: 117). Anna Christie (Brown 1930) was Garbo’s first talkie, with a German-language version made in the same year, directed by Jacques Feyder with a completely different cast apart from Garbo. Garbo’s ability to perform in another language was symptomatic of the star persona fostered by MGM; she was one of a number of non-domestic stars marketed as an exotic product: ‘The European stars

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Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Lil Dagover were [ ... ] “Orientalized” in many films and described as embodying a “pale exoticism” ’ (Berry 2000: 111). Such transracial performances were often cited as evidence of actors’ versatility, but the cross-dressing only worked in one direction; non-Anglo actors only played ‘exotic’ roles: ‘There was an interchangeability between all “ethnic” roles, but movement from “ethnic” typecasting to “white” roles was rare’ (Berry 2000: 111). In this way Hollywood studios engaged in a raced‘ doublespeak’ in which ethnicity was both free-floating and carefully policed. From the ‘oriental’ music which accompanies the title sequence to the costumes worn by Garbo throughout, Mata Hari is fetishized as an exotic woman. The star persona of Garbo exemplifies the interchangeability of ethnic identity, as this Mata Hari expands the boundaries of the Orient to Eastern Europe, several of the costumes evoking a Russian or Cossack style. In the first sequence that features Garbo, Mata Hari’s famous dancing is barely visible. Mary Cass Canfield noted in her ‘Letter to Garbo’ in Theatre Arts Monthly that Garbo’s performance was ‘like some superior and unperturbed mannequin’ (cited in Bainbridge 1955: 161). Just as the role was rife with contradictions regarding ethnicity – a Swede playing a Dutch woman pretending to be a Javanese dancer – so the role contradicted Garbo’s established persona. Mata Hari’s dance of Eastern passion became what Variety called ‘a polite cooch’, in a brief scene where Garbo moves slowly round a huge statue of Shiva (cited in Paris 1995: 213). This lack of enthusiasm for exotic dancing did nothing to dent the film’s success – ‘Its windfall $879,000 profit for MGM was larger than that of all but one of the films she ever made’ (Paris 1995: 213) – and endorsed the idea that Garbo was more potent as a static figure than a mobile actor. Yet in other ways Garbo’s star persona tapped into similar discourses to those that had surrounded Mata Hari, both as a New Woman and through her identification with the aesthetic of Art Deco. Garbo’s roles onscreen and in her Hollywood publicity depicted her as an avatar of unconventional and independent femininity; one commentator even described her as ‘an outgrowth of modernity’ (Biery, cited in Fischer 2001: 91). Garbo’s version of the modern woman lent itself to the Art Deco style of the studio era. The Deco style was an international aesthetic in furnishings, fashion and jewellery popular between 1910 and 1935. Its name came from an abbreviation of the Paris International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Modern Arts of 1925 and it epitomized modernity in its fascination with advanced mass-production techniques and synthetic materials, together with ‘ancient’ styles and exotic motifs

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(Fischer 2001). Art Deco had a significant influence on Hollywood, particularly art directors such as Cedric Gibbons and costume designers such as Adrian; both worked at MGM with Garbo. Several of Garbo’s films explicitly reference Deco style and relate her independent, sensual persona to that of the New Woman, none more so than Mata Hari (Fischer 2002). Just as Mata Hari’s Oriental femininity is ‘whitened’ in the Garbo film, to fit with the persona of the star and avoid the taint of miscegenation, so the complexities surrounding Mata Hari’s life and death are remade to fit a Hollywood femme fatale.4 Yet, as with any stereotype, the disturbing aspects of Garbo-as-Mata-Hari cannot be fully contained. One reason for this is purely economic; with the advent of talking pictures Hollywood found itself serving at least three different audiences: the home market, which enjoyed the ‘spice’ of exoticism in a range of ways; the newly immigrant Americans (mainly Jewish, Italian and Eastern European migrants); and the global audience outside the States (Berry 2000: 117). In such a polyphonic setting, images, narratives and stereotypes were liable to be read in a range of contexts and elicit varying responses, despite the studios’ attempts to control their product by producing films geared to particular markets, such as the German-language version of Anna Christie. Hollywood’s desire to promote their product across a range of markets made some of their product inadvertently more liberal than the racist politics of 1930s America in which they were produced (Berry 2000: 117). It allowed a complex intersection of discourses regarding race and gender to appear onscreen in films such as Mata Hari. Orientalism had long been deployed as a fantasy mode of advertising consumer goods such as cosmetics, and it was also a potent signifier of liberation for white women: ‘by temporarily adopting signs of exotic sensuality via makeup and clothing, Western women could present themselves as a combination of (white) virtue and (nonwhite) sexuality’ (Berry 2000: 133). Garbo, performing as Mata Hari in the extravagant costumes designed for her by Adrian, was part of an orientalist fashion during the thirties, an orientalism which ‘also signified stylistic modernity’ (Berry 2000: 136).5 In this way, the contradictions inherent in Margaretha Zelle MacLeod’s performances as Mata Hari continue to resonate, albeit transformed to fit their contemporary contexts. Just as Margaretha constructed an artificial orientalism which served her purposes and fed into the desires and fears of her audiences (and later her interrogators), so Garbo’s Mata Hari presented a construction of the oriental

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femme fatale which fed into the desires and fears of her audiences in the 1930s. The image and idea of Mata Hari offers an unstable and contradictory representation of white and nonwhite; west and east; modern and ancient. In the Garbo film Mata Hari is unequivocally guilty; as the foreword to the action asserts: ‘In 1917, war-ridden France dealt summarily with traitors and spies.’ She is an archetypal femme fatale who appears to betray France for little reason other than pure evil; there is a symbolic sequence where, in the process of seduction, Mata Hari insists that a lamp on a house shrine to the Madonna is extinguished.6 Yet the film also represents her as a sympathetic figure; a woman caught by her love for the heroic Alexei (Ramon Navarro). After their first night together she relights the Madonna’s candle, and during the final scenes she pretends to be in a sanatorium in order to spare Alexei, her blinded lover, when he visits her before she goes to the firing squad. Clearly designed as a vehicle for the two stars, the narrative is played for melodrama. Mata Hari is a bad woman redeemed by the love of a good man. After her death, as in her life, the contradictions and complexities of Margaretha Zelle MacLeod are eclipsed by the image of Mata Hari, so that the difficult questions she raised are subsumed in the drama of her appearance alone. She has become a supreme image. Just as the face of Garbo herself was later to be enshrined on celluloid as a blank page which offers everything and nothing to its reader, so Mata Hari has become a mythology onto which an audience can project their fears and desires.7 The resilience of the myth indicates western culture’s continuing fascination with the exotic and, through Mata Hari’s fictive heritage, a nostalgic past in which the East, the Other, and femininity remain mysterious territories.

Notes Another version of this essay appears in Rosie White (2008), Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture (London: Routledge), pp. 35–43. 1. For a succinct account of the absence of women in Said’s work see Lewis 1996: 15–35. 2. Mata Hari’s rival, Maud Allan, also became embroiled in a London libel case based on fears regarding national security. In the summer of 1918 Noel Pemberton Billing MP claimed to have a ‘Black List’ of high-ranking traitors and spies in Britain, many of whom were said to attend Allan’s performances as Salome: ‘Maud Allan, accused of immorality and lesbian proclivities, became a central figure in this national spectacle as an outsider (Canadian),

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4.

5.

6.

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Rosie White an exotic dancer (she was compared to Mata Hari, who had been executed less than a year before in Paris), and the lead actress in a play whose central themes were symbolic castration and sexual perversion’ (Proctor 2003: 40). Films about Mata Hari include Mata Hari (1920, 1931, 1964, 1978 and 1985), in addition to Mata Hari, The Red Dancer (1919 and 1927). Contemporary films about Mata Hari include numerous made-for-TV movies and soft porn straight-to-video titles. ‘Miscegenation was identified as “race suicide” and was included in the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) list of representational prohibitions when Will Hays became president in 1922, removing the possibility that any Hollywood film narrative could include a non-tragic cross-racial romance’ (Berry 2000: 116). Garbo also starred in The Painted Veil (Boleslawski 1934), in which her Chinese-style costumes indicate her modern sophistication. In one scene ‘she wears a white turban and floor-length white coat; their elegant streamlining and Orientalist details make her look both modern and mystically elegant’ (Berry 2000: 137). British censors objected to the use of a religious image in this scene and a retake, in which a picture of her lover’s mother is substituted for the Madonna, was edited into the version released in Britain (Paris 1995: 215). This refers to the notorious episode during the filming of Queen Christina (Mamoulian 1933), where Garbo asked for direction on how to play the final shot of Christina at the prow of a ship leaving Sweden and the director replied ‘Darling, just make your face a blank’ (Paris 1995: 305). For a seminal account of Garbo’s image, see Roland Barthes’ essay in Mythologies (1957, translated 1972).

Works cited Bainbridge, J. (1955), Garbo, New York: Doubleday. Barthes, R. (1957), Mythologies, translated 1972, London: Paladin. Bentley, T. (2002), Sisters of Salome, London and New Haven: Yale University Press. Berry, S. (2000), Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood, London: University of Minnesota Press. Dijkstra, B. (1986), Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Sie` cle Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Fawcett, H. (2004), ‘Romance, Glamour and the Exotic: Femininity and Fashion in Britain in the 1900s’, in A. Heilmann and M. Beetham (eds), New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930, London and New York: Routledge. Felski, R. (1995), The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Fischer, L. (2001), ‘Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema: The Actress As Art Deco Icon’, in Camera Obscura, 16:3, pp. 82–111.

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Grayzel, S. R. (1999), Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Huyssen, A. (1986), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Ledger, S. (1997), The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Sie` cle, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Le Queux, W. (1919), The Temptress, London: Ward, Lock and Co. Lewis, R. (1996), Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, London and New York: Routledge. Paris, B. (1995), Garbo: A Biography, London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Perrot, M. (1987), ‘The New Eve and the Old Adam: Changes in French Women’s Condition at the Turn of the Century’, in M. R. Higonnet, J. Jenson, S. Michel and M. C. Weitz (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 51–60. Proctor, T. M. (2003), Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War, New York and London: New York University Press. Richardson, A. (2004), ‘The Birth of National Hygiene and Efficiency: Women and Eugenics in Britain and America 1865–1915’, in A. Heilmann and M. Beetham (eds), New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930, London: Routledge, pp. 240–62. Said, E. W. (1978), Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Showalter, E. (1985), The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980, London: Virago. Showalter, E. (1990), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London: Virago. Stott, R. (1992), The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death, London: Macmillan. Wheelwright, J. (1992), The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage, London: Collins and Brown. Wilson, E. (1991), The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women, London: Virago.

Part II Film Stars

6 Diabolically Clever – Clouzot’s French Noir Les Diaboliques (1954) Susan Hayward

Contexts Adapted from Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel Celle qui n’était plus (She who was no more), which had as its original premise the decision of two women lovers to do away with the married woman’s husband so they could make off with his life insurance and live happily ever after, Henri Clouzot’s film version, renamed Les Diaboliques, paints an even darker picture of the venality of humankind. The original novel upon which this film was based was, therefore, a lesbian text. In the novel it is the two women (the rather mousy wife and her butch lesbian doctor lover) who plot to do away with the husband and get their hands on his insurance policy. In the film it is the husband and his mistress who plot the wife’s demise. In other words, the original text gets ‘straightened’, for reasons that will be made apparent below – a rewriting which, whilst it impacts strongly on the film’s narrative, never quite manages to obliterate the former queer text. The plot of the film runs as follows. Christina Delasalle (Vera Clouzot) is the wife of the headmaster Michel Delasalle (Paul Meurisse), who runs a private boys’ school in the outskirts of Paris. But Christina is tired of her husband’s abusive behaviour towards her and his womanizing. Michel’s mistress, Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret), is equally fed up with his brutal behaviour towards her and so the two women team up and decide to kill him by drowning him whilst making it appear as a suicide. When the body goes missing and sightings of the supposedly dead man are reported, the two women begin to panic. They must uncover what happened to the body before it is discovered or the interfering Private Detective (Inspector Fichet/Charles Vanel) unravels the women’s plot. However, it transpires that the whole plot is a hoax 89

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invented by Michel and Nicole to put sufficient stress on Christina’s heart and cause her to die of a heart attack. They succeed in causing her death (basically by terrorizing her). Unfortunately for them, Inspector Fichet is on the ball and he catches them out, almost literally red-handed. Upon its release, the director Henri-Georges Clouzot urged all who saw the film not to reveal its surprise ending ... one which still stands as one of the most original ‘shock’ endings in the thriller genre. If Clouzot, in Les Diaboliques, had to straighten out the plot, it was not for any ostensible reasons of censorship (indeed, in Quai des Orfèvres (1947) he gave very sympathetic portrayals of lesbians). No, the real reason was his wife, Vera Clouzot. She wanted a major role in the film – but in the novel the wife’s role is very small, and clearly given her rather frail physique Vera Clouzot could not play the butch doctor role. So what Clouzot had to do was reverse the role between the husband and the wife. In essence the heterosexualization of this text occurred to satisfy the director’s wife – but not without leaving its traces on the film, because, as I shall go on to argue, this shift doesn’t quite work and the queer still seeps through. Clouzot has often been compared to Alfred Hitchcock (Hayward 2005: 8–9), and indeed in the 1950s he was often referred to as the French Hitchcock (his love of suspense and elaborate hoaxes). Indeed, they had a lot of respect for each other – there is a little anecdotal story with regard to Les Diaboliques that is worth putting in place because Hitchcock originally wanted to make a film of this novel but Clouzot had already bought up the rights and effectively blocked Hitchcock from making the film. But Boileau and Narcejac went on to write another novel for Hitchcock, which he famously turned into Vertigo (1958).

Les Diaboliques a film noir? Although there is some overlap in the visual style, tone and narrative of the American and French noirs, the actual literary sources of the scenarios already help point to a first difference. In the main, the major influence for American noir was hard-boiled crime or detective fiction. But, as Frank Krutnik argues, the 1940s American noir was also deeply influenced by Hollywood’s popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus, in adapting hard-boiled pulp fiction, American noir films tended to focus on both criminal activity and the psychological breakdown and sexual malaise of the central male protagonist (Krutnik 1991: xiv). With this sexual malaise came, of course, a concomitant anxiety surrounding female characterization. During the war period, women had

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found fulfilment outside the traditional family unit. This, in turn, led to a hostility towards women, which, in the noir context, gets reflected as a mixture of fear and fascination which the hero projects onto the woman (Krutnik 1991: 63). Thus, in American noir, the femme fatale is born out of the hero’s conflicting desires and it is she who wields power over him. She becomes the threat to his masculinity, as he desperately tries to ascertain whether she can be trusted or not – an ambivalence that makes him both vulnerable and sexually paranoid. This trope is far less in evidence in the French noir of the 1950s, as the following makes clear. Ginette Vincendeau has called these post-war French noir films social noir films (2007: 16). And I think this is a useful distinction, since the product is indeed more varied than the American prototype in that, whilst it contains American noir elements, it also transcends them. Thus, on the one hand, as Vincendeau points out, in its noirness the French product is seemingly not unlike its American brother. The settings are urban, the photography uses contrastive black and white, the narratives are pessimistic, pitting the troubled male protagonist either against his past or some treacherous woman. But where the French noir does differ, as Vincendeau tells us, is on at least three counts. First, spectatorial pleasure is derived as much from watching the star–protagonist as it is from ‘social voyeurism’ (2007: 6). Second, although she is often the one who leads the men to their demise, nonetheless, the femme fatale in French noir, especially post-war, is a much reduced figure in relation to her American sister and lacks the latter’s overridingly dangerous ‘erotic charge’ (2007: 10). As Vincendeau argues, post-war, the French femme fatale all but disappears, leaving far greater space for the men (2007: 10). In terms of spatial dynamics far greater attention is paid to the moral ambiguity of the male than to any psychological mise-en-scène of the woman character. Undoubtedly (as I have argued elsewhere (Hayward 2004: 16–20)), this de-eroticization of the female body, the forefronting of masculinity in crisis and the diminishing of the psychological gravitas of the femme is directly linked to the post-war demonization of women as those most directly responsible for the nation’s ignominy as an occupied country during the war. Thirdly and finally (to return to Vincendeau’s three terms of reference), the social noir, as its label suggests, is socially ‘anchored’ (2007: 17) – and as such it does two things: on the one hand it speaks to the aftermath of the war and the humiliating effects of the occupation of France by the Germans and, on the other, it reflects very realistically the harsh socio-economic climate of the times.

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Clouzot’s film Les Diaboliques becomes interesting when viewed in this light because we can see how mould-breaking he was. On at least two counts, his noir film deviates from Vincendeau’s three distinctions between French and American noir. Indeed, as I shall argue, he makes something new happen to the noir and thereby to the concept of the femme fatale. Let us review these three counts. First in terms of location: Les Diaboliques is not urban, but is set in the ex-urbs of Paris and the south-west small provincial town of Niort. Second, the film, as we shall explain later, is not about masculinity in crisis but far more about the unfixity of gender. Furthermore, with regard to masculinity in crisis we can also see how Clouzot veers away from that trope in another way in that he makes the two female characters, Nicole and Christina, the centre of his narrative, not the male. Indeed, Michel is fairly marginalized, at least physically in that he is ‘murdered’ in the first half hour of the film. Furthermore, he is far from being morally ambiguous. We know he is horrid from the start. And, in terms of the mise-en-scène of psychological angst, it is not he, but his wife, who is riddled with anxiety and guilt. Finally, in terms of a social noir and social voyeurism: what we can say is that it is there, but hardly in a pleasurable way, since it holds up a rather uncomfortable mirror to a rather stingy and parochial petite bourgeoisie. Whereas Michel is obsessed with money, Nicole is obsessively mean, and it is her meanness rather than her cold manipulative ways that gives her away in the end. No glamorously devious and slinky femme fatale behaviour here then – merely sordid meanness. Thus, when it comes to social voyeurism, Clouzot reveals to us (through Michel and Nicole) the ugly connivance and mean-spiritedness of the bourgeoisie. But he does not allow us to contemplate it at our leisure or in any prurient or superior way; rather, we end up feeling implicated in and tainted by its dank and sordid atmosphere. To return to the second point of divergence, de-eroticizing the femme fatale, and Clouzot’s mould-breaking ways: as a result of the narrative’s focus on the two women it becomes increasingly difficult, during the unravelling of the plot, to know how to locate the femme fatale. And this is a key to Clouzot’s play with the genre. To all intents and purposes, at least initially and because of her hard manner and severe clothing, it looks as if Nicole should be the one to embody that role. But this reading of her as femme fatale is a very difficult one to make the first time we see the film because we do not know the real purpose of her game. So we are unable to interpret her actions as treacherous until the very last minute. We are not aware until the very end that, through pretending to lead the man to his demise, she is in fact leading the other woman

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to hers. To complicate matters further, in this context of trying to fix Nicole as the femme fatale – which in a sense we can only do once we have seen the entire film – there are times (as we shall see) when, even if she is supposed to be the femme fatale, she seems deliberately to evacuate that role. Very cleverly, therefore, rather than eliminate or reduce the femme fatale – as many French noirs of the 1950s did – Clouzot appears to fragment her at will: she could be any one of these three central characters, including the male. And it is this shifting uncertainty, a hallmark of Clouzot’s noir films incidentally, which keeps us, the audience, in such a state of unease. Let us now take a closer look at how Clouzot queers his noir and its effects on the femme.

Queering the noir With regard to the primary love triangle in this thriller narrative (Michel, Nicole and Christina), something very queer is going on. And it comes down to this fundamental question: who and where is the femme fatale? Traditionally, the expectation would be that, in terms of camera focus, the femme fatale would occupy the apex of the triangle. Clearly, this is not exclusively the case; in male-centred films noirs, the hero will be the camera’s focus. But, to return to Les Diaboliques, its female-centredness and our femme fatale and who she might be, let us look in more detail at the following diagram: (Cherchez la femme) Distribution of solo shots Signoret/Nicole Close-up Medium close-up Medium shot Long shot Totals:

3} +15} =18 41} +13} = 54 72

Clouzot/Christina 9} +51} = 60 35} +26} = 61 121

Meurisse/Michel 4} +16} = 20 24} +0} = 24 44

If Nicole is the femme fatale then there is an unexpected inversion in terms of the ratio of close-ups to medium and long shots (18:54 giving a ratio of 1:3). Now, if you compare this with Christina, she has as many close-ups as she does medium and long shots (giving a ratio of 1:1). And what about Michel? He is, proportionately speaking, more often in close-up than Nicole, which brings him closer to Christina’s profile. Furthermore, with regard to the ratio of close-ups to medium and long

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shots, he again comes closer to Christina, with a figure of almost 1:1. Of the three characters, then, Nicole is the one who occupies the least feminized of the positions in relation to the camera – and thereby comes to occupy a masculinized space. In terms of the conventions of the genre, therefore, she is actually the most unlikely candidate of the three for the role of femme fatale. I am well aware that some American femmes fatales are played by ‘masculinized’ stars (for example, Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz 1945)). But they still remain the central focus and their masculinization is part of the conceit of fetishizing the female body to contain her as safe. The point here – in relation to the way in which she is shot – is that, although Nicole is masculinized, she manages to annul the fetishizing process by persisting in evacuating the position of femme fatale. And in so doing, she queers the pitch – to say nothing of the femme fatale. As we shall go on to see, it is not just through the way in which she is shot that this queering occurs; there are other ways in which she does this – and the example we will use is her clothing. But let us return first to the love triangle. Indeed, in terms of shots, Michel occupies almost as strongly a female position as Christina. Yet, here again, things are at odds. For Christina is as much in evidence, if not more, in medium and long shots as is Nicole (Nicole on 54 and Christina on 61) – a position of activity which suggests an equal involvement on her part to Nicole’s in moving the plot along. It also suggests that both (albeit at different times) essentially occupy the role that traditionally should have been that of the male character, Michel. Both women then have parity here. Thus, Christina does not unambiguously occupy the apex of the triangle, nor indeed any exclusively female space. The evidence here suggests that she is not as weak of heart and passive as we at first might believe. Conversely, Michel is greatly feminized and this is quintessentially underscored by the fact that it is his disappearance, his enigma that gets investigated by the women. Thus, rather than participating in anything that could be qualified as action-packed masculinity in practice, he takes on the role more traditionally associated with the femme fatale in film noir: namely, the body as an object of fascination and scrutiny. He thereby usurps the place that should have been that of the female lead. Michel’s passivity and feminization – which begins by his being the ‘victim’ who is murdered and then continues as he remains the invisible subject – is strongly counterbalanced by Nicole’s no-nonsense practicalities. She occupies – not necessarily by default either, given her short-cropped hair and her

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rather unsexualized clothing – an overarching masculinized space that is greater than that of the other two. Her dress barely changes throughout the film and the cut is consistently the same. She either wears a pencil-line dress or a daytime functional tunic-styled dress that can be belted (to give a certain severe elegance) or left unbelted, as it is later on in the film, to be worn for comfort.1 To this idea of comfort we must add that she has no painted fingernails, and these two elements are surely a first set of clues to her disinclination to inhabit such a prescriptive space as that of the femme fatale. Nicole’s evacuating of her role as femme fatale causes a disruption within the narrative, and it is as if the strength of her characterization permits the original text to bleed back in, permitting a queer reading. To make this point more clearly, let us take a closer look at her iconography. Her black high heels and slim-line dresses are, of course, markers within the thriller codes and conventions of her femme fatale status. Iconically speaking, then, we could be forgiven for thinking that in this regard she ‘naturally’ represents the traditional femme fatale of the film noir with her clothing marking her as the safely contained phallic woman. But this apparent investment in noir iconography stops dead in its tracks at this juncture with regard to Nicole’s clothing. Other things intrude to stop it short. She loves removing her high-heeled shoes. Worse still, the carpet-slippers she wears whilst carrying out the murder and, again, at the end of the film, when she is finally apprehended for her crime, do enormous damage to her status as a sexy femme fatale. How can this homebody in any way be associated with the glamour of the phallic woman of the film noir genre? But there is more in terms of this undoing. For, when she is supposedly at her most ritualistically phallic moment (killing the male), her dress code stresses her ordinariness. She is in carpet-slippers (like her elderly male tenant upstairs) and her dress is unbelted so that it hangs, totally unrevealing of any contours, like a shapeless housecoat. Her gestures lose their extraordinariness, their excess, therefore. But this is just one way in which the iconographic coding is in conflict. There are others. The casually worn cardigan over the shoulders (which she wears at the beginning of the film) suggests a sporty persona (as though she is ‘ready for tennis’) not associated with the languorous femme fatale. And even that iconography (of sportswoman) is destabilized by the fact that Nicole knits (presumably for herself – a new white cardigan perhaps), although her needles do flash with considerable vigour, pointing to her prickly nature. Curiously, as if to give weight to this conflictual or fragmented characterization, it is noteworthy that she is never (as she would have

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been in a traditional film noir) the object of Michel’s investigatory gaze. She is not, therefore, the enigma that has to be unravelled – which as a femme fatale she most assuredly would be. Indeed, as already discussed, this probing of the enigma itself gets fragmented. In the first instance it is Michel who, once he has been ‘murdered’, becomes the enigmatically vanished body that is the constant object of the two females’ searching gaze. And, in the second instance, it is the rather grubby, unkempt and sleazy-looking retired policeman turned private eye, Inspector Fichet, who, to get at the truth and resolve the mystery, probes and investigates Christina and not Nicole (again with the effect of deflating her femme fatale role). Finally, in this series of role reversals, where the two men are concerned, to Michel’s rather feminized role (as the enigmatic evanescent body) corresponds Fichet’s own lack of sexualized masculinity (as a run-down aging body). All in all, one could argue that this film noir, with its fragmented (at times cross-gendered) femme fatale, is the noir to end all films noirs.

Conclusion To conclude, I want to return to Ginette Vincendeau’s idea that French noir’s femme fatale lacks erotic charge. Generally speaking she is right to make this point. However, with Signoret’s embodiment of Nicole everything changes. The erotic is back but in a queer way. Signoret is the linchpin to the whole drama. We derive tremendous pleasure in viewing her. But I would like to suggest that we do this in several stages, which is also what gives us such a thrill in our reception of her performance. The first time we view the film, because we are not in the know, it is clear that we cannot project onto her the specific fantasms of methodical murderer nor indeed of femme fatale. We can only do so once the film is over. Not until then do we really know what she is up to. So her performance is only revealed as a masquerade once we are at the end of it. What can our first reading of her be, then? Cold, hard, brusque, domineering on the one hand and, on the other, as we briefly observe, caring towards Christina, solicitous, capable of warmth. But not, above all, not overtly sexy – at least not in the heterosexual sense; in a way she cannot show any passion for Michel, given the hoax they are trying to pull off. But, given her, compared with Christina, more ‘butch’ appearance, maybe lesbian pleasure can be derived in viewing. But this is surely the exact opposite of the intentionality of a film noir? Whatever the case, there is no slinky femme fatale, no false seductions where Nicole/Signoret is concerned. In fact, as I have argued, she spends

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a lot of time eschewing the role of femme fatale, conceding that space to Michel. So why do we watch fascinated? What is left to entice? I would argue that, because Nicole/Signoret is not overtly one thing, she is precisely everything. By emptying out the stereotypes, there is so much more to see. Thus, I would suggest, it is this very visible ambiguity around her sexuality that excites – invites us into knowing more about female sexuality than the simple stereotype of mistress or femme fatale would ever allow. That is Signoret’s true power as a star – and we marvel at how serenely she achieves this. But I would also suggest that, having heterosexualized the original text to enable his wife to play a dominant role in the film, we can now see that Clouzot did not in fact repress the lesbian original. It is as if he knew he could retain it by maximizing Signoret/Nicole’s sexual ambiguity. A move that is diabolically clever in my opinion!

Note 1. There is a sketch of the type of dress Signoret wears in Les Diaboliques in the French Communist Party’s women’s weekly (Heures Claires des Femmes Françaises, No. 509, 4 November 1954, 14). Called a sort of ‘passe-partout’, its qualities are extolled by the weekly since it is functional, smart and inexpensive to purchase.

Works cited Hayward, S. (2004), Simone Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign, New York and London: Continuum. Hayward, S. (2005), Les Diaboliques, London: I.B. Tauris. Krutnik, F. (1991), In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, London and New York: Routledge. Vincendeau, G. (2007), ‘French Film Noir’, in A. Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 23–54.

7 Fatal Femininity in Post-War British Film: Investigating the British Femme Melanie Bell

The absent femme fatale in British cinema The commonly received wisdom is that British cinema of the 1940s failed to produce any femmes fatales. Robert Murphy, in his discussion of the post-war British crime film, argues that ‘there was no equivalent to the glittering femmes fatales who haunted Hollywood cinema’ (1989: 107). He supports his statement with reference to Wolfenstein and Leites’s postwar film survey, which concluded ‘British films do not, on the whole, take the destructive potentialities of women seriously’ (ibid.). Andrew Spicer, who has done much to open up the field of British noir for study, is largely silent on the subject of the femme fatale, despite claims that British noir was preoccupied with ‘a critique of male prowess, potency, sexuality and criminality’ (2002: 202); concerns where we might reasonably expect to find a female influence. How do we explain this curious critical absence, given that the British crime film in all its various manifestations proliferated in the post-war period? Sue Harper’s ground-breaking work on Gainsborough costume drama has convincingly demonstrated the centrality of ‘wicked ladies’ in British cinema between 1943 and 1950. Harper argues that ‘[t]he period is notable for the amount of screen time given to female villainy ... [which] quickly spread from costume to modern melodrama and to other generic forms’ (2000: 69). From this statement we might reasonably conclude that the dangerous female was present across a range of genres including – but not limited to – crime. This chapter will draw together the two strands of the crime film and the female villain into a discussion of the femme fatale as she emerges, contrary to previous opinion, within a specifically post-war British film context. 98

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As Britain struggled with wartime rationing and a burgeoning black-market economy a new type of crime film emerged in British cinema, which Peter Wollen and others have categorized as the ‘spiv’ cycle (1998: 18). Films such as Waterloo Road (1945) and They Made Me a Fugitive (1947) focused on a criminal underworld populated by razor gangs and ‘wide-boys’, dealing in black-market goods within the urban milieu of the palais de danse, the boxing ring and the dog track. Within these worlds men dominate, and women are secondary, either loyal but duped wives and girlfriends, or dance hostess and nightclub performers who function as objects of male exchange. In either role their narrative importance is minimal, and their concerns and desires marginal. These films, popular with audiences, attracted mixed critical response and were often condemned for their ‘sordidness’ and glamorization of crime. The Sight and Sound critic Arthur Vesselo coined the term ‘morbid burrowings’ in 1947 to describe contemporary British film-making, which had an ‘unpleasant undertone, a parade of frustrated violence ... a groping into the grimier recesses of the mind’ (1947b: 120). Vesselo’s term, although originally applied to They Made Me A Fugitive, has been taken up by critics such as Robert Murphy to describe the much broader cycle of film-making in post-war Britain that dramatized themes of paranoia, male anxiety, murder, psychological disturbance, sex and violence (1989: 169). The parallels with American film noir are obvious, and between 1943 and 1949 Britain produced its own cycle of ‘morbid films’ concerned with maladjusted or brain-damaged veterans (The October Man, 1947), hommes fatals (Blanche Fury, 1947) and tragic male murderers (Daybreak, 1946; Dear Murderer, 1947; Obsession, 1949). What Murphy rightly identifies about this loose cycle of film-making is its diffuseness, with male paranoia and criminality appearing across a broad spectrum of films which, in Spicer’s topography, range from topical crime thrillers to gothic-inspired Victorian films noirs (2002: 183). Indeed, it is this very diffuseness that has militated against a serious engagement with the British femme fatale. Dangerous women are central to some contemporary crime dramas (Dear Murderer) but more marginal to others (Obsession). They are afforded little narrative space in the spiv cycle but assume greater prominence in gothic noir (for example, Daughter of Darkness, 1948; see Spicer, 2002: 183–4). This diffuseness is only part of the explanation. British film criticism has demonstrated a remarkable uncomfortableness with home-grown female villainy and has struggled to find a way to engage with it in any meaningful manner. The most popular British star of the 1940s, Margaret Lockwood, was the quintessential ‘wicked lady’ of British

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cinema (see her murderous roles in costume dramas such as The Man in Grey, 1943 and The Wicked Lady, 1945), but her performances were roundly dismissed by critics. Leonard Mosley in the Daily Express declared ‘I just cannot believe in Miss Margaret Lockwood as a femme fatale’ (in Babington 2001: 95), the Guardian likened her to ‘cold suet pudding’, whilst for Time and Tide she was competent to ‘launch a hair style [rather] than a thousand ships’ (in Aspinall and Murphy, 1983: 74–7). Gavin Lambert later sneeringly dismissed her performances as ‘suburban’ (Babington, 2001: 105) and indeed she has fared no better with more recent commentators. For Murphy, Lockwood’s costume roles are examples of ‘boisterous, good-natured villainesses, bold but unthreatening’, whilst her role as a ‘real femme fatale’ in Bedelia (1946) sees her performing as a ‘spoilt child rather than a psychopath’ (1989: 107). The sense that Lockwood cannot be taken seriously as a femme fatale even now suggests that the benchmark for dangerous women remains predicated on a Hollywood model, perhaps best embodied by Barbara Stanwyck, whose femininity was resolutely modern, edgy and urban. This, however, elides any engagement with how a specifically British variant of the femme fatale may have emerged, and there are two key concerns that need to be addressed: domesticity and sexuality. As Babington has demonstrated, part of Lockwood’s appeal was her ordinariness, coupled with elements of the exotic (the Karachi–Norwood interface, 2001: 104). Her star persona embodied a type of fatal femininity which was inflected through a domestic lens, seemingly at odds with commonplace understandings of the ‘Hollywood’ femme fatale, but rooted in a specifically British context and arguably as, or perhaps even more, threatening because of its very domesticity. Indeed, the idea of the domestic femme fatale in British cinema is further strengthened by the proliferation of female poisoners found, perhaps not surprisingly, in gothic noir (Pink String and Sealing Wax, 1945; Madeleine, 1949), but also present in contemporary thrillers (Dear Murderer, Bedelia). The poisoning wife is a spectre that emerges historically (alongside studies of female criminality) at times of ‘profound unease about women’s place in society’ (Jones 1991: xxii). Certainly, as a more domestic variant of the femme fatale, this figure has been relatively overlooked in studies of British cinema. Whilst the idea of domestic space as threatening is a long-standing feature of the female gothic film, in the Hollywood variant, men threaten women (The Spiral Staircase, 1946; Secret Beyond the Door, 1947), whilst conversely, in the British films mentioned above, it is the women who prove deadly to the men.

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As Rebecca Stott and others have argued, sexuality is the defining feature of the femme fatale, a sexuality that is ‘perceived to be rapacious, or fatal to her male partners’ (1992: viii). It is perhaps this component, more than any other, that is seen as lacking in British actresses and that might account for Murphy’s comment that Lockwood is ‘unthreatening’ in the role of villain. Certainly British cinema had always used ‘exotic outsiders’ to import sexual sophistication into the narrative (Macnab 2000: 143). During the war and immediate post-war period, of course, casting ‘exotics’ was neither possible nor desirable, and homegrown actresses were called upon to perform divergent femininity, with varying degrees of critical success. Actresses as diverse as Googie Withers (Pink String and Sealing Wax), Margaret Lockwood (Bedelia), Jean Kent (Good Time Girl, 1948), Ann Todd (Daybreak, Madeleine), Greta Gynt (Dear Murderer, Easy Money, 1948) and Siobhan McKenna (Daughter of Darkness) featured as villains in period and contemporary melodramas and crime thrillers, made by a range of British production companies including Ealing, Gainsborough and Cineguild. An actress’s star persona inflected the female villain character in particular ways. Ann Todd’s impassive glacial iciness differed markedly from Googie Withers’ sensual and grounded persona, producing a broad spectrum of fatal femininity where sexuality was not necessarily rapacious in the way that Stott deploys the term. For example, Ann Todd was, as Harper suggests, adept at ‘inspir[ing] passion in others ... [whilst herself remaining] frigid’ (2000: 70). The idea of a frigid femme fatale is perhaps a peculiarly British phenomenon. There is no doubt that Todd’s characters are fatal to men: in Madeleine she poisons a besotted and blackmailing former lover whilst in Daybreak the rivalry between her two suitors causes murder and suicide. Similarly, Withers played another duplicitous poisoner, whose sexuality was shot through with a degree of pragmatism (Harper 2000: 71) that enabled her to approach her male victims with steely determination. Frigidity and pragmatism may seem the antithesis of the femme fatale, but they point to a particularly British inflection of female sexuality, and indicate some of the methodological limitations in deploying wholesale a framework drawn from critical discussions of the Hollywood femme fatale to another national cinema. I’ve expanded on these points elsewhere (Bell, 2009) and within the remaining space of this chapter I want to offer a case study of two different types of British femme fatale appearing in different types of films: the mature overtly sexual woman who consciously performs female villainy (Greta Gynt in Dear Murderer and Easy Money) and the more domestic yet no less deadly ingénue type (Siobhan McKenna in Daughter of Darkness).

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The two types have been chosen because they illustrate the diverse ways in which British cinema negotiated some of the tensions surrounding female sexuality in the post-war years. I’ve drawn at times from existing scholarship on the femme fatale (Doane, Gledhill, Dyer et al.), and these ideas have helped illuminate readings, but I have borne in mind the Britishness of these femmes, and suggested points where they depart from critical frameworks.

Performing fatal femininity for the British screen: Greta Gynt Greta Gynt enthusiastically embraced stardom within British cinema at a time when many British actresses eschewed such glamour in favour of a more modest star identity.1 Norwegian-born, she trained as an actor and dancer and came to England in 1935, aged nineteen. Instructed by her agent to model herself on Madeleine Carroll, she dyed her hair blonde and, after an apprenticeship in supporting roles, secured a seven-year contract with Rank and enjoyed a brief but intense period of success between 1943 and 1948. She provided fuel for the gossip columns with numerous marriages and love affairs and was a shameless self-promoter who always courted press attention. She famously appeared at a 1947 Royal Command performance in a silver lamé dress with a matching silver fox coat and silver hair adorned with silver osprey feathers, a calculated attempt to steal the publicity from Hollywood star Loretta Young, whose film The Bishop’s Wife was premiering at the event.2 She later commented that she looked ‘like a fairy on the Christmas tree gone wrong – but of course it made all the papers next day’ (in Braun 1973: 34). Described in 1948 by society magazine The Leader as ‘the only Rank star who behaves like a film star’ (Oliver 2000: 50), she has subsequently passed into the annuals of British film history as a vamp – one obituary describing her as ‘the slinkiest Delilah of them all’ (Times, 5 April 2000). Equally at home in comedy or straight drama, it was her roles in Dear Murderer and Easy Money that consolidated her female villain status. Upon her retirement from film production at the end of the 1950s she declared herself ‘utterly bored with this femme fatale business’ (Bergan 2000). Gynt’s Nordic heritage gave her an outsider status which meant she could signify as the ‘exotic other’ to the British cultural consciousness and perform certain roles in British cinema, whilst Norway’s position as occupied ally during the war ensured she continued to readily find work in the British film industry. It was of course her exotic outsider status

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coupled with her ‘Hollywood-esque’ attributes – glamour, film ‘starriness’ – that allowed her to be read as a convincing femme fatale, both at the time and subsequently. Arthur Vesselo, reviewing Dear Murderer for Sight and Sound in 1947, argued that the film’s ‘chief redeeming feature’ was Gynt as a ‘highly unscrupulous siren’ (1947a: 77). She is afforded a brief mention in Murphy’s and Spicer’s studies of British noir; Murphy approvingly describing her as ‘glitteringly evil’ in Dear Murderer (1989: 187) whilst for Spicer she succeeds as ‘the most ruthless femme fatale in British cinema’ (2006: 125). For these two contemporary commentators there remains a sense that Gynt is best understood as an anomaly within British cinema, rather than locating her more precisely within a spectrum of British fatal femininity. Whilst aspects of Gynt’s star persona meant that she functioned effectively as a femme fatale, conversely those same elements could work against the character type. Within British cinema culture, where an ‘anti-star inflection of stardom’ predominated (Babington 2001: 20), Gynt occupied the terrain of self-conscious performer. Her own reference to the business of performing as a femme fatale suggests a selfawareness of her image, its construction and presentation. She was regularly cast in roles that showcased performances: a nightclub singer and dancer in The Common Touch (1941) and Easy Money, an opera singer in Take My Life (1947), and a cabaret artiste in Crooks’ Tour (1941). This, coupled with her training as a dancer, meant that her star persona comprised a generic ‘song and dance’ or ‘performative’ element. Christine Gledhill notes that the placing of noir women in ‘image-producing roles – nightclub singers, hostesses, models etc. ... [has meant that] their performance of the roles accorded them in this form of male story-telling foregrounds the fact of their image as an artifice’ (1998: 30–1). With Gynt, the idea of artifice is heightened, and her star persona worked in interesting ways with the film material. She is simultaneously convincing as the dangerous woman, whilst pointing to the creation of that image and its construction as a fantasy figure. This tension is evident in Easy Money (1948), a portmanteau film which warns against the dangers of gambling, and, by association, loose women. Gynt is cast as a nightclub singer, Pat Parsons, who persuades her pools-clerk boyfriend Joe to make a false claim on the pools for a payout of £20,000. Interrogated by the company’s claims investigator, Pat tries to double-cross Joe and the sequence ends with their arrest. Opening in typical noir fashion, with flashback and voice-over, Gynt’s character is introduced performing her regular nightclub routine. Gynt, dressed in a black satin split-skirt dress and gloves, performs the song

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Illustration 5 Press Materials for Easy Money (1948) Courtesy of Cinema Library. Credit: The Steve Chibnall archive.

‘Shady Lady Spiv’ to an upmarket nightclub audience seated at tables through which she moves and dances whilst singing.3 The scene is a remake of Rita Hayworth’s striptease performance of ‘Put the Blame on

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Mame’ in Gilda (1946). Gynt’s dress, described by a commentator at the time as the ‘new look and look again’ gown (in Spicer 2006: 100), is virtually a direct copy of Hayworth’s outfit. Wearing twenty-four-button gloves to above the elbow, and with her shoulder-length hair blonde and waved, Gynt copies the hair-tossing mannerisms of Hayworth in Gilda, in a manner that leaves no room for ambiguity in recognising the source of the scene. Certainly performing a British variant of Gilda, an instantly recognisable femme fatale, is a role that no British actress other than Gynt could realistically have attempted, and the scene is intended to showcase Gynt’s character as both a sex object for male heterosexual pleasure, and the cause of their downfall. However, the notion of image-production cannot be escaped, and from the outset artifice is foregrounded and runs throughout the film. In part this is achieved because a double performance takes place as the star ‘Greta Gynt’ performs ‘Rita Hayworth’s Gilda’, which results in the audience being positioned to read between the two scenes. As Andrew Horton has illustrated in his work on remakes (an elastic term which can encompass allusion, parody or the recreation of key scenes), these ‘invite and at times demand that the viewer participate in both looking at and reading between multiple texts’ (1998: 4). Richard Dyer has convincingly demonstrated that Gilda is a problematic femme fatale, not least because Hayworth’s star persona (her ‘charisma’) resists some of the negative connotations of the deadly female (1998: 121). Given the striking and extended parallelism between the two films, traces of this resistance spill over into Easy Money. Gynt’s song ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ suggests female culpability in the black-market economy (‘ladies cash-in looks aren’t done on coupon ration books’), and that women sell sexual favours to the highest bidder (‘she’ll be your lady, but you’ve got to givegive-give’). But drawing together the multiple circuits of allusion and parallelism, performance and resistance clearly at play here brings challenges to bear on this version of sexual politics. The film’s moralizing discourse is not overturned (it authoritatively proclaims Pat, at the point of her arrest, ‘a wicked and foolish girl’), but it is certainly disrupted and its validity rendered ambiguous; a characteristic that typifies the narrative positioning of the femme fatale figure. A similar pattern obtains in Dear Murderer, which, even more than Easy Money, points to the femme as a male fantasy figure. In this film Gynt’s character, Vivien Warren, an upper-middle-class society woman, drives her husband Lee to distraction with her constant infidelities. Lee murders one of her lovers, Richard, and then frames a second paramour, Jimmy, for Richard’s murder. Lee is wracked with guilt at the

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incarceration of the ‘innocent’ Jimmy and the film concludes with Vivien murdering Lee and being arrested by the police. Thematically and stylistically the film deploys characteristics typically associated with film noir. Adapted from a play, the film is shot in the studio, the drama located in interior domestic settings, with much of the action taking place at night. Chiaroscuro lighting is used to enhance this moody and claustrophobic setting. The iconography of Janey Place’s ‘spider woman’ is in evidence for Gynt’s character. Her long hair frames her face, she smokes constantly, and she wears a number of glamorous outfits that signal her sexual availability. She frequently gazes at herself in the mirror at times of narrative importance (reflecting on her infidelity or planning her husband’s murder), suggesting the ‘selfabsorbed narcissism’ of the femme and the desire for autonomy (Place 1998: 56). She is first introduced through her husband’s flashback, with Lee’s voice-over drawing attention to her appearance: ‘I remember how she looked, she was wearing her new black dress.’ Although the role of the duplicitous society wife would appear to be removed from Gledhill’s image-producing roles, the film’s publicity material suggests the central importance of ‘performing’. The film is usually approached critically as one of a number of post-war psychological thrillers in which the travails of ‘sensitive and tormented’ middle-class men are foregrounded (Spicer 2002: 184). The film’s press book, however, places great emphasis on Gynt as ‘a perfect model’, with film studios being well positioned to take advantage of the actress’s ‘enviable ability as a fashion model’. A full-page spread details aspects of Gynt’s ‘£2,000 wardrobe’ for the film; the ‘white strapless evening dress with draped crepe bodice and a skirt of cascades of white tulle’, the ‘exquisite hand beaten bronze and pearl studded flower jewellery’, the ‘sable-trimmed hat and muff’ and the ‘£3,000 luxurious mink coat’ on loan from a ‘distinguished London fashion house’. With accompanying film stills of Gynt in a variety of outfits, suggestions are then put forward as to how female viewers (the ‘average woman’) can adapt these ideas, which ‘can be copied quite easily and cheaply’, for their own wardrobes. In the film, Gynt showcases a number of outfits ranging from smart, stylish daywear to glamorous evening gowns, paraded against a backdrop of elegant dining and sophisticated ‘contemporary’ living. The film’s visual pleasure, both now and certainly for a post-war ‘austerity’ audience, derives as much from Gynt’s numerous costume changes as it does from Reginald Wyer’s ‘accomplished noir cinematography’ (Spicer 2006: 125). Further, it is these frequent costume changes (taking place from scene to scene), coupled with Gynt’s star persona,

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that provide the film with its sense of ‘dressing-up’ and playing the part of the fatal woman. The notion of image-production in relation to the fatal/duplicitous woman is also evident in other, perhaps less immediately obvious, ways. The film opens with an extended, wordless scene depicting the husband Lee entering a stylish apartment and rifling through bedroom wardrobes and drawers. His attention is arrested by flowers in the waste-paper bin which are accompanied by a card reading, ‘Love Always, Richard’. Spurred on by this clue, Lee continues searching for more evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and quickly finds numerous cards in the dressing-table drawer, all bearing the same message and clearly intended to indicate the woman’s unbounded capacity for sexual duplicity. Vivien, however, as an embodied character is entirely absent in the opening sequence, and rather it is the idea of the duplicitous woman that motivates the action; Lee’s image of the ‘unfaithful wife’ (a resident wartime folk-devil) is here called into service. In this respect the idea of the femme fatale that is deployed in this scene recalls Angela Martin’s observation that this is an image that expresses ‘a masculine view of female sexuality’ and one which Martin argues, drawing on Mary Ann Doane, functions ‘as a kind of signpost’ (1998: 208–9). For Martin, this signpost can point to male neurosis, an observation that bears on Dear Murderer, where the opening sequence, intended to illustrate the wife’s infidelity, equally points to the obsessive nature of Richard’s ‘love’ (a man who clearly exhibits no restraint) and the husband’s capacity for paranoia and mental instability. There has clearly been a critical tendency to approach Greta Gynt as the archetypal ‘siren’ or ‘ruthless femme’, and to read her as imagistic shorthand for fatal femininity on the British screen. This approach fails to engage fully with her unique position within British cinema and how aspects of her particular star persona (performativity, imageconstruction) pull against the femme fatale type in various, complex ways that suggest different readings. A similar contradiction or duality characterises the femme fatale of Daughter of Darkness (1948, adapted from a 1938 play), although here the tension is between the exotic and the domestic.

The deadly ingénue: Daughter of Darkness Daughter of Darkness is a gothic melodrama with the central protagonist, young Irish servant girl Emmy Baudine (Siobhan McKenna), using her sexuality to lure young men to their deaths. Banished from her

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village in Ireland, she’s dispatched to a Yorkshire farm headed by Bess Stanforth (Anne Crawford) and her husband. Young men from the local community begin to mysteriously disappear and Bess, increasingly suspicious of Emmy, confronts her, eventually expelling Emmy from the community to meet her death. The narrative is thus structured by the investigation of a mystery, although, in common with many films noirs, the focus of the investigation is displaced onto the woman and what follows is an investigation of female sexuality. Of particular interest for this discussion is how nationality and landscape are used to construct fatal femininity, and the role of the woman Bess in investigating and regulating female sexuality. In contrast with the upper-middle-class world inhabited by Gynt or the more working-class urban milieu associated with, for example, Googie Withers, Daughter deploys a specifically rural landscape as the backdrop for female sexuality. In the original play Emmy’s origins were Cornish, but in the film her roots are in rural Ireland; a shift that is significant. As Ruth Barton has argued, Irish neutrality during the war severely fractured British–Irish relations, with post-war British cinema responding with a ‘darker view ... of national treachery’, the Irish countryside now ‘represented as a dark, malevolent space whose depiction drew closely on the Gothic rather than the pastoral tradition of representation’ (2004: 80). Part of Emmy’s fatal femininity thus derives from her Irishness. She’s positioned in the British cultural consciousness as an outsider figure and an invader. This gives her licence to perform fatal femininity, whilst the femme figure here assumes a wider political significance. The film, however, retains its Cornish elements through the use of landscape, which is also put to use in constructing the British femme. Despite the ostensible Yorkshire setting, the film was shot on location in Cornwall, with some of the more dramatic sequences being filmed at recognizable Cornish locations such as Hellsmouth near Perranporth. Studio press releases frequently stressed the film’s Cornish setting. The Cornish landscape, as Rachel Moseley has argued, is simultaneously ‘familiar and strange’ (2009), occupying a place within the British imaginary as ‘the domestic exotic’ (Thomas in Moseley, 2009), and within post-war British film history this landscape was often used to represent the ‘desirable, dangerous woman’ (Moseley, 2009). In Daughter of Darkness, Emmy is linked with this landscape in ways that suggest dangerous femininity. In a key scene, after murdering one of her male victims, Emmy is dramatically shot from a cliff-top at high angle running along the beach, the camera then cutting to a close-up of her scrambling,

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barefoot, amongst the rocks and pools and then standing staring out to sea. She encounters a young fisherman, David, who advises her not to ‘bide there too long ... it ain’t healthy’. Emmy’s response that this is her ‘favourite spot’ signals her as a regular visitor to the deserted cove and establishes her connection with the landscape. Emmy draws parallels between herself and the sea: ‘It’s just like me, that sea, nothing holds it back. You’d never think it had such strength. And then its hands come out and crash on the rocks and tear at them, and all the thunder is in your ears.’ Female sexuality is given the force of nature and is signalled as destructive, unbridled and unhealthy, certainly when it is cut loose from socially acceptable avenues such as monogamous marriage. Emmy’s sexual power is presented as something that she struggles and fails to control. She admits, ‘something terrible rises up in me and I can’t breathe,’ and in this respect she embodies Doane’s description of the femme as the ‘carrier’ of power, with its attendant ‘connotations of disease’ (1991: 2). This resonates with Bess’s later claim that Emmy is ‘rotten’, and thus the threat of contagion is linked to the Irish-outsider figure. Doane’s observation, however, suggests a femme who lacks agency, something that, as I shall demonstrate later, is challenged by Emmy’s particular characterization. Whilst Emmy is clearly signalled as exotic and therefore threatening (David, bewildered, can only weakly observe ‘you’re not like a servant girl at all’), she too, like the Cornish landscape, is simultaneously ‘domestic’ and familiar. Indeed, she is complimented on her actual domestic skills on more than one occasion (‘she does her work well’ and enjoys polishing the silver). She’s frequently dressed in modest clothing: blouses with ‘peter pan’ collars, pretty embroidered dresses, flat shoes and a cross on a chain around her neck. Indeed, the challenge for the film’s dress stylist Dorothy Sinclair was how to design a wardrobe that would ‘attract the admiration of men’ whilst remaining sufficiently ‘demure’.4 Reviews of the film focus on the duality of Emmy’s character, her ‘wistfulness and innocence, shot through with a suggestion of evil’ (Times, 28 January 1948). Her seduction technique consists of nothing more than a downward glance and seemingly shy half-smile. It is the combination of deadliness and innocence (the deadly ingénue) that characterizes this particular femme and points to the importance of recognizing the role played by the domestic and quotidian in an understanding of the British femme fatale. In common with many films noirs, the central concern of the film is an investigation of the femme fatale and her sexuality. What is particularly noteworthy about this film is that the investigation is undertaken

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by a woman – a situation which gives considerable narrative space to the dynamics between the fatal femme, Emmy (young and unmarried), and Bess (slightly older and married, but without children). As Gledhill has demonstrated, within film noir investigation often takes the form of a confession (1998: 29) and Bess is positioned as a confessor figure in the narrative, confronting Emmy and forcing her to confess to violating the codes of female sexuality. In two key scenes Bess challenges Emmy: ‘what made you leave your village in Ireland? I want to know why, tell me! They didn’t like you, did they? Why, Why?!’ and, later, ‘you’re going to tell me what’s behind this filthy thing, I’ll shake it out of you ... Answer me!’ Bess is, however, a redundant investigator because, as far as the audience is concerned, they already know what happened in Ireland and her interrogation brings no new evidence to bear on the killings. Through casting, the two women are positioned as opposites – ‘English Rose’ versus ‘dark Celtic beauty’ (McFarlane 1999: 86) – but Bess is simultaneously repulsed by Emmy (‘She repels me, I don’t know why’) and fascinated with her. What motivates Bess is a desire to hear, in detail, Emmy’s sexual transgressions. Stott, in her discussion of the femme fatale, draws on Foucault to argue that ‘confession produces sexual discourse whilst appearing to repress sexuality’ (1992: 68) and these ideas structure the narrative of Daughter of Darkness. Bess produces Emmy as the embodiment of transgressive female sexual desire (‘you’re a bit of a flirt, aren’t you’, ‘I believe you’re rotten’), inciting her to talk (‘Where have you been?’ ‘What have you been up to?’ ‘Did you know him’), whilst she simultaneously works to regulate her (‘You don’t bring those habits onto this farm,’ ‘You’ll pack your things ... and get out of this house’). Bess’s actions, seemingly motivated by protecting the community, call female sexuality into being. In this case female sexuality is not subjected to ‘the voice of male judgement’, as Gledhill finds in many American noirs (1998: 29), but rather, in this British context, female judgement and regulation: in the end Bess casts Emmy out of the community to certain death. The older married woman is positioned as the gatekeeper for the community’s sexual mores and bears the responsibility for reconstructing the domestic realm, but this is achieved through a process that allows her to confront, head-on, female sexual desire in a manner not often found in mainstream British cinema. Nor does Bess’s interrogation go unchallenged. Emmy’s response – ‘I have my rights,’ ‘I believe you’re jealous’ and ‘You shouldn’t speak to me like that’ – suggests a degree of independence and agency, a space where the young woman is given a voice, and attempts at regulation negotiated and, at times, thwarted. If, as Doane has argued, many representations

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of female sexuality ‘take on a life of [their] own’ (1991: 3[Authorquery: Please provide complete details in Works cited]), then what is particularly memorable here is the fascination female sexuality is shown to have for women, as much as men. As I have shown in this chapter, post-war British cinema did produce home-grown femmes fatales, and in a manner more diffuse and complex than has been widely recognized. Whilst ‘resident outsiders’ such as Gynt had greater licence to perform fatale femininity, aspects of her star persona – shaped by her place within the British consciousness – pulled against character type and foregrounded the femme as a fantasy figure. Daughter of Darkness illustrates how, within the British context, fatal femininity was often inflected through a lens of domesticity, and that unregulated female sexuality could be a source of fascination for other women. The films discussed were made with domestic audiences in mind and enjoyed reasonable commercial success, suggesting that home-grown femmes fatales had cultural currency and that no discussion of the femme figure is complete without a critical engagement with national cinemas and their particular inflections of cultural types.

Notes 1. Lockwood, for example, was famously chastised by her production company for appearing in public looking unglamorous and casually dressed (Babington 2001: 95–6). 2. See the Greta Gynt ‘micro jacket’ held at BFI library. 3. ‘Shady Lady Spiv’ written by Vivian Ellis, sung by Greta Gynt. 4. Daughter of Darkness press book, held in the BFI library.

Works cited Aspinall, S. and Murphy, R. (eds) (1983), Gainsborough Melodrama, London: BFI. Babington, B., ‘Introduction’, in B. Babington (ed.) (2001), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: MUP, pp. 1–28. Babington, B. (2001), ‘ “Queen of British Hearts”: Margaret Lockwood Revisited’, in B. Babington (ed.), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: MUP, pp. 94–107. Barton, R. (2004), Irish National Cinema, London: Routledge. Bell, M. (2009), Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris. Bergan, R. (2000), ‘Greta Gynt’ obituary, Guardian, 5 April. Braun, E. (1973), ‘Rank’s Young Generation’, in Films and Filming, 20:1, 32–40. Daughter of Darkness Press Book, held in BFI library. Dear Murderer Press Book, held in BFI library.

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Doane, M. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Studies, Phychoanalysis, New York & London: Routledge. Dyer, R. (1978; 1998), ‘Resistance Through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI, pp. 115–22. Easy Money Press Book, held in BFI library. Gledhill, C. (1978; 1998), ‘Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism’ in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI, pp. 20–34. Greta Gynt ‘micro jacket’, held in BFI library. Harper, S. (2000), Women in British Cinema, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, London: Continuum. Horton, A. and McDougal, S. Y. (1998), ‘Introduction’, in A. Horton and S. Y. McDougal (eds), Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, California: University of California Press, pp. 1–11. Jones, A. (1991), Women Who Kill, London: Victor Gollancz. Macnab, G. (2000), Searching for Stars, Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Cassell. McFarlane, B. (1999), Lance Comfort, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Martin, A. (1998), ‘ “Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!”: The Central Woman of 40s Films Noirs’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI, pp. 202–28. Moseley, R. (2009), ‘A Landscape of Desire: Cornwall as Romantic Setting in Love Story and Ladies in Lavender’, in M. Bell and M. Williams (eds), British Women’s Cinema, London: Routledge. Murphy, R. (1989), Realism and Tinsel, Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1948, London: Routledge. Oliver, J. (2000), ‘The Archive Presents ... Greta Gynt’, in National Film Theatre programme, November, 50–2. Place, J. (1978; 1998), ‘Women in Film Noir’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI, pp. 47–68. Spicer, A. (2002), Film Noir, Essex: Pearson. Spicer, A. (2006), Sydney Box, Manchester: MUP. Stott, R. (1992), The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Vesselo, A. (1947a), ‘British Films of the Quarter’, Sight and Sound, 16:62, 76–7. Vesselo, A. (1947b), ‘British Films of the Quarter’, Sight and Sound, 16:63, 120–1. Wollen, P. (1998), ‘Riff-Raff Realism’, Sight and Sound (April), 18–22.

8 ‘Put the Blame on ... Mei’: Zhang Ziyi and the Politics of Global Stardom Olga Kourelou

A rare beauty in the North, she’s the finest lady on earth, A glance from her, the whole city goes down, A second glance leaves the nation in ruins. There exists no city or nation that has been more cherished than a beauty like this. The above lyrics feature in Zhang Yimou’s martial arts epic, Shi mian mai fu/House of Flying Daggers (2004), sung by the film’s star, Zhang Ziyi. Zhang plays the role of Mei, an entertainer renowned for her allure and exquisite dance and singing abilities. In one of the film’s most spectacular sequences, Mei performs a seductive dance while singing the above song, whose words about the destructive powers of a beautiful woman serve as a parallel to the diegesis and her characterization. The lyrics of Mei’s song are derived from a famous Chinese poem entitled Jiarenqu, meaning The Beauty Song.1 According to Anne E. McLaren, this poem contains the earliest reference to the phrase qing guo qing cheng, literally ‘one who ruins city and state’; a phrase commonly used in China to refer to a femme fatale (McLaren 1994: 1). The femme fatale image, indeed, is one that Zhang Ziyi has been closely associated with not only in House of Flying Daggers but throughout her career. Appearing mainly in genre films, in particular wuxia pian, 2 and period pieces, as well as in auteur films, such as Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004), Zhang has built her star persona as a hybrid icon of dangerous beauty, amalgamating elements from Chinese women warriors with traits from alluring courtesans and sing-song girls (a sexualized female type I discuss later in more detail). 113

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Zhang’s image as a femme fatale and her rise to stardom, however, have been subject to controversy, receiving both high acclaim and strong opposition from critics at home and abroad. An interesting case in point is the debate her star image generated in 2005, the year of her first tailor-made Hollywood vehicle, Memoirs of a Geisha (Rob Marshall 2005). This was also the year Zhang Ziyi appeared on the cover of a Newsweek special issue devoted to ‘China’s Century’ (Anon. 2005). Alongside the Great Wall of China and the Shanghai Television Tower, Zhang Ziyi’s image is placed in the foreground, occupying the most prominent position among these three Chinese cultural symbols. Yet, while Newsweek featured Zhang as ‘the face of China’, web postings in her native country denounced her as ‘an embarrassment to China’ due to her role as a Japanese geisha in her Hollywood debut (Anon. 2006). Both of these incidents illustrate the contradictory reactions that Zhang Ziyi’s star persona and its reception generate. Zhang’s star image is determined by a transnational mode of film-making and film consumption, governed by networks of global capital, transnational production values, marketing practices and distribution channels. Her stardom emerged with her role in Ang Lee’s Wo hu cang long/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) (henceforth Crouching Tiger); the first transnational wuxia pian hit, which ushered in a trend for big-budget hybridized martial arts films, such as Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Asianized’ Kill Bill (2003–4) and Zhang Yimou’s ‘Americanized’ Yingxiong/Hero (2004). Moreover, Zhang’s stardom coincides with the gradual opening up of the previously nationalized Chinese film industry to the global film market. According to Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, the transnational implies a loosening of the viability of national and cultural insularity (Ezra and Rowden 2006: 3); yet the hostile reactions towards Zhang’s global stardom, such as the accusation of shaming her country, would seem to indicate the persistence of national cultural boundaries and values. Zhang’s embodiment of the Chinese femme fatale therefore raises important questions about stardom within a transnational context. This chapter will consider the sexual and ethnic connotations generated by Zhang’s image, and her association with cultural authenticity and national identity. It will also show how her persona negotiates and alters the power relations between the local and the global, the East and the West – in other words, the ways in which Zhang Ziyi personifies the tensions that emerge when an ‘ethnic’ star achieves global stardom. In exploring these questions I will focus on her iconography and characterization in her major international hits: Crouching Tiger, which, as previously mentioned, propelled her to global stardom; House of Flying

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Daggers and 2046, which were both released in 2004, the highest point in her career so far; and her controversial Hollywood debut, Memoirs of a Geisha. Methodologically, the essay draws from Richard Dyer’s concept of the star text (1979), and the idea that stars embody contradictions within and between ideologies (Dyer 1998: 34). Adapting the notion of the star text in the context of my case study, I examine the representation of Zhang’s femme fatale persona not only across a range of cinematic genres, but also across the various discursive materials circulated around her persona, primarily in the West. In addition, I consider the new modes of her persona’s ancillary consumption, made available by a proliferation of extra-cinematic material disseminated through blogs and fansites on the web. Moreover, drawing from transnational cinema studies and Chinese film studies, I discuss the ideological conflicts crystallized in Zhang’s image by employing Gary Xu’s analytical metaphor, ‘sinascape’; a term that refers to ‘twenty-first-century Chinese cinema as media-based contact zones, where ideologies clash, [and] where new identities emerge through both border crossings and resistance against globalization’ (Xu 2007: 19).

The Chinese femme fatale: A woman in public space The construction of Zhang Ziyi’s star persona as a femme fatale needs to be located within the culturally specific representational traditions from which it emerges. In The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period, Anne McLaren analyses the ancient motif of the femme fatale in seventeenth-century Chinese fiction as combining attraction with an evocation of anxiety (McLaren 1994: 5–9). Within her feminist reading of the femme fatale, she discusses the stories of this period as cautionary tales, designed to warn male readers of female sexuality’s catastrophic effects on patriarchy. McLaren also argues that the depiction of the dangerously beautiful woman became so conventional in Chinese fiction that the femme fatale motif encompassed a wide range of women: lower-class women in cities, from housewives and midwives to singsong girls and prostitutes, as well as imperial concubines and ‘ladies of quality’, whose unbridled sexuality and determination to follow their personal desires wreaked havoc in the strict patriarchal society of their time (ibid.: 2–8). Zhang Ziyi’s star persona incorporates several of the above facets of the Chinese femme fatale. To examine these further, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar’s approach to the intersection of gender and nation can be usefully evoked here. In China on Screen (2006) Berry and Farquhar analyse the images of four female stars, Xie Fang, Ruan

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Lingyu, Gong Li and Maggie Cheung, in terms of the changing ideas about modernity and the nation state they embody. They argue that, unlike dominant representations of women and the nation, which tend to see female characters in relation to the home, women in Chinese cinema are primarily associated with public space (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 110). Through an examination of narrative role and of the deployment of the gaze, Berry and Farquhar demonstrate how these Chinese female stars elude both typical narrative roles and ‘gendered cinematic tropes like the look’ (ibid.). In the discussion that follows, I draw from Berry and Farquhar’s approach to consider how Zhang Ziyi can be seen as a femme fatale, and the ethnic and sexual inflections of that image. In narrative terms, Zhang Ziyi’s characters display continuity in terms of her portrayal of women warriors as agents in public space. In the wuxia pian films, Crouching Tiger and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang’s characters can be traced to the long tradition of the woman warrior in Chinese literature and film. The image of the woman warrior ranges from legendary figures, such as Fa Mulan, who disguised herself as a man to take her elderly father’s place in battle, to the large stable of female martial arts stars, such as Zheng Pei-pei, who dominated the Hong Kong film industry before its ‘masculinization’ with the arrival of Bruce Lee in the mid-sixties (Desser 2006). Zhang Ziyi’s roles as Jen in Crouching Tiger and Mei in House of Flying Daggers tap directly into the lineage of the ‘female-centered Chinese cinema tradition’ (Desser 2006: 145). These women warriors appear as femmes fatales both figuratively and in a literal, physical sense, as they ‘ruin city and state’ not only with the power of their beauty and sexuality, but also with their deadly martial arts skills. More specifically, Jen in Crouching Tiger is a nobleman’s daughter who leads a double life, and whose gender transgressions destabilize social norms. While she is destined for an arranged marriage, Jen is involved in a passionate love affair with Lo (Chen Chang), an infamous bandit, known by the name ‘Dark Cloud’. Furthermore, Jen dreams of escaping her familial and societal constraints, and of living according to her own desires in jianghu, that is, the ‘world of vagrants’ (Hunt 2003: 124). Having secretly mastered the techniques of the Chinese martial art of wu dang, she embarks on various jianghu adventures. These involve her stealing warrior Li Mu Bai’s (Yun-Fat Chow) Green Destiny sword, and going on the road as, to use her own words, ‘the Invincible Sword Goddess’, fighting anyone who comes her way. Jen is a powerfully alluring character. She exerts a great influence on Li Mu Bai, the aloof master of wu dang. Li Mu Bai is drawn to Jen because of her expert martial arts

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skills, but also because he is fascinated by the mystery that initially surrounds her identity, as well as by her refusal to obey him as a master, despite his repeated demands that she become his disciple. Jen’s allure and the danger she represents for Li Mu Bai’s moral restraint come to the fore through the way she looks and is looked at. More specifically, when she breaks out of her domestic confines and adopts the swordswoman persona, she is dressed in a one-piece, all-black outfit that resembles the suit traditionally worn by ninjas. Her outfit matches the mystique that at first surrounds her character, since it conceals both her identity and her martial arts skills. Besides hiding her identity and enhancing her mystery, Jen’s outfit also carries sexual overtones. With its feline connotations, it strongly suggests that which is untameable, and endows her with qualities of a wild sexuality. To the contemporary viewer the outfit is also reminiscent of the cat suit Maggie Cheung wears in Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas 1996), a self-reflexive film about a film-maker’s attempt to remake Louis Feuillade’s silent classic, Les Vampires (1915). Cheung plays the role Musidora performed in the original serialized film. The film presents Cheung, dressed mainly in a latex bodysuit, in a highly eroticized manner. This comparison with Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep gives Jen a touch of the mysterious Vamp that further enhances both her elusiveness and her dangerous sexual appeal. The suit thus becomes a sign of the femme fatale and a cue for her threatening sensuality. Another feature of her iconography that is expressive of an untamed sexuality is her hair. In her role as dutiful daughter, Jen appears with her hair tied up. Conversely, the loosening of her hair is a trope repeated in all the sexually charged scenes of the film. For instance, the object that instigates Jen and Lo’s love affair is her hair comb, which he steals and which she tries to retrieve. Throughout her stay in Lo’s cave in the dessert, her flowing hair classically connotes her ‘free’ sexuality, while it also contributes to her eroticization in the bamboo fight with Li Mu Bai. As Kenneth Chan observes, ‘the seductive gaze on Zhang Ziyi’s face as strands of her black hair, blown by the gentle breeze, softly caress it, all captured in slow motion’ (Chan 2004: 6) presents Jen as the eroticized object of Li Mu Bai’s suppressed desires. While Jen is presented as a traditional erotic object through her cat suit and Li Mu Bai’s libidinous gaze, her image as a femme fatale in the guise of a woman warrior lends itself readily to a feminist reading. Through her refusal to become either a wife or a disciple, and her determination to follow her own desires, Jen resists objectification. By stealing the sword, a potent phallic symbol of male power, and by running away from the family home, she delivers a blow to patriarchy, as represented

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by Li Mu Bai on the one hand and her family on the other. She enters the world of fighters that has fascinated her since reading about it in stories from her girlhood; a world she imagines as exciting because in it fighters can live freely. Jen’s idealization of the world of jianghu echoes the female narrator in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1981), a semi-autobiographical book, which explores the experience of growing up as a Chinese–American. In ‘White Tigers’, Kingston re-imagines her childhood, by describing herself as a version of Fa Mulan. This rewriting of her girlhood demonstrates the affirmative values expressed by such women. The opening of ‘White Tigers’ is particularly revealing: When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learnt that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound [ ... ] I would have to grow up a warrior woman (Kingston 1981: 25). Jen’s fascination with women fighters clearly echoes the feelings in this passage, and her decision to emulate her heroines turns Jen into a powerful female character and a positive identificatory figure. The film’s ambiguous ending, in which Jen jumps off Wudan Mountain, also reinforces a possible feminist reading. Kenneth Chan’s analysis of the multiple meanings the ending generates is particularly insightful in this respect. Considering Jen’s characterization throughout the film, as well as the element of myth that is one of the genre’s main elements, Chan’s positive reading is in my opinion the most apt interpretation. From this perspective, Jen’s jump can be seen as ‘a leap to freedom and escape’ (Chan 2004: 14). As Chan argues, Jen has demonstrated her qing gong skills, that is, her ability to defy gravity, especially when she dives into the river to retrieve the sword. Therefore, the narrative context establishes the possibility that she survives the final jump and remains alive. In addition, Chan notes that narratively this reading also ties Jen to the fulfilment of Lo’s story of hope, in which God rewards a young man after he jumps off a mountain, by granting his wish and by allowing him to float away into eternity. Expanding upon Chan’s argument, I would add that, in light of the genre’s fantastical elements and links with folk stories, Jen’s jump, besides a leap to freedom, can also be read as a leap into the world of legend; in other words, as her entry into a world where she can roam

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wild as a woman warrior, inspiring fear and respect and contributing to her own myth-making. Zhang’s on-screen persona as a woman warrior venturing into public space is analogous to her growing visibility off screen, which testifies to her rising power as a new contender in the Asian and international film circuits. Interestingly, a recurrent theme in the films in which she is not the main female lead is her confrontation and antagonism with an older and more established woman. For instance, Crouching Tiger and Hero feature fighting sequences with Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung respectively, both of whom were much more recognized (martial arts) stars than Zhang, who was at an early point in her career. Fighting for principles as well as for the attention and affection of a man, these sequences also suggest Zhang Ziyi’s attempts to gain more access into the world of high stardom. Her subsequent lead roles and top billing, as shown by Memoirs of a Geisha, in which Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li appear in supporting roles, serve as a confirmation of Zhang’s winning battles. In contrast to the woman warrior, a different facet of the femme fatale that Zhang Ziyi is associated with in her films is the figure of the entertainer, whose different inflections vary according to the genres in which they appear. For instance, in House of Flying Daggers, set in China’s Tang Dynasty, Mei is a composite figure of the woman warrior and the female entertainer. She is a martial artist, working for a clandestine anti-state organization, as well as the most sought-after performer at a luxurious brothel, using her body to both lure and fight off the police officers who pursue her. Mei thus occupies and moves across two different generic female characterizations. In a different vein, in Memoirs of a Geisha the figure of the entertainer Zhang embodies is a geisha in 1920s Japan, while in 2046 she appears as a call girl in 1960s Hong Kong. To examine this aspect of Zhang’s on-screen personas more closely, I would like to move away from the wuxia genre, and focus on Zhang’s character as Bai Ling in 2046. Bai Ling can be usefully analysed in terms of what Stephen Teo calls the ‘sing-song girl’ type (Teo 1997: 29) – a Western corruption of the Shanghainese term used to describe a predominant feature of Shanghai nightlife since the nineteenth century. The ‘sing-song girl’ was a highclass prostitute who entertained her native and foreign clients by serving tea and wine, and by singing opera and popular songs. The sing-song girl type migrated to the cinema via the Hong Kong Mandarin musicals. In the cinema, sing-song musicals flourished between the 1940s and the 1960s, with Xue Lihong/Red Bloom in the Snow (Li Han Hsiang

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1954), Taohua Jiang/Songs of the Peach Blossom River (Wang Tian-lin and Zhang Shankun 1956) and Chuan/My Dreamboat (Tao Qin 1967) being some of the most representative titles. Whether comic or melodramatic, they all included music and shared as motifs the city and the sing-song girl. The latter appeared as performers and entertainers – from nightclub and opera singers to escort girls and prostitutes – who were either tragic women or femmes fatales. By the late 1950s, Stephen Teo observes that the Hong Kong musical had evolved into an eclectic genre, bringing together, in the Hong Kong style, traditional Shanghainese singsong entertainment with American popular music and fashion trends (ibid.: 35). This development was best exemplified by Grace Chang, popularly known as Ge Lan, as the sing-song girl’s modern incarnation in Mambo Nülang/Mambo Girl (Yi Wen 1957). In fact, throughout its development, the image of the sing-song girl worked together with particular stars who came to personify its different permutations, such as the ‘sweet’ Zhou Xuan, star of the classic Malu Tianshi/Street Angel (Yuan Mu-jih 1937) and Genü zhi Ge/Song of a Songstress (Fang Peilin 1948), and the ‘sour’ Bai Guang, who earned her fame as a ‘terrible beauty’ in Li Pingqian’s 1949 Yidai Yaoji/A Strange Woman (ibid.: 32). In 2046, Bai Ling represents the tragic sing-song girl; a departure from Zhang’s typical casting, since she usually portrays the seducer rather than the seduced. Initially represented as a coquettish and giddy dance hall girl, Bai Ling becomes lovelorn after her impossible affair with her neighbour, the world-weary and emotionally unavailable Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung). In Wong Kar-wai’s exploration of longing, memory and ‘the nostalgic remembrance of the 1960s’ (Teo 2005), Bai Ling can be seen as a modern sing-song girl firstly through the American jazz and mambo music that is heard when she appears. Bai Ling is usually accompanied by Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, and Connie Francis songs. In fact, the theme that introduces her is a sexy 1960s Latin American song, Siboney, written by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona and performed by Connie Francis. Heard non-diegetically, Siboney’s slow mambo tempo underlines Bai Ling’s languid movements, which accentuate the sultriness of her character. The modern sing-song girl type is also evoked through the way Bai Ling looks. The most prominent feature in her iconography is the large number of bejewelled, tight-fitting, silk cheongsams she wears. Bai Ling’s modernized cheongsams with their tight fit, high collars and slit skirts contrast sharply with their traditionally loose predecessors. During the 1950s and 1960s, the cheongsam appropriated Western fashion styles, and became, as Pam Cook has argued, an emblem of fashionable Chinese womanhood, combining ‘opposing

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forces of tradition and modernity [and] revealing a femininity at once sexualized and constricted’ (Cook 2005: 10). This image of sexualized Chinese femininity encapsulated in Bai Ling’s form-fitting cheongsams at first sight would seem to undermine the empowered and empowering figure of the woman warrior previously discussed. With a beehive hairdo, high heels, cigarettes and cheongsams, Bai Ling embodies the quintessential exotic sex object. At times she has a serpentine quality about her – an aspect that further suggests her exoticism, enhanced by her reclining and coiled poses, as well as the fur boas that encircle her neck. This objectification is reinforced by her subjection to the male characters’ libidinous gaze, echoing Laura Mulvey’s articulation of woman as spectacle (1975/1989). Observed by Chow and his friend through a grille, and recurrently shown as a framed reflection in mirrors, Bai Ling appears as the classic object of the voyeuristic male gaze. Similarly, the way she looks at herself is also framed as a reflection of male desire. Even when the point of view does not seem to belong to any of the male characters in the diegesis, Bai Ling constantly poses and checks herself in mirrors in a manner that reproduces the way she is looked at by Chow, the bearer of the male gaze. However, despite her visual objectification, Bai Ling may also be read, like the woman warrior, as an agent in public space. This is expressed through her trade, and the way it invokes the trading city. Berry and Farquhar analyse the genealogy of Chinese women who are presented as agents outside the home and signify the nation through their association with old Shanghai and modern Hong Kong as port cities. They observe that the lineage of women who represent the trading city are different incarnations of ‘the old figure of the courtesan [who] survive outside the home not because of patronage or as women warriors, but as commercial agents trading in the new economy and symbolized by a range of entertainers including the streetwalker and the female actor’ (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 130). In this light, Bai Ling as a dance hall girl, who exchanges her time for money and luxury goods, may seem like an independent commercial agent, partaking in the new international economy that made Hong Kong in the 1960s become one of the Four Asian Tigers. Her financial freedom not only endows Bai Ling with the power to be self-determining and to choose how and where to live (for instance, at the end of the film she decides to leave Hong Kong for Singapore); it also helps her to overcome her bruised feelings and pride. During her short-lived affair with Chow, which he treats casually, the only way Bai Ling manages to maintain

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some power over him is through money. By paying him for sex when they last sleep together and by returning him the money for her ticket to Singapore, Bai Ling ‘pays him back’ for his apathy and womanizing. Hence, her financial independence and mobility, coupled with the fact that, unlike the unsympathetic Chow, she is an empathetic character, endow Bai Ling with more agency than her previous objectification by Chow’s libidinous gaze would allow.

Zhang Ziyi: An agent in transnational cinema Despite her young age and relatively short career, Zhang has managed to become a major player in the global flow of cultural exchange. She has garnered numerous nominations and awards at various international film festivals, including the Baftas, the Hong Kong Film Awards and the Golden Globes, as well as a place on the 2006 Cannes festival jury, certifying her increasing global appeal. She was featured in the 2005 Time 100 Most Influential People list, described as ‘China’s Gift to Hollywood’ (Corliss 2005), and she frequently appears in several ‘Hottest Stars’ lists. Her name has also been attached to a number of luxury brands, as she became the Chinese representative of labels ranging from haute couture (Dior and Armani) and skincare products (Garnier and Asience) to prestige watches (Omega). Meanwhile, as evidenced by the previously mentioned Newsweek cover, in the West, Zhang has overwhelmingly been seen as the new face of twenty-first-century China. In her native country, however, matters are more complicated. Whereas, during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Zhang became a Global Ambassador for the Special Olympics, and in March 2006 she received a special World Influence Award, overall her influence on Chinese culture has not been received as unanimously positive. The critique against Zhang’s star persona and the values it signifies has been twofold: on the one hand, she has been accused of betraying her country, and on the other of misrepresenting it. Both sides of this critique arose from her appearance in Memoirs of a Geisha as the Japanese Chiyo, a young maid, who transforms into Sayuri, a renowned geisha. The film, which was banned in China for fear of inciting anti-Japanese sentiments (already running high at the time), generated a heated debate. Zhang was blamed for selling out not only by catering for Western audiences’ tastes for exotic Oriental spectacles, but also by playing a Japanese character, disregarding cultural specificity and ethnic diversity, and thus betraying her national loyalties. In fact, her ‘selling out’ carried such negative sexual connotations that

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Zhang was portrayed as whoring after money and success. For instance, one of the most popular Chinese web forums, Tianya, posted several poor-quality nude pictures, purporting to show Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe, her co-star in Memoirs of a Geisha, copulating in one of the film’s scenes. According to Jeremy Goldkorn’s coverage of this story, the pictures were ‘accompanied by a nationalist rant, castigating Zhang Ziyi for dropping her pants with a Japanese man and acting as a Japanese prostitute’ (Goldkorn 2005). Dovetailing with the above critique is the accusation that Zhang misrepresents her country. In his analysis of Zhang Ziyi’s embodiment of the transformation of Chineseness in the age of global modernity, Chu Yiu-Wai cites a critique of Zhang by Kong Lingqi, a descendant of Confucius. This critique was part of a larger debate in Mainland China about the extent to which Zhang Ziyi, an ‘ “Orientalist” movie icon’ (Chu 2008: 194), has become a more important and more marketable cultural symbol of China than Confucius. According to Kong Lingqi, ‘What Zhang Ziyi represents isn’t true Chinese Culture – she’s just a symbol of China. [ ... ] Foreigners like her because to them she fits more closely to the Westerners’ image of a Chinese woman, but this image twists and misunderstands Chinese culture’ (ibid.: 196). Kong Lingqi’s argument points both to the persistence of Orientalism in discussions of representations of Chineseness and to what Gary Xu has identified as one of the cultural symptoms of twenty-first-century China, ‘the insistence on Chinese cultural authenticity’ (Xu 2007: 28). Clearly, in the West Zhang has been seen through Orientalist eyes. The casting of three ethnically Chinese actresses, Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li, as Japanese geishas in the controversial Memoirs of a Geisha, at first glance certainly perpetuates Hollywood’s regulating and nationally blinkered gaze, which relegates ethnic others to ‘epidermically correct’ roles (Shohat and Stam 1994: 190), just as it frequently casts European actors in indiscriminately ‘European’ roles (Phillips and Vincendeau 2006: 12–17). This is especially evident in the billboard posters that were used to promote the film, with Zhang’s face in extreme close-up and her eyes retouched and tinted blue so as to look at once more ‘Japanese’ and more ‘Western’ – a strategy that speaks of Hollywood’s tendency to favour cultural homogeneity and to gloss over ethnic diversity. From this perspective, Zhang’s role may be read as typecasting, whereby ‘the range of characters an actor may attempt is limited by the emphasis, rather than de-emphasis on the given-ness of her or his physical and behavioural attributes’ (Shohat and Stam 1994: 131).

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However, this reading can be challenged, as first of all it ignores the transformation of Orientalism from ‘Western positional superiority to the interpretation of Chineseness’ in the context of globalization (Chu 2008: 192). With this in mind, we can rethink Zhang’s portrayal of Sayuri and other characters who exhibit the signs of Orientalism in films set in an explicitly fictionalized ‘East’. This portrayal can be better understood in terms of what Rey Chow has called, in her discussion of Zhang Yimou’s Fifth Generation films, ‘a cross-cultural commodity fetishism’ (Chow 1995: 170). From this perspective, Orientalism as portrayed by an ‘Oriental’ becomes the deliberate staging of a tactic: through the exhibitionist self-display of ethnicity, it manages to return the Western gaze, and to create its own images as products for cross-cultural consumption. Even though Chow discusses the way this tactic works in Chinese films, her analysis is relevant for an understanding of Zhang Ziyi’s role as Sayuri because of Zhang’s complicity in her representation as a Japanese geisha in her Hollywood vehicle. This role appears as an extension of her typical portrayal of the femme fatale in her transnational Chinese films, since at the heart of both her Hollywood and Chinese spectacles there lies a conscious self-display of exoticism and eroticism, driven by market imperatives and by Zhang’s desire to achieve global stardom. Hence, through her self-Orientalizing, Zhang emerges as a marketable cultural spectacle, commanding high salaries and top billing, and asserting her power to transcend the gender and ethnic limitations typically imposed on ‘Asian others’. At the time of writing, Zhang Ziyi is starring in and producing one of her next projects, Sophie’s Revenge (Yimeng Jin 2009), which boldly speaks of her growing status in the film industry, since, apart from Jackie Chan, there is no other Chinese star (let alone a woman) who can exercise such power. Furthermore, it is precisely this power that the ‘typecasting’ and ethnically blinkered argument levelled against Zhang Ziyi also fails to account for. What Zhang’s star persona signifies in Memoirs of a Geisha is neither an Orientalist gaze upon the image of the geisha, nor Zhang’s ethnic inauthenticity, since we already know her ethnic identity and since the film is in English (Lim 2007: 48). On the contrary, as Song Hwee Lim acutely observes, Zhang’s image speaks of the economy of desire behind Zhang’s transnational stardom and the agency this endows her with (ibid.). Discussing the processes as well as the impetus behind the deterritorialization of culture, Lim parallels Zhang’s on- and off-screen personas in Memoirs of a Geisha, arguing that both transformations (Chiyo into Sayuri, and Zhang into a Japanese character in an

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American film) are fuelled by a desire associated with power: Chiyo/ Sayuri’s quest to enter the Chairman’s world, and Zhang’s aim to gain ‘a place in the world of Hollywood and mega-stardom’ (ibid.). What is the significance of this desire for power in terms of Zhang Ziyi as a transnational Chinese star and what her persona stands for in relation to turn-of-the-millennium Chinese cinema? To return to Gary Xu’s notion of sinascape, Zhang Ziyi’s star image crystallizes the ideological tensions running through twenty-first-century Chinese cinema, whose transnationalism can be understood as ‘representations of border-crossing under the demand of profit-seeking nations that are more competitive, not collaborative, with each other even if collaborations are deemed essential’ (Xu 2007: 19). Zhang Ziyi’s translocation does not imply the transgression or obliteration of national ideologies and cultural authenticity claims, as the above hostile reactions towards her and her transnational ventures show. Rather, her border-, ethnic-, and linguistic-crossing echoes China’s rise in the global film market. Representing the post-Mao generation’s energy and confidence, Zhang’s star image exemplifies ‘China’s aspiration to develop its own name brands’ (ibid.: 28) and to challenge the unidirectional flow of cultural exchange between the West and the East. Ultimately, what Zhang Ziyi’s stardom represents is Richard Dyer’s ‘perfect fit’ between an actor and the characters s/he plays (Dyer 1998: 129); for Zhang Ziyi’s star persona as a femme fatale personifies not only the anxieties raised by a growing, cosmopolitan China, but also the fascination and threat this powerful image of Chinese femininity inspires at home and abroad.

Notes 1. Jiarenqu dates back to the Han Dynasty, and it was composed by Li Yannian. 2. Wuxia pian is the Chinese martial arts genre, which translates into English as sword-fighting film. Some of its main characteristics include an ancient setting, lavish sets and costumes, as well as complex choreography that mixes swordplay with kung fu techniques, acrobatics and wirework.

Works cited Anon. (2005), ‘Special Report: China’s Century’, Newsweek, 9 May. Anon. (2006), ‘China Cancels Release of “Memoirs of a Geisha” ’. 2 January, http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2006–02-01-geisha-canceledchina_x.htm (last accessed 31 January 2009). Berry, C. and Farquhar, M. (2006), China on Screen: Cinema and Nation, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Chan, K. (2004), ‘The Global Return of the Wu Xia Pian (Chinese Sword-Fighting Movie): Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, Cinema Journal, 43:4, 3–17. Chow, R. (1995), Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press. Chu, Y. (2008), ‘The Importance of Being Chinese: Orientalism Reconfigured in the Age of Global Modernity’, Boundary 2, 35:2, 183–206. Cook, P. (2005), Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema, London and New York: Routledge. Corliss, R. (2005), ‘Ziyi Zhang: China’s Gift to Hollywood’, Time, 18 April, http:// www.time.com/time/subscriber/2005/time100/artists/100ziyi.html (last accessed 31 January 2009). Desser, D. (2006), ‘Diaspora and National Identity: Exporting “China” through the Hong Kong Cinema’, in E. Ezra and T. Rowden (eds), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Dyer, R. (1998), Stars, 2nd edn, London: Bfi. Ezra, E. and Rowden, T. (eds) (2006), Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, London and New York: Routledge. Goldkorn, J. (2005), ‘Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe – Naked Pics; Hypersensitive Ranting’, Danwei, 23 September, http://www.danwei.org/trends_and_buzz/ zhang_ziyi_and_ken_watanabe_na.php (last accessed 31 January 2009). Hunt, L. (2003), Kung Fu Cult Masters, London: Wallflower Press. Kingston, M. H. (1981), The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, London: Picador. Lim, S. (2007), ‘Is the trans- in transnational the same as the trans- in transgender?’, in New Cinemas, 5:1, 39–52. McLaren, A. E. (1994), The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming Period, Broadway, Australia: Wild Peony. Mulvey, L. (1989) Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Phillips, A. and Vincendeau, G. (eds) (2006), Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood, a Critical Companion, London: BFI Publishing. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (1994), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London and New York: Routledge. Teo, S. (1997), Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions, London: Bfi. Teo, S. (2005), ‘2046: A Matter of Time, a Labour of Love’, Senses of Cinema, 35, April – June, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/2046.html (last accessed 31 January 2009). Xu, G. (2007), Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

9 Gender, Genre and Stardom: Fatality in Italian Neorealist Cinema Catherine O’Rawe

Illustration 6 Image from Ossessione (1943) Credit: Industria Cinematografica Italiana / The Kobal Collection.

This essay addresses issues raised by the figure of the femme fatale at a particular moment in Italian cinema of the 1940s: these issues concern the meanings to which the femme fatale figure is put to work in the period, her relation to an Italian ‘national’ cinema such as neorealism,

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and the transmission of genres and star figures from Hollywood to Italy. It will discuss the ways in which Italian neorealism is thought to have anticipated, assimilated and recast some potent noir tropes and figures, especially that of the femme fatale. It will argue, in relation to two films considered slightly marginal to the ‘canon’ of neorealism, Ossessione (Obsession, Visconti 1943) and Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, De Santis 1949), that discourses of genre, gender and nation are intimately linked through the presence of the femme fatale, and will evaluate how the critical quest for this figure, through the stars that incarnate it, reveals the fissures in these discourses, and in the critical categories that have structured much of Italian film studies. Neorealism, which lasted from around 1943 to around 1953, has been conventionally read as a politically committed, documentarystyle national cinema opposed to the star-driven practice of Hollywood. Cesare Zavattini, scriptwriter on Vittorio De Sica’s films of the 1940s and 1950s, wrote that ‘the audience should be able to liberate itself from the inferiority complex caused by the mythic idea of the “star” ’ (Zavattini 1978: 73). As such, the use of non-professional actors has been commonly associated with the movement, in particularly the films of Vittorio De Sica, such as Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and Umberto D. (1952). Although commentators point out the widespread use of professional actors alongside non-professionals in most neorealist films, little attention has been paid to the precise function of the star as national signifier in these films.1 The focus by hegemonic left-wing Italian film critics of the 1940s and beyond on neorealism as a nation-building cinema that addressed the problems of post-war reconstruction and aimed both to reflect Italian experience of Fascism and the war and to reformulate a collective national identity, has accorded neorealism an exceptionally privileged cultural status.2 Neorealism has also, to a large extent, rested upon a myth of stylistic purity that this essay will aim to unpick. Although later critics acknowledged the retrospective nature of the definitions of neorealism, and their contingency, certain ideas about its stylistic practices have proved very resistant. Further, the terms of neorealism’s address to ‘the nation’ have always been assumed to be gender-neutral, presuming a universal audience; however, gender and its relation to neorealism as a genre have rarely been interrogated. In this context Lesley Caldwell (2000) has argued that neorealism created little discursive space for the specific experience of women. Attention to the critical construction of neorealism as a national cinema, and the role of star practices within this construction, particularly the figure of the

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femme fatale as an embodiment of transmission from Hollywood, can illuminate the gendered assumptions that have governed so much work on neorealism. Despite ongoing attempts to contest the myth of a rupture between neorealism and cinema under fascism, the critical topos of the foundational status of neorealism for post-war Italian cinema is a muchrepeated one. However, ideas of stylistic origin and influence in relation to neorealism have taken precedence over the discussion of transmission and circulation of those styles: both Ossessione and Riso amaro have been relegated to the margins of neorealism by Italian critics precisely because they are seen to have absorbed Hollywood stylistic influences, or because they are not ‘Italian’ enough. It is my argument that a focus on these films as sites of multiple transmissions between Hollywood and Europe, and attention to the centrality of gender, genre and fatality in those transmissions, can bring a new understanding to both neorealism and film noir.

Ossessione Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, released towards the end of the Fascist regime in 1943, is generally regarded as the herald or precursor of neorealism, indeed as the film that inspired the coining of the term ‘neorealism’.3 The history of the film, the story of a drifter, Gino (Massimo Girotti), who turns up at an inn run by a woman, Giovanna (Clara Calamai), and her husband in the Po delta, falls in love with her and conspires to murder her husband, is itself a history of transmissions between European and American culture, between high and low. An adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, it constitutes a mediation between neorealism and American noir, this time via the French cinema of the 1930s.4 Visconti worked with Jean Renoir in the late 1930s in France, was given a copy of the Cain novel by Renoir, and possibly saw Pierre Chenal’s 1939 adaptation, Le dernier tournant, before returning to Italy and making his own version. The novel would later be adapted in 1946 by Tay Garnett, in a version starring Lana Turner and John Garfield that is regarded as part of the noir corpus. MGM’s publicity positioned Turner’s character as an unequivocal femme fatale, featuring a shot of her in a two-piece swimsuit with the tagline ‘You must be a she-devil ... You couldn’t make me feel like this if you weren’t!’ (Chinen Biesen 2005: 122)5. Ossessione has been widely discussed in terms of its stylistic hybridity – its use of noirish lighting and mise-en-scène, its melodramatic

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plot, and its sexual politics, coupled with its naturalistic vision of the Italian landscape – but here I would like to focus on the debates the film has stirred up over the question of fatality and the complex ways in which it is embodied and gendered. Giovanna’s song luring Gino into the trattoria on their first meeting establishes her as a siren, but immediately gives way to her reaction to the sight of Gino’s body, in a double-take that ‘reverses the conventional star treatment of femininity’ (Landy 2008: 195). Calamai’s own star persona is relevant here: usually described as a femme fatale or diva in films from the 1930s, here her diva persona is overturned and emptied out, as she is plainly dressed in modest black.6 David Forgacs argues that Calamai is a femme fatale, because of her overt sexuality and her role in Gino’s downfall, although this is complicated by her lack of conventional glamour, emphasized by the shabby mise-en-scène.7 What we also encounter in the critical discourse is a terminological ambiguity, a problem of definition: the term ‘diva’, which is nationally located within Italian culture, runs up against the transnational femme fatale, and this terminological slippage is mirrored in a confusion as to its gendered use. For, although Calamai is the ostensible siren, William Van Watson’s queer reading of the film posits Girotti as the fatal figure, through the camera’s lingering on his physique, and the film’s playing with the idea of female as object of desire. He argues that ‘Gino occupies the diva role’.8 According to Janey Place, the composition of the femme fatale in American film noir is characterized by visual centrality and control of the camera movements, and it is this visual centrality that marks out Gino, particularly in the early scenes of the film (Place 1998: 54).9 The interest in Girotti as the focus of the camera is partly because of his bodily presence, highlighted by the tattered vest that shows off his equine shoulders; this draws on his ‘strong man’ persona from Alessandro Blasetti’s wildly popular swashbuckler La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941); in fact Girotti was described in Italian press features around the time of Ossessione as ‘the Italian Weissmuller’, and ‘a new Tarzan’ (Càllari 1942: 61). Girotti’s body, however, also signifies in another way: the film’s co-screenwriter Antonio Pietrangeli famously commented in 1948 of the scene in which Gino arrives at the inn, asleep on the back of a truck, ‘How then shall we baptise Gino in Ossessione? Let us call him Italian neorealism’ (Pietrangeli 1948). This desire to find a physical embodiment of neorealism is, I would argue, significant: the male body or figure becomes the locus from which neorealism’s poetics of the everyday can spring, yet the film’s ambivalence as to whether to position Gino or Giovanna as the fatal figure remains one of its greatest complexities. Reception of

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the film reflects this ambivalence and entwines issues of classification and gender. If Giovanna is a femme fatale, then the film is by definition noir, and cannot be completely accommodated within the boundaries of neorealism.10 Although the terms diva and femme fatale are often used interchangeably, the troubled nature of those terms, and the semantic slippage between diva and femme fatale, are clear, if we think of the lineage of the Italian diva, from stage to silent cinema onwards: Angela Dalle Vacche argues that the diva is associated with nineteenth-century theatrical codes, in terms of both performance style and genre, and that her meaning cannot be carried forward to later periods (Dalle Vacche 2008: 256). Duncan notes some vestiges of the diva’s performance codes in Calamai’s emphatic acting style in Ossessione (Duncan 2000: 101).11 Thus context, including gendered ideas of stardom in particular national cinemas at particular historical moments, is vital for our readings of these figures. The issue of the film as an object of textual transmission further complicates a reading of the fatality of the characters. Visconti’s connection with Renoir and French poetic realism also encourages a reading of Gino as the homme fatal in the Jean Gabin mould. In Gabin’s roles in films such as Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938) and La grande illusion (1937), he played what Ginette Vincendeau termed the homme fatal, the ‘anti-hero’ who is ‘mostly fatal to himself’ (Vincendeau 2000: 62). Vincendeau points out the absence of the femme fatale figure in pre-war French film, and the predominance instead of the homme fatal, usually incarnated by Gabin.12 Although the influence of Renoir on Ossessione has been much discussed, the effect of the transmission of this gendered figure of fascination, the disturbance wrought by the homme fatal to traditionally gendered polarities in relation to noir and genre criticism, has been little noted. The figures of both Giovanna and Gino are thus clearly linked to different national contexts. Narratively, both characters can be read as fatal: each seduces the other, each leads the other on to the murder of Giovanna’s husband, and to the eventual death of Giovanna and arrest of Gino. Yet there is a critical anxiety about what happens when the male character occupies the culturally designated space of the femme fatale. Rather than a simple reversal of male and female characters, what is at stake in Ossessione’s rewriting of Cain’s fatal female seems to be a kind of undoing of the femme fatale figure itself as archetype, one which is revealed to be nationally and historically contingent, and thus available for reinscription. Reading through

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this figure also reveals it to be a metaphor of generic anxiety and transmission. For Vincendeau, femme fatale itself is a fatally gendered term in its transnational borrowing: the adoption of the terminology of the femme fatale (and of film noir) from French into the English language by American critics in the post-war period is a way of ‘sexualising the term’.13 If critics of Hollywood noir now concur that the femme fatale does not really exist in a strictly textual sense, emphasizing rather her role as a metaphor of ‘discursive unease’ (Doane 1991: 3), what the femme fatale’s movement from one context to another can also tell us about is generic unease, and the intertwining of critical discourses of gender and genre. Just as Gino/Girotti became for Pietrangeli a figure of classification, a way of locating genre within the (male) star body and bolstering the fragile boundaries of national cinema, so the debates round the transmission of the femme fatale or homme fatal are a way of talking about genre and its relation to the national context. The oscillation of this fatality between Gino and Giovanna, in terms of narrative and performance style, and the generic oscillation this implies, places the film on the margins of neorealism. Vittorio Mussolini, son of the dictator, famously and apocryphally shouted at an early screening of Ossessione ‘This is not Italy!’ (Bondanella 2003: 29), an observation that perhaps anticipates later understanding of the film as outside the terms of neorealism, understood as an Italian national cinema. Ossessione thus instantiates multiple transmissions: these include transnationally shifting meanings of gender and genre, a shift from the theatrical and nationally specific context of the diva to the imported and then incorporated and assimilated meanings of American crime fiction, brought together with new French influences on presenting masculinity within poetic realism. The transmissions that make Ossessione such a problematic text for the canon of neorealism to absorb will be radicalized in Riso amaro, another neorealist hybrid, whose central character stands as a figure of transmission emblematic of the controversy over neorealism’s stylistic purity.

‘Put the Blame on Silvana’: Riso amaro Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro was released in 1949, in a context dominated by the post-war ‘dumping’ of US films in Italy, after the withdrawal in 1938 of the four major Hollywood studios from the Italian market, when the United States had tried to prevent Italian protection of its own

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domestic production (Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 146–67; Gundle 2002). Christopher Wagstaff writes about neorealist films as a response to this ‘cinematic colonization’: they were films of high cultural quality which could successfully be exported, win prizes and open up export markets for less highbrow Italian films (Wagstaff 1995). Riso amaro was successful abroad, precisely because of its genre elements.14 The film was conceived as a kind of neorealist response to Gilda (Charles Vidor 1946), and, interestingly, Borde and Chaumeton, in their 1955 Panorama of American Film Noir, mention Riso amaro in terms of its noir influences (2002: 124). The director, Giuseppe De Santis, one of the original theorists of neorealism, like many antifascist intellectuals of the 1930s, had a deep love of American culture, seen as the heartland of democracy and free speech, and a passion for the films of John Ford, King Vidor and Frank Capra. De Santis stated that in relation to his protagonist, Silvana Mangano: ‘I had an exact image in mind of a character that would resemble a provincial Italian Rita Hayworth’ (cited in Faldini and Fofi 1979: 154). Rita Hayworth in Gilda was an interesting model for ‘Italianization’: use of her poster image in Bicycle Thieves sets up an implicit opposition between two types of production, Hollywood and neorealist (see Gundle 2002: 99–100). Waller, however, argues that as Rita Hayworth was herself Margarita Carmen Cansino, a Latina remade as American, her selection by De Sica ‘to figure the seductions of Hollywood film language thus proves very pointed. In identifying across the body of Hayworth-Gilda, with an imperial, patriarchal Anglo subjectivity, the Italian spectator actually falls into the anomalous position of the historical Cansino-Hayworth herself’ (Waller 1997: 259). Thus the use of Hayworth’s image is not necessarily oppositional, but in fact ‘the image taken from Gilda deconstructs into an allegory of the role Hollywood film has tried to play in the Italian context’ (260). Millicent Marcus calls Riso amaro a ‘neorealist hybrid’ (Marcus 1986: 76), in that its neorealist subject matter (a study of the plight of female rice workers in Northern Italy) and mise-en-scène (exterior locations shot in natural light using long takes) alternate with heterodox generic elements (a noirish plot, interior scenes in chiaroscuro lighting, the use of boogie-woogie music). However, the most contentious element in the film’s reception by both Italian/European and American critics was its star, Silvana Mangano, described by Bosley Crowther as ‘Ingrid Bergman with a Latin disposition and Rita Hayworth plus twenty-five pounds’ (Crowther 1950). Riso amaro was heavily criticized by Italian

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Communist critics, influenced by the dominant Zhdanovist position of the time, for its ‘Americanization’ and its ‘contamination’ of neorealism with American genre influences, particularly noir, melodrama and gangster movies, and much of this criticism focused on the image of Silvana, which was promoted in the publicity for the film. Guido Aristarco, the leading Marxist critic, declared that ‘the workers cannot be educated with the bare legs of Silvana’ (cited in Vitti 2002: 36). The film was condemned by the Communist daily L’Unità for its ‘decadent’ display of female flesh (see Aitken 2001: 233), a response that demonstrates how female sexuality is the central problematic of both the film’s diegesis and its reception. As mentioned, the discourse of neorealism, with its advocacy of the use of non-professional actors, set itself up in opposition to the idea of the star itself, and the star system. Although the reality of the use of stars and professional performers was much more nuanced than this position might appear, the star was still critical in this period – either in terms of her absence (for example in Bicycle Thieves or La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, Visconti 1948), or because her function was reconceptualized; Landy talks of a ‘redefinition of cinematic culture that involved reflections on the body of stardom, its past, present and future’ (2008: 86). Yet the changing nature of the Italian film industry, due to its increasing commercialization and imitation of Hollywood practice, meant that the late 1940s saw the beginning of an Italian star system, featuring star searches (Silvana Mangano was a former Miss Italia) conducted by big production companies; Riso amaro was produced by LUX films and Mangano was married to its boss Dino de Laurentiis. Silvana, the physically seductive, visually central woman, containing contradictory elements, is a ‘complex figure’, as Gundle notes, ‘who derived something from recent female stereotypes: the pin-up, the Hollywood vamp, the variety showgirl, the heroine of photoromances, the beauty queen’ (Gundle 2007: 145). The common focus on the problematic persona of Silvana, and the critical search for the femme fatale, which often reads her through the image of Hayworth, says much about the ideological troubling provided by the film’s gendered focus. Flora Ghezzo defines Silvana as a ‘neorealistic femme fatale’, thus bracketing together two particularly amorphous definitions, and calls her a ‘femme fatale in disguise’. Ghezzo says that ‘Silvana’s opulent body marks the (re)appearance of the femme fatale in Italian cinema’ (Ghezzo 2001: 39).15 Critics agree that the appearance of Silvana marks a new focus on the female body, leading to the neorealismo rosa (pink or

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popular neorealism) of the early 1950s.16 Giovanna Grignaffini goes further, arguing that the body-landscape is a key feature of this period and that the female body becomes figured as an imaginary place of national rebirth after the trauma of war and occupation (Grignaffini 1996: 372). Millicent Marcus agrees, discussing the ‘feminized body politic’ in this period, represented by figures such as Silvana, as incarnating a ‘series of anthropological, social, and political ideals’ (Marcus 2000: 338). The body of the female star is thus consistently inscribed in a metonymic chain, associated with the landscape and therefore with the rebirth of the nation in the First Italian Republic.17 However, the contradictions perennially associated with femininity mean that this gendered body politic would arouse controversy, both in the left-wing reception of the time and subsequently.18 The shift from Ossessione’s Gino as embodiment of neorealism and the national to the location of the national in a differently gendered body, in response to the post-war context, could never be unproblematic. The designation of Silvana as a femme fatale seems primarily to rest on her non-diegetic paratextual resemblance to Rita Hayworth, as well as on her alleged imitation of Gilda. Of course Riso amaro is a film about a woman who desires to be American, who desires to be deadly, who aspires to be like a Hollywood heroine. The film’s focus on Silvana’s body, particularly in the famous boogie-woogie dance scene in which her visual centrality is established, sees her become the literal embodiment of Americanization, and of the transnational transmission of genres. Ghezzo reads this scene, in which Silvana’s joyous bodily immersion in the music offers her both to Walter and to the viewer as an erotic object, and sets in motion the chain of events that will lead to Silvana’s death, thus: as a femme fatale (or phallic woman) she occupies a shifting, duplicitous position in the text: on the one hand she is a luminous objectification of male desire, on the other, she is a figure of power and omnipotence, therefore posing a potential threat (Ghezzo 2001: 47–8). As well as creating a moment of spectacle in which the narrative pauses, the dance is also a moment that anchors the comparison with Gilda, based on Hayworth’s famous solo dance to ‘Put the Blame on Mame’. Richard Dyer argues that in Gilda the dance is a moment of self-expression that means that Gilda is not the ‘unknowable and absent’ femme fatale. As he points out, ‘no other femme fatale dances’ (Dyer 1998: 120).

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Meanwhile Angela Martin declares that Gilda is not a femme fatale at all, but rather a ‘central woman’, noting the inability of noir critics to recognise female characters as performing other narrative functions (Martin 1998) The troubled nature of the identification of Silvana with Gilda, and of the film with Hollywood traditions, is of course one of the reasons for Riso amaro’s exclusion from the canon of neorealism. Just as Mary Ann Doane, in her analysis of Gilda, argued that noir constitutes a diversion of the hermeneutic code from the riddle of the crime towards the enigma posed by the woman herself (Doane 1991: 102), Silvana has become the hermeneutic and classificatory problem for the film’s critics, her body the sign of the film’s generic hybridity, identified with the Italian landscape as signifier of rebirth, and with the iconic figure of another problem woman, Gilda. The film has a narrative trajectory similar to that of noir for the fatal woman – the punishment of Silvana for her transgressions, her self-sacrifice and expulsion from the community of women, though not before she shoots Walter in the chiaroscuro setting of the abattoir – and ends on the death of Silvana, which allows Francesca and Marco to begin a new life together; however, the textual disruption provided by the fatal woman is not forgotten; indeed, it is what is remembered about this film above all else.19 This is a common textual effect of the femme fatale; both Janey Place and Adrienne McLean note that it is the visual dominance of the fatal woman that the viewer remembers, not her ultimate recuperation into the narrative (McLean 1993: 11; Place 1998: 48). There is yet another level on which the femme fatale operates here: Silvana occupies such a powerful position in the film’s mise-en-scène, and in its reception, that the intriguing status of the other leading actress in the film, Doris Dowling, who plays Francesca, has been overlooked. Dowling plays the gangster’s moll who arrives with Walter (Vittorio Gassman) and is redeemed through her devotion to the female collective and her love of Marco (Raf Vallone). During the film Francesca and Silvana exchange places and destinies (Marcus 1986: 90). Dowling came to Italy after having made several films in Hollywood, including playing a femme fatale in the noir The Blue Dahlia (Marshall 1946) and ‘good-bad girl’ roles in films such as The Crimson Key (Forde 1947) and The Lost Weekend (Wilder 1945). 20 As an incarnation of both star and genre transmission from Hollywood, therefore, Dowling’s role is significant: the scene in which she narrates her sordid past (an abortion, Walter’s poker games and fast cars, the robbery of a necklace, going on the run) to a rapt Silvana makes of her the heroine

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of the photoromances Silvana loves to read. Francesca’s renunciation of her past, and the film’s climax in which she walks into the distance with Marco, leaving the body of Silvana in the foreground, represents also her renunciation of Americanization, and of the femme fatale role. Her bodily discipline and progressive discarding of Hollywood glamour (unlike Silvana, Francesca dresses conservatively and is rarely the visual centre of a scene) make of her the ideal neorealist woman, and she and Marco are framed according to the iconography of social realism (Ghezzo 2001: 50).21 This debate over the classification of woman and film-text is, it seems, a way of giving a name to the visual centrality of the woman. Thus cinematic traditions and genres are embodied in the figures of each woman, as they become, both textually and extra-textually, figures of classification, even, indeed, of ‘epistemological trauma’ (Doane 1991: 3). Although Doane has posited the ‘unknowability’ of the femme fatale, I have shown that careful tracing of histories of transmission can in fact illustrate different national and cultural ways of knowing and representing these female figures.

Conclusion The debates around Ossessione and Riso amaro demonstrate the critical anxiety surrounding the classification of woman and film-text, and foreground the powerful and enduring critical myth of the fatal female, read as metaphor for generic anxiety. I have argued that it is necessary to read terms like femme fatale, homme fatal and diva as historically and nationally contingent, as are the designations film noir and neorealism. The myth of stylistic purity upon which neorealism rests has always been contested: it rests upon a series of exclusions, such as the exclusion of the star persona, of artifice, of the spectacular and of what André Bazin termed the ‘demon of melodrama’ (Bazin 1971: 31). Understanding the discursive construction of neorealism also allows us to see an instructive parallel with critical debates on film noir itself: noir has been designated variously as a ‘lost object’ (Vernet 1993: 25), a ‘conceptual black hole’ (Elsaesser 1996: 132) and a ‘fantasy’ (Cowie 1993: 121); Steve Neale argues that noir ‘never existed’ (Neale 2000: 173), whilst simultaneously acknowledging its ‘talismanic’ status.22 Critics now almost unanimously concur that noir is merely a discursive category; Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment make explicit the link between neorealism and noir as critical constructions: ‘Like other stylistic definitions (film noir is the most obvious case in point), neorealism

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is a flexible container for a range of non-classical variations found in many Italian films of the day’ (Hallam and Marshment 2000: 41). The homme fatal and femme fatale as transnational figures of representation highlight the discursive limits of neorealism and noir as national cinematic constructions. The embodiment of hybrid codes of representation in the body of the protagonist, or the reading of the protagonist as vehicle for those hybrid representational codes, can help point us towards a more nuanced understanding of the construction of the neorealist canon, and the fluidity of noir, femme fatale and neorealism as transnational categories.

Notes 1. Recent work by Marcia Landy has attempted to redress this imbalance, as a chapter of her recent book Stardom Italian Style (2008) focuses on stars in post-war Italian cinema. 2. Millicent Marcus calls neorealism ‘the via maestra of Italian film [ ... ] the point of departure for all serious cinematic post-war practice’ (Marcus 1986: xvii). See O’Rawe (2008) for a critique of this. On neorealism as an Italian national cinematic language see Farassino (1989). 3. Ricci argues that Ossessione constitutes a ‘persuasive symbolic break with the previous organization of cultural life under the fascist regime’ (Ricci 2008: 4). Brunetta says that ‘everything began with Ossessione’ (2009: 102). Ossessione was heavily censored and had a troubled exhibition history (see Rondolino 1981: 114–24). 4. Wood calls it ‘an early example of film noir’ (2007: 240). 5. On the history of Cain’s novel and its adaptation by Garnett, see Chinen Biesen (2000). On the Visconti–Renoir transaction, see Duncan (2000: 96) and Rondolino (1981: 109). On the reception of Cain’s novel by French intellectual culture, see Naremore (1998: 23). The film was not released in the US until 1976, because of the copyright issues arising from Visconti’s unauthorised appropriation of Cain. 6. Landy notes that ‘Calamai’s star persona was invoked and then transformed, its glamour stripped away’ (Landy 2008: 192). See the title of Moscati (1996): Clara Calamai: l’ossessione di essere diva. 7. Forgacs (2002: 163). In the DVD commentary (BFI 2003) Lesley Caldwell says Clara Calamai ‘fits the femme fatale stereotype’. 8. Van Watson (2002: 177). 9. Place gives the example of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice as exemplary of the ‘domination in composition, angle, camera movement and lighting’ of the femme fatale (Place 1998: 54). 10. Left-wing critics, such as Guido Aristarco, preferred to note how Visconti transcended the conventional hard-boiled plot of Cain and Garnett, and rooted the story in the Italian landscape, which becomes a protagonist.

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

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Right-wing and Catholic reviews focused on the film’s representation of sexuality: the review in the Catholic Avvenire d’Italia (Anon: 1943) condemns the film’s ‘exasperated and morbid immorality’. Similarly, Landy notes that the diva’s resistance to substitutability and the codes of mass reproduction means that she cannot be a product of mass culture (2008: 70). An interesting Italian equivalent here is Franciolini’s Fari nella nebbia (Headlights in the Fog, 1942), loosely inspired by La bête humaine, in which Luisa Ferida plays the Simone Simon role, but Fosco Giachetti’s character lacks the fatal qualities of Gabin. ‘That is, film noir, like femme fatale, is a term that has a relationship with sex’ (Vincendeau 1996: 148). Bosley Crowther in the New York Times (1950) reported that the film ‘involves much lurid violence of a criminal and physical sort, so that it makes quite a package of racy activity’. Interestingly, Ghezzo names Ossessione’s Giovanna as Silvana’s precursor as an earthy Italian femme fatale (Ghezzo 2001: 40). As Marcia Landy notes, ‘Mangano [ ... ] returned the body and gesture to the screen’ (Landy 2008: 110). See Gundle (2007: 143) on Mangano’s ‘generous figure’ as ‘a landscape into which new elements from outside were introduced’. ‘The connection established in post-war cinema between the female body and the landscape was crucial insofar as it formed a basis for the “rebirth” that was so frequently invoked in the period of reconstruction and neorealism’ (Gundle 2007: 145). Di Giammatteo (1949) notes that ‘the film’s already complicated and abstruse ideological structure is further complicated, and the character of Silvana, far from clarifying the director’s intentions, muddies them still further.’ See Doane (1991: 14) on this textual ‘disruption’ offered by the femme fatale. On the ‘good-bad girl’ see Williams (2005: 116). Dowling went on to make several further films in Italy, including Alina (Pastina 1950) and Cuori sul mare (Hearts at Sea, Bianchi 1950). Dowling’s extra-textual persona is relevant here: she and her sister Constance (who had appeared with Dan Duryea in the noir The Black Angel (Neill 1946) before coming to Italy) were later described by co-star Raf Vallone as ‘nursing a diabolical taste for destruction’ and as having ‘an almost demoniacal appetite for destruction’. Vallone described his erstwhile lover Doris as ‘a very dangerous woman’ and described how he was forced to flee her when he discovered she had a revolver in her handbag; Constance had been the lover of illustrious Italian poet Cesare Pavese and her ‘sensual voracity’, described by Vallone, is identified by many as a factor in the poet’s suicide (Vallone 2001: 31). Ghezzo notes Francesca’s ‘de-eroticized body, associated with labor, productivity and solidarity’ (2001: 54). André Bazin, of course, anticipated all this in 1955, when he wrote ‘neorealism as such does not exist’ (1971: 99).

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Works cited Aitken, I. (2001), European Film Theory and Cinema: an Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Anon. (1943), review of Ossessione, Avvenire d’Italia, 15 June. Bazin, A. (1971), What is Cinema?, vol. II, trans. H. Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bondanella, P. (2003), Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present Day, New York: Continuum. Borde, R. and Chaumeton, E. (2002), A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, trans. P. Hammond, San Francisco: City Lights. Brunetta, G. P. (2009), The History of Italian Cinema, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Caldwell, L. (2000), ‘What about Women? Italian Films and their Concerns’, in U. Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–1951, London: Cassell, pp. 131–46. Càllari, F. (1942), ‘Massimo Girotti, dal pelago alla riva’, in Primi piani, II:7–8, 61. Chinen Biesen, S. (2000), ‘Raising Cain with the Censors, Again: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 28:1, 41–8. Chinen Biesen, S. (2005), Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cowie, E. (1993), ‘Film Noir and Women’, in J. Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir: a Reader, London: Verso, pp. 121–66. Crowther, B. (1950), ‘Bitter Rice, New Italian Film With Silvana Mangano, Opens Stand at the World’, New York Times, 15 September 1950. Dalle Vacche, A. (2008), Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. Di Giammatteo, F. (1949), Review of Riso amaro in Bianco e nero, 12 December. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Duncan, D. (2000), ‘Ossessione’, in J. Forbes and S. Street (eds), European Cinema: an Introduction, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 95–105. Dyer, R. (1998), ‘Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI, pp. 115–22. Elsaesser, T. (1996), ‘A German Ancestry to Film Noir? Film History and its Imaginary’, Iris, 21, 129–43. Faldini, F. and Fofi, G. (1979), L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suoi protagonisti, Milan: Feltrinelli. Farassino, A. (1989), ‘Neorealismo, storia e geografia’, in Farassino (ed.), Neorealismo: cinema italiano 1945–1949, Turin: EDT, pp. 21–44. Forgacs, D. (2002), ‘Sex and the Cinema 1930–43’, in J. Reich and P. Garofalo (eds), Re-Viewing Fascism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 141–71. Forgacs, D. and Gundle, S. (2007), Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ghezzo, F. (2001), ‘The Polysemic Body: Silvana as a Neorealistic Femme Fatale’, in T. C. Riviello (ed.), Women in Italian Cinema, Rome: Libreria Croce, pp. 39–55.

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Grignaffini, G. (1996), ‘Il femminile nel cinema italiano: racconti di rinascita’, in G. P. Brunetta (ed.), Identità italiana ed identità europea nel cinema italiano dal 1945 al miracolo economico, Turin: Edizioni Agnelli, pp. 357–87. Gundle, S. (2002), ‘Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:3, 95–118. Gundle, S. (2007), Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hallam, J. and Marshment, M. (2000), Realism and Popular Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Landy, M. (2008), Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McLean, A. (1993), ‘“It’s Only That I Do What I Love and Love What I Do”: Film Noir and the Musical Woman’, Cinema Journal, 33:1, 3–16. Marcus, M. (1986), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marcus, M. (2000), ‘The Italian Body Politic is a Woman: Feminized National Identity in Postwar Italian Film’, in D. Stewart and A. Cornish (eds), Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its Afterlife, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 329–47. Martin, A. (1998), ‘“Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!”: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: British Film Institute, 1998, pp. 202–28. Moscati, I. (1996), Clara Calamai: l’ossessione di essere diva, Venice: Marsilio. Naremore, J. (1998), More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, Berkeley: University of California Press. Neale, S. (2000), Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge. O’Rawe, C. (2008), ‘ “I padri e i maestri”: Genre, Auteurs, And Absences In Italian Film Studies’, Italian Studies, 63:2, 173–94. Pietrangeli, A. (1948), ‘Panoramique sur le cinéma italien’, in La revue du cinéma, 13. Place, J. (1998), ‘Women in Film Noir’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI, pp. 47–68. Ricci, S. (2008), Cinema and Fascism, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rondolino, G. (1981), Luchino Visconti, Turin: UTET. Vallone, R. (2001), Alfabeto della memoria, Rome: Gremese. Van Watson, W. (2002), ‘Luchino Visconti’s Homosexual Ossessione’, in J. Reich and P. Garofalo (eds), Re-Viewing Fascism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 172–93. Vernet, M. (1993), ‘Film Noir on the Edge of Doom’, in J. Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir: a Reader, London: Verso, pp. 1–32. Vincendeau, G. (1996), ‘A Round Table Discussion’, in Iris: European Precursors of Film Noir, 21, pp. 148–9. Vincendeau, G. (2000), Stars and Stardom in French Cinema, London and New York: Continuum. Vitti, A. (2002), Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wagstaff, C. (1995), ‘Italy in the Post-war International Cinema Market’, in C. Duggan and C. Wagstaff (eds), Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society 1948–58, Oxford: Berg, pp. 89–109.

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Waller, M. (1997), ‘Decolonizing the Screen: From Ladri di biciclette to Ladri di saponette’, in B. Allen and M. Russo (eds), Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 253–74. Williams, L. R. (2005), The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wood, M. P. (2007), ‘Italian Film Noir’, in A. Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 236–72. Zavattini, C. (1978), ‘A Thesis on Neo-Realism’, in D. Overbey (ed.), Springtime in Italy: a Reader on Neo-Realism, London: Talisman, pp. 67–78.

Part III Femmes Fatales in European and World Cinemas

10 The Femme Fatale of Spanish Retro Noir: The Recuperation of a Repressed Voice Ann Davies

This chapter explores the functions of the femme fatale in Spanish retro noir. One of its premises is the questioning of Benedict Anderson’s now commonplace formula of the nation as an imagined community, imagined ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members [ ... ] yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson 1991: 6), and a community because ‘regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’, a community that Anderson describes as ‘this fraternity’ (Anderson 1991: 7). Anderson’s formula risks excluding women from the nation, since the concepts of comradeship and fraternity that he uses in his definition are terms tagged as inherently masculine. Anderson goes on to elaborate the construction of the imagined national community around print media (including newspapers) that come to form part of a public sphere, an ‘imagined space’ for the participation of citizens – in contrast to the private that has notoriously been the sphere in which to confine women. Thus Anderson’s notion of national identity, grounded very much in the public, overlooks the particular position of women in relation to the nation, and runs the risk of excluding women from the community altogether, particularly in specific historical contexts. I want to pursue this potential for exclusion in the specific historical context of Spain between 1939 and 1975, the years of the dictatorship under General Francisco Franco. The official ideology of Franco’s regime envisaged the nation as inevitably Catholic, right-wing and crusading, looking back to the so-called glory days of the Spanish Empire. In the process, Francoism deliberately suppressed anything secular or 145

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left-wing that did not fit in with this template: this included the histories of those vanquished in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), which was fought between Franco’s forces and those of the left-wing Republican government previously elected to power. Anyone or anything that fitted into the categories of left-wing or secular was simply ‘not Spanish’ as Francoist ideology understood it. This suggests a particular form of imagined community, one deliberately constructed and exclusive, which rested on the hiding away of an alternative community that espoused different values. Included in this sharp ideological divide were notions to do with women’s social position. Francoist ideology encompassed a return of women to the home and the responsibility for the family (including its spiritual welfare in terms of Catholicism). Women lost the political rights given to them by the previous Republic and became in theory confined to the private domestic sphere, excluded from the public sphere of politics and work. This emphasis on the home was enshrined in law: married women needed permission from their husbands to work, and were discouraged from working by state apparatuses, while single women who wanted a job had to do some form of state welfare service as well. In practice many women had to work, deprived of the primary male breadwinner as a result of the war. Since these women were usually the wives and widows of the defeated Republican forces and sympathizers, they were discriminated against in terms of public welfare, and usually had to work in clandestine and often criminal sectors – particularly as prostitutes. These women, who could not remain at home, worked in practice on the margins of the public sphere but were not officially acknowledged (Graham 1995: 182–95). They too formed part of the hidden Spain, the unacknowledged community which could nonetheless be occasionally glimpsed, because of their intermittent appearances on the margins of the public sphere. With the transition to democracy after 1975 the difficult process began of recuperating this hidden Spain back into the mainstream. Much of this readjustment towards the past has involved a political or cultural ‘forgetting’ that does not examine too closely the uncomfortable Francoist past. But this process of forgetting – desmemoria – is not total, and earlier Francoist values are often acknowledged and critically examined, alongside the recognition of alternative and opposing viewpoints that were previously hidden (Anderson himself refers to recuperation from the margins (Anderson 1991: 202)). The cinema is one such sphere where this occurs: it carries the potential, like other cultural vehicles, to recover the ‘lost’ histories of women. Given, moreover, that cinema is a very popular vehicle for stories about the clandestine or

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criminal sphere, it has a particular value for bringing to the fore tales of those women forced to live and work on the margins. The alignment of such women with the hidden Spain that is thus facilitated allows a more positive valuation of their actions. Their exclusion from the Francoist template of national identity implies that, with the prevalent rejection of Francoism that took place after democracy, they may now be included within the national community, as other previously unacknowledged entities have been. This opportunity dovetails with the recent tendency towards what might be termed ‘retro noir’ in Spanish cinema. This is distinguishable from the neo-noir that has been observed in 1980s and 1990s Hollywood, in that the retro noir retains contemporary perspectives but simultaneously looks back to the past rather than bringing forward the characteristics of noir into updated, late-twentieth-century settings. Spanish retro noir facilitates the exploration of Spain’s Francoist past, wherein the nostalgic pleasures of a sort of costume drama soften the pain of contemplating less palatable aspects of history. Indeed, 1990s retro noir followed the trend in Spanish cinema for costume dramas with high production values that was established in the 1980s as a response to an emphasis within government film funding policy for high-quality production values and for literary adaptations.1 Retro noir, like noir and neo-noir, is also familiar as a home to the femme fatale figure. This chapter considers the femme fatale as a cinematic device for the recuperation of the hidden histories of those associated with the losing side of the Spanish Civil War, whose viewpoint was suppressed under the ensuing right-wing dictatorship of General Franco. As such, the femme fatale of Spanish retro noir unusually carries a positive potential as part of the recuperation of lost history. Her familiar status as predator, often on the wrong side of the law, is rendered more complex in this specific context by the fact that the law of the time is perceived by many as illegitimate or unjust, while clandestine positions are open to reassessment as part of the work of recuperating suppressed memory. Kate Stables has observed the return of the femme fatale within US neonoir, an element to be picked up by the Spanish cinema-going audiences, who still have an overwhelming preponderance of US films in the cinema fare from which they choose. Stables distinguishes between the 1990s femme fatale and her predecessor of the 1940s and 1950s: If the fatales of the 40s and 50s were marked out from the vamp by their hunger for independence, their unfeminine ambition or unsettling sexuality, the threat they posed to cultural norms was merely that of the woman outside the conventional social structures. But in

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the 90s, the new freestanding fatale willingly inhabits the cultural margins; what motivates her is her enormous appetite for power, money and sex (Stables 1998: 170). Stables neglects here the blurring of these categories in the retro noir, also a strong element of 1980s and 1990s noir, which has appeared in the US as well as Spain in such films as LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson 1997) and Devil in a Blue Dress (Franklin 1995). Her comments also implicitly apply to US cinema and thus unsurprisingly neglect the historical capacity of women to resist oppressive political and social structures in other countries. At any rate, the retro noir offers us the possibility of perceiving the femme fatale at both the levels Stables outlines: the fatale is simultaneously a woman of the 1940s and of the 1990s. As I have observed elsewhere (Davies 2007: 226), Marvin D’Lugo suggests that, although the generic elements of noir might imply the erasure of cultural specificity, our reading in the present of what seems a familiar past – using a ‘future anterior’ mode of perception and interpretation – means that we read these film texts in terms of a self-conscious historicity (D’Lugo 1998: 292–3). In fact, awareness of classic American noir facilitates not only a retro style but the adoption of a past mode of perception, so that fatales of the retro noir must still be punished as if they were back in the 1940s and 1950s. The retro femme fatale seems to get the best (or worst) of both worlds, the concerns for independence and power both then and now. But we can also view the fatale from a contemporary standpoint critical of the values of the past – and we can move back and forth adopting first one standpoint and then the other as we please. The concerns, desires and anxieties that the fatale embodies and negotiates are clearly different in Spanish retro noir, with its incorporation of portraits of Francoist society. Thus the femme fatale can have to do with the nation in one sense, at least – these desires and anxieties can be specific to a national culture. To explore how this might work in the Spanish case, we can resort to the three characteristics touched on by Mary Ann Doane in her book Femmes Fatales. Doane mentions three motifs that are useful to us here: the femme fatale is deadly, evil (and must therefore be punished) (Doane 1991: 2), and above all is the ‘figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma’ (Doane 1991: 1). Doane expands on this point thus: The seductive power attributed to the figure of the femme fatale in film noir exemplifies the disparity between seeming and being,

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the deception, instability, and unpredictability associated with the woman. While the organization of vision in the cinema pivots around the representation of the woman – she is always aligned with the quality of to-be-looked-at-ness – it is also the case that in her attraction to the male subject she confounds the relation between the visible and the knowable (Doane 1991: 46). The notion of discursive unease is further problematized, I want to argue, when we consider the femme fatale in terms of the recuperation of lost history: can the femme fatale really speak for those who were repressed by Franco? If the Franco era stressed the return to traditional gender roles, then the assertion of the femme fatale in retro noir comes to stand for a return of the repressed and marginalized discourses of those who found it difficult or impossible to embrace Francoist ideology. As I will argue subsequently, the femme fatale undermines a male protagonist who is aligned to some extent with patriarchy and thus to a greater or lesser extent with Francoist forces of law and order. The retrospective stance of these films, in the context of Spain’s subsequent return to democracy, implies a repudiation of the Francoist ideology that these men come to stand for, and a re-evaluation of the femme fatale as part of a real but hidden Spain, excluded from Francoism but now recuperated and perceived more positively. Her subversion is refigured in retrospect as a form of opposition to repression. But, as I will also argue, the role of femme fatale still implies a form of threat and a consequent need for punishment that comes to interfere with this recuperation. This leads to unease in the recuperation of lost history: she questions a dictatorship that suppressed elements of Spanish identities that it did not like, but she destabilizes the memory she recuperates. To explore the problem a little further I want to look at two films that belong to this genre of retro noir, and which feature strong fatale leads. The first of the two films is Vicente Aranda’s Amantes (Lovers, 1991), and the second is Pilar Miró’s Tu nombre envenena mis sueños (Your Name Poisons My Dreams, 1996). Both films are set in the first half of the Franco regime and draw explicitly on ideas about Francoist values. The female leads – our femmes fatales – are firstly, in Amantes, Luisa (Victoria Abril), who not only seduces the young innocent Paco (Jorge Sanz), who has just left the army and lodges in her flat, but also persuades him to kill his girlfriend Trini (Maribel Verdú) for the sake of Trini’s savings. Secondly, Julia (Emma Suárez) of Tu nombre sets out to murder the fascists who shot her left-wing, Republican lover during the Spanish Civil War, leading them to their deaths through her capacity for seduction:

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she also seduces Barciela (Carmelo Gómez), the policeman investigating the crimes. Both femmes fatales appear to love the corresponding male protagonists Paco and Barciela, but they undoubtedly do these men no good. Paco kills and ends up in prison; Barciela connives in the cover-up of Julia’s crimes but then leaves the police force and retires, heartbroken, to teach the abstract study of mathematics. Both femmes fatales in the two films can be perceived as aligned to some extent with the hidden Spain suppressed by Francoism. It is particularly clear in the case of Tu nombre. In a series of flashbacks, we come to understand that Julia supported the Republican forces during the Civil War and that her Republican lover was murdered by the Falangist fifthcolumnists given shelter by her mother and brother. With the war over and the Franco regime now well established Julia leads a more sedate life working in the British Embassy; but her apparent respectability does not quite cover her plan to avenge the death of her lover by systematically murdering those guilty of his death. She achieves this by seducing them first, before killing them. Julia’s association with the hidden, leftwing Spain that has had to disappear makes her retrospectively a more sympathetic character, a member of a true Spain recognized now if not then; a fact underscored by the scene in which she weeps at her lover’s coffin draped in the Republican flag. Her murderous intentions also arise from a desire for vengeance rather than from a pleasure in killing (in contrast to the scene in which the Falangists indiscriminately shoot Republican soldiers and bystanders at a café). Her systematic killing of the Falangists who murdered her lover may be understood not only as revenge on a personal level but as a necessarily clandestine redressing of a political balance. Indeed, it is political events that impel her to take on the role of femme fatale, as implied in the scene where Julia stares unhappily at victorious Franco supporters giving the fascist salute in her father’s garden. Immediately after this scene Miró cuts to the slicker Julia of the early 1940s, making the clichéd moves of seduction on Barciela. This juxtaposition implies that this femme fatale is not born but made through adverse circumstances, the repression of the Franco era. Julia’s role as fatale is adopted as both a personal and also a political response to Franco’s victory. Luisa in Amantes resembles more closely the women of the early Franco era who had to make do somehow or other in a society that officially refused to acknowledge the precarious position of lone women without a man to intercede in the public sphere. Luisa is more overtly manipulative and dangerous, conforming more closely to the femme fatale of American film noir (she even confesses to having killed her husband). It

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becomes apparent, however, that she also struggles to survive in a hidden underworld unacknowledged as part of the Francoist nation (even if officials were aware of and connived in such criminal activity). Not only does she take in lodgers but participates in defrauding innocents of their savings (a motif that prefigures her designs on Trini’s own savings). The scene where Luisa encounters Trini for the first time suggests her indeterminate status in terms of the public/private dichotomy. She is positioned in a triangular formation between Trini – the symbol of the traditional feminine private sphere – and Paco – the symbol of the masculine public – indicating that she is not aligned with either. The fact that she is unwelcome even in the clandestine public sphere (if such a concept is not a contradiction in terms) indicates the uncomfortable position of such women – and of the Spanish retro femme fatale as well. Her partners in crime threaten her over money and later beat her up – the catalyst that compels her to seek Trini’s savings in order to pay them back what she owes. Thus Luisa is marginalized twice over, from both the public sphere of Franco and the clandestine alternative. She is vulnerable, inciting Paco to the murder of his girlfriend Trini but also jealous of her, so that, although Paco appears a passive character in contrast to Luisa as sexual dominatrix, he does in fact exert quite a lot of control. As Chris Perriam argues, ‘Luisa’s domination of Paco’s body and its responses [ ... ] are by no means free of association with pornographic male fantasies’ (Perriam 2001: 31). Luisa thus acts as a reminder of the cost of surviving in the hidden Spain, but her character nonetheless strongly figures the pleasure as well as the pain of this clandestine sphere. She is deliberately contrasted with Trini, who, as the virginal, devout girl working as a maid for a Francoist general (until she can marry Paco and set up a good business on her savings), is clearly the sort of woman approved of by Francoist ideology. Trini is in her element performing the domestic duties appropriate to the home, but is rather less comfortable with Paco’s sexual demands: she does not enjoy sex as Luisa does. It is notable that Aranda does not dwell on the sex scenes featuring Trini as he does on those with Luisa: with Trini we are present before and after sex, but never during. The contrast between the two women implies that the hidden Spain may have been more desperate but it was also more fun – the first sight we and Paco have of Luisa, draped in tinsel and eating sweets as she decorates her Christmas tree, underscores this. Luisa implies a pleasurable excess, in contrast to Trini, who hoards her money, plans for an industrious future rather than taking pleasure in the present, and is reluctant to bestow sexual favours until compelled to compete with Luisa.

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Both Julia and Luisa thus already incorporate a certain unease. As femmes fatales they are deadly, causing trauma to the male protagonists. But they do not appear evil so much as desperate, serving to demonstrate the hidden struggles of women in early Francoist Spain, so that these hidden histories are recuperated into mainstream Spanish cinema and culture. However, their presence on the margins of the public sphere means that they retain their dubious status not only as objects of sexual desire but as participants in the national community that is being recovered in retrospect. Julia’s work at the British Embassy, and the fact that she is also having an affair with a British man simultaneous with her affair with Barciela, imply an allegiance that is not totally Spain’s. We hear her talking in English on the phone to her other lover, her double tongue suggesting her duplicitous nature. But again, this slippage from the community comes about through the tragedy of her circumstances. It is notable that, in the first scene of her supposed ‘degeneration’ and slide into fatale-ity after the death of her lover, she is seduced in a club and later begins to vomit (having drunk too much) to a background sound of English voices. But earlier scenes, where Julia is an eager young lover rather than a femme fatale, have a background of traditional Spanish music and dancing. Flags feature from time to time in the mise-enscène, and Julia is in two key scenes shot against a background of a British flag – when Barciela meets her for the first time, and when he tells her to leave the country as soon as possible. The Spanish flag, however, is displayed prominently in the police chief’s office, and the Republican flag is draped over the coffin of her lover Jaime. Tu nombre implies, in fact, that Julia takes on the role of the femme fatale – and thus exclusion from the Spanish community – as a result of the death of the Republic symbolized by the flag over the coffin. And eventually Barciela, although he covers up her crimes, insists on her exile from Spain – expulsion from the nation – as the price for keeping quiet. This is another instance of discursive unease, problematizing Julia’s role in recuperating the repressed: her duplicity, and her position straddling a border of national identity, mean that she can only fit uneasily into the symbolic space of the hidden Spain. And, while she shares the experience of exile undergone by many who fled Franco, this punishment is also duly tied up with the custom of punishing the femme fatale for being just that – fatal – and this again complicates the recuperation of a hidden Spain. In Amantes Luisa and Paco also undergo a form of exile at the end of the film – though this is not to underestimate the apparent triumph

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of the film’s final freeze-frame shot as the couple embrace ecstatically when Luisa discovers that Paco has killed Trini. Text superimposed over the final shot tells us that Paco and Luisa are caught and sent to prison for the crime – again, a form of exile and exclusion from the imagined community. This technique is a throwback to the cinema of the Franco era, where voice-overs and subtitling were used to counter any impressions that the criminals got away with their crimes. This ending again suggests unease – Luisa and Paco’s triumph is passionately attractive, but they are murderers; they must be excluded. However, the superimposed text reminds us that it is the Francoist nation that excludes. This fate of the lovers carries an extra irony derived from the real-life people from whom the story derives: Paco becomes a wealthy man subsequent to his release from prison, but Luisa dies, thus reinscribing the traditional noir ending where the femme fatale is punished in disproportionate measure to her male accomplice (Kinder 1993: 210).2 The ending of the film causes unease in a different way from Tu nombre: Luisa’s crime seems more heinous because in this case we have got to know the victim; but her punishment, through the superimposed text, marks the just retribution as Francoist in terms of cinematic history, an ambiguity heightened by the final embrace and the ecstasy of the background music. Are we pleased or sad at the end of the film? Again, the femme fatale as the recuperator of the lost voice is problematic, giving rise to a discursive unease. Not only do Luisa and Julia not fit into the public sphere of Francoist Spain, but they also dislodge the male protagonists from their place therein. The male protagonists of each film represent to some extent state institutions aimed at upholding the national order that Franco established; that is to say, they appear to us initially as fully situated in the public sphere that constitutes the imaginary community. Paco of Amantes is first seen as a young soldier about to leave the army and make his own way in the world, to enter the public sphere through the world of work. Barciela in Tu nombre envenena mis sueños is older and more cynical, but is nonetheless a police inspector charged with the responsibility of solving the murders of important ‘friends’ of the regime. In both cases, the ties of the male protagonists to state institutions of law and order are unstable: neither embraces these ties wholeheartedly. But they are nonetheless very much concerned with the public sphere. Barciela has the responsibility, indeed, of actually maintaining a public sphere while Paco tries to insert himself into it in the traditional manner by finding a job with a view to marriage and setting up home, although he does this very reluctantly.

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Perhaps it is the instability of their links to the public sphere that make them vulnerable to the femme fatale. The instability of these links becomes rapidly apparent as soon as the male protagonists encounter their female counterparts. Paco, once out of the shelter of the army, is quickly entangled in an affair with Luisa, who makes constant sexual demands on him. Marsha Kinder observes that Paco becomes the object of the gaze, torn between the two Spains (a phrase commonly used in debate about twentieth-century Spain that implies both the Spanish community imagined by Franco and that imagined community he suppressed) represented by Trini and Luisa. Kinder also observes that it is Luisa rather than Franco’s army that turns Paco from a passive young man into a killer (Kinder 1993: 207). Luisa draws Paco into her clandestine world on the margins of the public sphere: this induction of the male into a life of crime is a move typical of the femme fatale. Barciela pursues Julia not only as an object of sexual desire but unwittingly as the object of his investigations. Although it may not be initially clear to him that she is the murderer, it is fairly obvious to us as we see (and Barciela does not) the interspersed flashback sequences that provide a clear motive for the crime. His shock on discovering that the objects of his investigation and his desire are one and the same leads him to disillusionment, emotional breakdown, and resignation from the police. Thus the actions of the femmes fatales lead both men to abandon the Francoist public sphere in which they are involved: Paco is literally shut out of it in prison, while Barciela retreats to the study of mathematics, which demands no allegiance. Thus the operation of both women on the margin on the public sphere directly impinges on and threatens the status of these men as part of their community institutions. Neither man dies – the traditional threat of the femme fatale – but they themselves must suffer the same fate of exile, or are outcast to some extent. They are also unmanned: Barciela is reduced to drink and violent tears while Paco is a victim of the struggle between Luisa and Trini for control over him. And if these men do not die, others do – Trini, the victims of Julia, Luisa’s husband. From the standpoint of a Francoist community, then, Julia and Luisa fit Doane’s model for the femme fatale as deadly, evil and deserving of punishment – and the exile from the Spanish nation is appropriate. But the discursive unease posited by Doane, which a Francoist culture simply denied, surfaces with the attempt to view these women more sympathetically. The impulse towards recuperation of the hidden past, and the histories of women on the margins, mitigates but does not ultimately displace the threat of the femme fatale. This slippage or discursive

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unease over the femme fatale, both acceptable and threatening within the logic of the Spanish retro noir, suggests an anomaly within the process of recuperation of the hidden Spain into Spanish identity. It therefore reveals how the question of gender problematizes Anderson’s concept of national identity as an imagined community. We know much more now of the repressed desires and ambitions of many women during the early years of the Franco regime, but this notion of their precarious, uncomfortable and frustrating position in some ways makes these particular women, moving dangerously across the divide between public and private spheres, all the more threatening. An alignment of Anderson’s imagined community with the masculinity of the public sphere means that the femme fatale must still be placed outside it as an invasive threat. She can move through the male public sphere but she is not of it, and she is not wanted there. This seems to be the case even when the terms of national identity are refigured and renegotiated. The Spanish femme fatale thus implies that, if national identity is perceived in terms of Anderson’s imagined community, where identity and community are figured as normatively male, the position of women – and indeed of female desire – is anomalous. Rebecca Stott draws on Toril Moi’s notion of woman as the limit or boundary of the symbolic order, in order to argue that the femme fatale ‘signifies all that lies beyond the frontier’ (Stott 1992: 39), and the need for both Julia and Luisa to undergo a version of exile coincides with this idea. Stott also suggests the frontier itself may shift over time, so that ‘the constitution of the femme-fatale-as-sign depends upon what else (besides Woman) is considered to be culturally invasive or culturally and politically Other at any historical point’ (Stott 1992: 44). Stott’s conceptualization allows us to perceive the Spanish retro fatale as standing at the point of this boundary shift, representing a hidden Spain that was invisible then but visible now; but the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, we are able to perceive her from two different historical viewpoints means that we experience unease once more. We cannot tell on which side of the boundary we should position her. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas argue that, while ‘the femme fatale continues to appear in contemporary Spanish cinema and frequently comes to a sticky end, the moral force of her elimination or punishment is now usually tempered in some way’ (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 1998: 136). The blurring of boundaries between public and private that is the essence of the Spanish retro femme fatale suggests a possibility of slippage that destabilizes Anderson’s imagined community. This slippage over the Spanish retro femme fatale suggests a discursive unease that blurs the

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boundaries of sympathy. It gestures towards the potential recuperation of the femme fatale, perceived more sympathetically as part of a hidden community now emerged into the light of day, but her very function as fatale ensures that a repressive thread is still retained.

Notes 1. For an overview of Spanish retro noir, see Davies (2007: 223–30). 2. Some copies of the film include this information in the closing text, reinforcing the sense of extra punishment, but it does not appear on the DVD copy of the film.

Works cited Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn, London: Verso. Davies, A. (2007), ‘Spanish neo-noir’, in A. Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 210–35. D’Lugo, M. (1998), ‘Vicente Aranda’s Amantes: History as Cultural Style in Spanish Cinema’, in J. Talens and S. Zunzunegui (eds), Modes of Representation in Spanish Cinema, Hispanic Issues, vol. 16, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 289–300. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Graham, H. (1995), ‘Gender and the State: Women in the 1940s’, in H. Graham and J. Labanyi (eds), Spanish Cultural Studies: an Introduction: the Struggle for Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 182–95. Jordan, B. and Morgan-Tamosunas, R. (1998), Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kinder, M. (1993), Blood Cinema: the Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, Berkeley: University of California Press. Perriam, C. (2001), ‘Jorge Sanz: el Galán Sumiso: Problematising Masculinities in Mainstream Cinema in Spain’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 37:1, 26–37. Stables, K. (1998), ‘The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, 2nd edn, London: British Film Institute, pp. 164–82. Stott, R. (1992), The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: the Kiss of Death, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

11 Chiaroscuro: The Half-Glimpsed Femme Fatale of Italian Film Noir Mary Wood

Illustration 7 Image from Il Bandito (1946) Credit: DI Laurentiis/Lux Film / The Kobal Collection.

Introduction Film noir has a long history in Italian cinema, early examples copying the French feuilleton in stories of urban apaches, gangster gangs and sinister villains. Silent cinema also had a memorable category of fatal women. As Stephen Gundle has shown, the phenomenon of the diva developed partly as a strategy by the main film companies to differentiate their output in a competitive market (Gundle 2007). They were beautiful women wearing wonderful clothes, characterized by their unwillingness to accept the limitations of the conventions and expectations of 157

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female behaviour of their time.1 The Italian femme fatale is a woman of strong emotions and is often the focus of hyperbolic and melodramatic narratives in which her dangerous sexuality brings about the downfall of the male protagonist. Mira Liehm suggests that the Italian femme fatale differs strongly from her American or German counterparts, particularly in the pre-sound era. She characterizes her as la dolente, the suffering woman – making men suffer, suffering herself, and mainly dying in the last reel. In this respect she is not a vamp, but ‘the product of a matriarchal society, impressed with a strong psychic image of the Virgin Mary’ (Liehm 1984: 19). We will see traces of la dolente in the films under discussion in this chapter. There are many manifestations of the femme fatale in Italian cinema, but my chapter will concentrate on those Italian films that have always used film noir conventions to investigate social problems or political realities. Starting with the absorption of American noir conventions in the 1940s, my discussion will move to the complex reworkings of the style in the 1970s giallo politico, and to contemporary neo-noir. It will explore the reasons for the near-absence of the femme fatale in Italian political film noir over the last sixty years, and the subtle mutations of the figure. Post-war Italian film noir absorbed the conventions of American noirs, the high-contrast lighting, stressed camera angles, low-life characters and settings, but gave them a distinctively Italian inflection. Highcontrast lighting, chiaroscuro, is a characteristic of Italian Baroque art, and Baroque excess, asymmetry, spectacle and turbulence are defining features of Italian film noir style for reasons which this chapter will explore (see Wood 2007: 236–8). Italian noir is also unique in having recourse to the colour yellow (giallo) to indicate the presence of mysteries.2 It must be noted that Italian noir is not a genre; it occurs in a wide range of very different films where the visual and performative characteristics of the style allow the clash between ideologies to be expressed, or the injection of complexity into narratives that conclude with the ostensible re-establishment of the status quo. The narrative worlds of political film noir are highly masculinist, representing the past and public life in patriarchal terms, and marginalizing women. Within these homosocial narratives, struggles for power are played out, and usually lost by female characters, but the importance of the struggle is expressed in their visual and performance style.

The femme fatale in post-war Italian cinema The influence of French and American noir is visible from Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) onwards. There was a (very) small group of 1940s and

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1950s films called neorealismo nero (black neorealism).3 Their subjects reflected the seedier side of the aftermath of war – hunger and unemployment, homes destroyed, families scattered, interracial relationships with the occupying forces, black marketeering and prostitution for survival. Characters and mise-en-scène reflect the anxieties accompanying this massive social disruption. If, as Lesley Caldwell argues, films of the main neorealist canon (such as Paisà (Paisan, Rossellini 1946), Bicycle Thieves (De Sica 1948), Rome Open City (Rossellini 1945) and Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis 1948)) are concerned to validate both the strength of ‘the people’ in their struggles against fascism, and the ethico-moral strength upon which the country will draw in post-war reconstruction (Caldwell 2000: 136–9), then black neorealist films are truly marginal, lacking the familial core upon which the personal and the national will build. Alberto Lattuada’s Il bandito (The Bandit, 1946) ostensibly deals with the problem of returning Italian soldiers. Gubitosi claims that former soldiers were an inconvenient reminder of the fascist regime, and that mistreating those who had fought far away, with the Germans, allowed Italians to deflect their own sense of guilt away from themselves (Gubitosi 1998: 85). The film shows some signs of the displacing of blame for acquiescence to fascism along gender lines identified by Ulrike Sieglohr (2000: 6–7), in that Ernesto the bandit (Amedeo Nazzari) only turns to banditry after discovering that his sister is a prostitute and kills her pimp. However, the film contains a powerful femme fatale figure in gangster’s moll, Lydia (Anna Magnani), and is much more complex and interesting in its questioning of traditionally held beliefs about social and gender hierarchies. Ernesto is desperately attached to traditional values, such as protecting the family and looking after the family’s honour and name. In his and his sister’s choices of criminality the destruction of the nation is represented. The excesses of late 1940s popular film melodramas indicated the difficulty of reconciling traditional Italian stories, based on patriarchal relationships, and the lived experience of the world outside the cinema (Caldwell 2006: 225). In his flight from the police Ernesto takes refuge in a gang leader’s apartment, and meets Lydia. Lydia transfers her allegiances when Ernesto takes over the gang. Lydia is one of the few successful femmes fatales in Italian cinema, and this is due entirely to Magnani’s star status, deriving from her popularity as a vaudeville artiste in the 1930s. She was a supporting actor in several melodramas of the fascist period, but her unruly and erotic persona could barely be contained in subordinate roles. By the time of Campo de’ fiori (Mario Bonnard 1943) and Rome Open City she was firmly established as a working-class character who suffers in love, for

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her family and its future, and it is the emotional charge of her performances that militates against her containment in narratives requiring her punishment in the last reel. According to Millicent Marcus, Magnani acknowledged the existence of the cult of personality attached to her star persona, whose ‘impulsive, assertive, litigious, publicly demonstrative’ characteristics functioned as a contract with her audience, ‘offering vicarious liberation to the female members of her following, and the challenge of sexual domination to the males’ (Marcus 2001: 60–1). Magnani’s post-war films indicate difficulties in reconciling strongly assertive female characters with traditional narratives, reflecting the fact that, during the war and the period of the liberation of Italy, women had had to assume considerable autonomy in order to survive and/or feed their families (Wood 2000: 153). Her star status dictates as much screen space and as many close-ups as Nazzari, but the plot cannot resolve the dichotomy between her star performance and Lydia’s subordinate role. Elizabeth Cowie has refuted the idea that the character whose story a film tells constitutes the predominant narrative focus, suggesting that ‘a film’s story is more than that of any one character; it is a fantasy scenario’ (Cowie 1993: 137). Indeed, although Ernesto is ostensibly the protagonist, and his story of the difficult transition from soldier in a defeated army to coping with the aftermath of war is clearly important, Lydia’s character resists stereotyping her as merely malevolent and sexual. The scenes of the robbery of jewellery from the patrons of a nightclub display how the gang depends on her organizational skills, knowledge and judgement, reflected in her intense cynicism and vocal domination of dialogues. Ernesto and Lydia quarrel when she ridicules his postcard from his niece, Rosetta. He throws his drink in her face and the sequence closes with a slow track in to a close-up of her reaction. Lydia’s Medusa look freezes time whilst we infer what she is thinking, motivating her betrayal of Ernesto to the police; Ernesto dies in a hail of gunfire trying to reach Rosetta’s family’s farm. The insight which Martin Jay offers into the function of the ‘penetrating stare or withering gaze’ as a ‘distanced violence’ (Jay 2003: 2), explains the function of the Medusa look. The femme fatale resents and rejects the exercise of masculinist power. The Medusa look indicates both the violence of female resentment which, nonetheless, has to be contained, and the metaphorizing of the violence which patriarchal power does to those subjected to it. In the Italian case, the violence of the stare derives from the tension between the desire for freedom and autonomy, and the suppression represented by fascist ideology’s insistence on motherhood as ‘woman’s natural destiny and

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means of fulfilment, and as a responsibility’, reinforced by the Catholic Church during and after the war (Caldwell 1991: 43). Il bandito seeks to criminalize Lydia and thereby to contain her autonomy and sexuality, either through recourse to genre conventions reminiscent of 1930s Hollywood gangster films in the mise-en-scène of her apartment, satin housecoats and feather boas, or by visually containing her through the labyrinthine tunnels, run-down, dirty staircases in damaged houses and dark streets in which the gang operates. Lydia resists containment and the final sequence shows her, clothed in furs and with a satisfied expression on her face, boarding a train – unpunished. Any purely psychoanalytic reading of Magnani’s femme fatale could not do justice to the complexity of this film and its relationship to the world outside the cinema. 1946 was the year in which Italian women got the vote for the first time, and took part in elections to decide the fate of the monarchy. Widespread poverty and unemployment thwarted the desires of ordinary people to achieve some measure of prosperity. Desires to share in the level of comfort enjoyed by the occupying Allied forces and seen on the silver screen alarmed the Catholic Church, which condemned the material wealth of the Americans as introducing alien values. Il bandito is ambiguous about wealth, and these ambiguities are inscribed on the body of Lydia. Her sexuality is emphasized through her feathers and furs, her body being used as a ‘total instrument of communication’ (Ghezzo 2001: 42). The power of Magnani’s performance goes beyond the attempt to contain her within conventional generic stereotypes of transgressive femininity, achieving what Christine BuciGlucksmann sees as the ‘theatricization and allegorization of the feminine’, which is a metaphor for male castration (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 154). The phallic woman does violence to the power of patriarchy, and destabilizes it in a way characteristic of the Italian neo-Baroque. In her move from one gangster to another, Lydia symbolizes what is at stake – the dangers for patriarchy represented by the allure of female autonomy and prosperity. Il bandito is also emblematic of other tensions associated with desires in the population not to return to coercive social, political and gender relations, because it is Ernesto’s patriarchal rigidity that provokes the initial tragedy; in this regard, it is very significant that Lydia is unpunished at the film’s end. Il bandito also displays typical characteristics of Italian noir in its use of realist conventions. Narrative, kinetic, performative and visual excess – film noir conventions, disturbing asymmetry, chiaroscuro lighting, showy visuals – function to draw attention to events perceived as traumatic, whilst the foregrounding of referentiality in repeated

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illusionistic detail links the story world firmly to crimes and other social preoccupations. Once social and political stability returned, Italian society concentrated its energies on reconstruction and building the economic boom of the later 1950s and early 1960s. Italian film noir style became associated with the horror genre, and with films such as Processo alla città (The City on Trial, Zampa 1952), which explored political scandals and were precursors of the political noirs explored below. It would have been equally interesting to explore where the Italian femme fatale figure migrates to in this period, and there are some wonderful examples in the peplum epics of the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to the blonde and wholesome heroines of the aspirational comedies of that time, films of the sword and sandal genre usually included an evil priestess, the antagonist of the passive, blonde heroine whose function was to scream and look decorative. Priestesses were usually played by actors of southern physical type, darkly sensual, active, and in authority. Concerns about the pace of modernity and the valorizing of northern, rather than Mediterranean, traditions, the growing autonomy of women in work and civic life, and anxieties about masculine roles lie behind representations of gender and sexuality in this genre. They are played out in complex narratives in which the struggle between right and wrong is presented as ostensibly simple. Christians and representatives of strong, patriarchal institutions (kings, princes, generals) are right; pagans, usurpers, regicides and powerful women are depicted as strongly transgressive.4 Today their appeal continues, deriving from their camp iconography, and the often unconvincing punishment of the dark, Medusa-like femme fatale in the final reel.

Political noirs from the 1970s onwards The overwhelming presence of the femme fatale in popular genres aimed at lower-class audiences in the outer suburbs contrasts with her absence in the auteurist political films aimed at the educated middle class. The interesting investigative thrillers of the 1970s and 1990s are usually regarded as the most coherent expressions of Italian political film noir but, as they explore the uses and abuses of civic and political power, they generally lack the femme fatale figure. Investigations are set in motion by traumatic events that cause the initiating disruption rather than the presence of a transgressive or unruly woman. This is indeed the case in Francesco Rosi’s films, which are categorized as leading examples of the critical realist and political cinema that succeeded

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neorealism. In his political films women are a structured absence, and, when I asked him why, he replied that his films were about power, and that since, with rare exceptions today, women did not exercise political power in Italy, they did not appear in his films (Wood 1985). This was, of course, not strictly the case, and certainly is not now; but the necessity to pare down the narrative in the drive to uncover unpalatable or hidden truths about the complex political situation in Italy results in a focus on the male drive to investigate and contain, and the containment of the disruption represented by any femme fatale. However, in Elio Petri’s political thrillers darkly sensual women are literally fatal to the central male protagonist. A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way, 1967) was made after leaving the Communist party, but before the 1968 revolutions, at a time when Italian intellectuals felt impotent faced with the dominance and corruption of the right-wing. Paolo Laurana (Gian Maria Volonté), who decides to investigate the death of his friend, Roscio, is presented as a socially and emotionally inadequate figure who is the only one not to understand the reasons for the murder. Roscio’s widow, Luisa (Irene Papas), is the femme fatale. Papas’s performance stresses the ambiguous and darkly erotic nature of Luisa’s character. Her dark eyes and hair and black clothes rhyme with the fetishistic pictures of a black rubber-clad woman on Laurana’s wall. Laurana’s fetishizing of Luisa blocks out the truth (which is spelled out through dialogues of other characters) linking the fascist past and the current political right, the church and illegal power, and he fails to see until too late that Luisa is implicated in the murder through her sexual relationship with her cousin, the right-wing lawyer Rosello (Gabriele Ferzetti), whose corruption Roscio was about to denounce. The darkly erotic but passive Luisa acts as a metaphor for collusion with the mafia, and the relationship between a powerless population and the domination of illegal power. Her silence is a metaphor for the omertà, the code of silence, by which the mafia maintains its grip on the population. The femme fatale of Petri’s Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1970) also embodies the effects of the exercise of political and gender power. In this film we know from the very beginning that the policeman, il dottore (Gian Maria Volonté again), has murdered his mistress, Augusta (Florinda Bolkan), on the day of his promotion from head of the homicide section to head of the political section of the police force. The film’s investigation is, therefore, into the nature of the institution of the police force through the actions of this emblematic character, and is a metaphysical exploration of the nature of justice and power. Several excessive elements in

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this political film noir assist the perception of meaning. The performance styles and how the characters use domestic and institutional space provide indications of their personal power and how they exercise it. The architectural paradigms used in the film provide another. On the one hand, in the use of classical, neoclassical and modernist architecture and institutional spaces of various police departments, framing and camera angles stress regularity and order. Augusta’s home, on the other hand, is characterized by sinuous, art deco decoration, curves and womb-like spaces. Complexity and lack of order are emphasized through spatial compositions (Wood 1998: 285). Within this space, Augusta and her lover, il dottore, have played games of coercion and domination, mirrored in the games that il dottore plays with suspected terrorists and young revolutionaries. In the opening sequence Augusta rises up to meet her lover, wearing a beautifully patterned housecoat. She is the upright, phallic woman who envelops her prey with her arms and draws him into her dark bedroom. She takes the leading role in their love-making, erect astride him – and he slits her throat as she climaxes. In their games, Augusta has taunted il dottore for being sexually incompetent. Powerful male figures representing the law do not tolerate any reduction of their power, or lifting of their mask of superiority (De Gaetano 1999: 88). Her murder is a deliberate attempt to retake control, as il dottore spreads clues to his guilt for his colleagues to find. Augusta’s voluptuous body, the fixity of her gaze, which constantly engages il dottore, her surroundings, the repetitive and carnivalesque nature of her games, are all part of the construction of her as a femme fatale. This overdetermination (Degli Esposti 1998: 8), like that of Magnani’s character, Lydia, functions as a guide to interpretation. In fact, after the initial murder, repeated flashbacks to the couple’s sexual games show that this femme fatale resists the textual eradication which Mary Ann Doane suggests is the ‘desperate reassertion of control’ by the male subject (Doane 1991: 2). Internal conflicts are externalized in this tension between order and disorder, which Omar Calabrese identifies as neo-Baroque (Calabrese 1992: 25). Two versions of politics or ideology are expressed visually, neo-Baroque strategies also being used to reject simplicity and to inject complexity into narratives. In this respect the neo-Baroque in Italy is an expression of the postmodern undermining of the grand metanarratives. Fluidity, ambiguity, doubts, excess expressed visually or in monstrous characters or in the performance of violence, are all elements of the template of film noir, and have been used by Italian political filmmakers to problematize the grand metanarratives of political, gender or

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social ideologies, which seek to project themselves as part of the natural order of things. These are flexible paradigms. This film is not alone in providing a visualization of how power is exercised through a panopticon, taking the form of the police surveillance centre, a dark space where lines of technicians manage whirring tape recorders. Sequences set in police headquarters show il dottore’s aggressive movements through corridors and offices, addressing his subordinates as ‘ragazzi’ (boys) and shouting his instructions on how to view and treat the young people the police arrest. His power, and that of the institution of the police, is based on coercion and the burning impulse to control. Augusta’s games rob il dottore’s power of its authority by showing its arbitrary and ridiculous nature. She goads him into violence, which reveals the elusive nature of his control, and receives the ultimate punishment. These disorderly elements, neo-Baroque disruptions, attain the force of what Buci-Glucksman describes as the plenitude of allegorical visions (BuciGlucksmann 1994: 102). Allegory, in its complexity, suggests a reading of the reality depicted, and demystifies the carefully constructed edifice of law and masculinist control. Augusta’s female body and her sexual games, the complexity of her movements within her feminine space and her dominance of it render her a figure of opposition to the patriarchal system, which would place her in a subordinate position. Italian film noir is politicized and the figure of the femme fatale is subordinated to the drive to express anxieties about power, powerlessness, corruption, and other wounds to the body politic.

Conclusion: Twenty-first-century femmes This template for the femme fatale continues in the cinema of the turn of the twentieth century. In the early 1990s the revelations about financial kickbacks to politicians and corruption of all sorts amongst the elite classes resulted in a resurgence of interest in noir fictions. Not only were names named, but politicians and men of power were prosecuted and even imprisoned. Italian film noir resurfaced and returned to the 1970s to investigate past mysteries and scandals with the intention of naming names, finding those responsible and shedding light on the dark corners of Italian civic life. In these films, mainly with magistrate, journalist or policeman heroes, male power derives from the protagonist’s moral authority rather than the ability to wreak excessive violence. Again, they lack femme fatale figures. The initial disruption is usually a violent event, in the course of whose investigation layers of illegal

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power networks are uncovered. The investigator is differentiated from those he investigates by his depiction within healthy family relationships. Moreover, this protagonist’s female companions generally remain in supportive and subordinate roles, maintaining the traditional female stereotype. There are exceptions to this stereotype in the 1990s, and they have become more common in the 2000s. Excessive materialism, as identified with a multitude of social ills in Italian society, is frequently associated with transgressive female characters in contemporary film noir. More recent femmes fatales in Italian noir are more successfully transgressive, but all reflect the projection onto the female body of blame for social malaise. Anxieties about female power, corruption, immigration, the mafia and materialism are visible in many examples.5 The seductive allure of riches, expressed in the mise-en-scène of conspicuous consumption, luxurious hotels and villas, antiques and designer clothes and cars, act as metaphors for the huge profits and economic power of the contemporary mafia in Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love, Sorrentino 2005) and Romanzo criminale (Placido 2005). Whilst not precisely femmes fatales, in that neither of the female protagonists of these two films is a powerful Medusa figure who escapes male control, both women are literally fatal to the male protagonists in that their allure requires commensurate financial recompense, precipitating the unravelling of usually hidden criminal structures and links between legal and illegal power. An important mutation of the stereotype occurs in Notturno Bus (Night Bus, Marengo 2007), where there are no apologies for using and abusing men from the femme fatale. Leila (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) confidently uses her beauty to seduce, drug and rob men, an activity which accidentally brings her into contact with the attempted blackmail of a politician in mafia pay. Typically, the figure of the unruly woman allows access to the normally hidden worlds of political and institutional power. However, Leila’s preparations for seduction in wig, make-up and revealing dress show the femme fatale figure as pure construction and response to male desires, and in the ensuing mayhem she is clearly superior in health and resourcefulness to all of the male characters around her. The threat to male power represented by the femme fatale is visualized in disruption and violence occasioned by Leila’s amoral seductions, but coding her as ‘ordinary underneath’ (when she goes on the run in jeans and t-shirt), and male characters as ineffective, provides a clearer metaphor for the threat to male power represented by women’s autonomy and sexual demands.

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The seductive glamour of the femme fatale in Italian political and social noir cinema is a ploy of Baroque aesthetics, a disguised key to the interpretation of the workings of Italian society. Massive social change and economic prosperity challenged the traditional ordering of Italian society from the late 1940s onwards, whilst unexplained scandals and crimes indicated the persistence of older power relationships. Cultural texts show that the status of women is still problematic in the popular imaginary. In the particular noir films that I have chosen to study here the temptation is to analyse the femme fatale figure in terms of her allure and threatening autonomy, and as a projection of male anxieties about the consequences of female economic and psychic independence. In Italian political and social film noir she is altogether more nuanced than her American counterparts, both in allegorizing the difficult tensions between traditional female stereotypes, and in the use of realist conventions to make firm links to Italian political and social realities. The narrative drive drawing on the necessity of female suffering to define Italian womanhood, which was sanctioned by the Catholic Church, is challenged by the evocation of real worlds in which the exercise of patriarchy is experienced as painful and resented. These tensions make the femme fatale a useful outsider figure to shed light on the many mysteries of Italian civic life, and the particular configuration and mutation of her character can metaphorize existing social and political relations. One of the most constant preoccupations is the corrosive effect of materialism on what are held to be the core values of Italian society. Whatever the target of the investigations of the political film noir, the films are ultimately about power. Complex visual regimes and femme fatale figures betray the continuities between past and present power structures, explaining the excessive reactions to the perceived threats represented by the demands of globalized capitalism, and of women.

Notes 1. See Angela Dalle Vacche’s recent discussion of the silent diva (Dalle Vacche 2008). 2. Since 1929, when the publisher Mondadori started bringing out detective fiction in yellow covers, the word giallo has come to be used as a shorthand term for detective fiction, and as a generic term for stories with any mystery element. Film-makers commonly used saturated yellow tones to denote the presence of mysteries. 3. Examples include Il bandito (Lattuada 1946), Tombolo, paradiso nero (Tombolo, Black Paradise, Ferroni 1947), Senza pietà (Without Pity, Lattuada 1948),

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Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth, Germi 1949), In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, Germi 1949). 4. Maggie Günsberg suggests that the many exposed female (and male) bodies cater primarily for male desires, but that the ‘exciting and dangerously empowered exposed female bodies’ appealed to ‘sexualities other than licit heterosexuality’ (Günsberg 2005: 101). 5. Examples include La fine è nota (The End is Known, Comencini 1993), Angela (Torre 2002), Rose e pistole (Apuzzo 1998), The Holiday Killers (Assassini dei giorni di festa, Damiani 2002).

Works cited Buci-Glucksmann, C. (1994), Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity, London: Sage. Calabrese, O. (1992), Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. C. Lambert, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Caldwell, L. (1991), ‘Madri d’Italia: Film and Fascist Concern with Motherhood’, in Z. Baran´ski and S. Vinall (eds), Women in Italy, Basingstoke: Macmillan/ University of Reading, pp. 43–63. Caldwell, L. (2000), ‘What about Women? Italian Films and their Concerns’, in U. Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–51, London and New York: Cassell, pp. 131–46. Caldwell, L. (2006), ‘What Do Mothers Want? Takes on Motherhood in Bellissima, Il grido, and Mamma Roma’, in P. Morris (ed.), Women in Italy, 1945–1960: an Interdisciplinary Study, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 225–37. Cowie, E. (1993), ‘Film Noir and Women’, in J. Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir: A Reader, London and New York: Verso, pp. 121–65. Dalle Vacche, A. (2008), Diva: Passion and Defiance in Early Italian Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press. De Gaetano, R. (1999), Il corpo e la maschera: Il grottesco nel cinema italiano, Rome: Bulzoni. Degli Esposti, C. (1998), ‘Postmodernism(s)’, in C. Degli Esposti (ed.), Postmodernism in the Cinema, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 3–18. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New York and London: Routledge. Ghezzo, F. (2001), ‘The Polysemic Body: Silvana as a Neorealistic Femme Fatale’, in T. C. Riviello (ed.), Women in Italian Cinema/La donna nel cinema italiano, Rome: Edizioni Libreria Croce, pp. 39–56. Gubitosi, G. (1998), Amedeo Nazzari, Bologna: Il Mulino. Gundle, S. (2007), Bellissima: Feminine Beauty and the Idea of Italy, Yale: Yale University Press. Günsberg, M. (2005), Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jay, M. (2003), Refractions of Violence, New York and London: Routledge.

The Femme Fatale of Italian Film Noir 169 Liehm, M. (1984), Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the present, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Marcus, M. (2001), ‘Cane da grembo o carne in scatola? Divismo in Visconti’s Anna and La strega bruciata viva’, in T. C. Riviello (ed.), Women in Italian Cinema/ La donna nel cinema italiano, Rome: Edizioni Libreria Croce, pp. 57–74. Sieglohr, U. (2000), ‘Introduction’ to Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–51, London and New York: Cassell, pp. 1–11. Wood, M. P. (1985), unpublished interview with Francesco Rosi, 28 July. Wood, M. P. (1998), ‘Francesco Rosi: Heightened Realism’, in J. Boorman and W. Donohue (eds), Projections 8, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 272–95. Wood, M. P. (2000), ‘Woman of Rome: Anna Magnani’, in U. Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines Without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945–51, London and New York: Cassell, pp. 148–59. Wood, M. P. (2007), ‘Italian film noir’, in A. Spicer (ed.), European Film Noir, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 236–72.

12 A Myth Is Born: The Femme Fatale in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema John L. Marambio and Marcie Rinka

During the 1940s, Mexico produced and exported more films than any other Latin American nation. This boom in its cinematic production became known as the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema and the films of this era tended to produce a divided image of women; they were depicted as virtuous wives, mothers and daughters or as prostitutes, fallen women, or femmes fatales. This chapter examines the good woman/bad woman paradigm in Fernando de Fuentes’ Doña Bárbara (1943) and argues that the historical roots of the femme fatale and her counterpart, the virtuous woman, not only originate in two of Mexico’s iconic figures, La Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe, as Joanne Hershfield suggests, but reflect an anxiety about the changing social role of women in post-revolutionary Mexico. It also demonstrates how the redefinition of appropriate feminine behaviour is mediated by a hyper-masculinized identity; an examination of the film shows that the male characters can be read as a direct response to the threat of the femme fatale and reflect Mexican society’s struggle to re-establish patriarchal power. In order to understand the history of the femme fatale in Mexican cinema, we must consider her origins in other literary and cinematic traditions. Firstly, the femme fatale is a universal archetype which has existed, in one form or another, in folklore and myth in nearly all cultures. Some of the earliest examples include Judeo-Christian characters such as Lilith, Eve, Delilah and Salome. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the femme fatale became popular in Western culture. Famous femmes fatales from those eras 170

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Illustration 8 Image of Maria Felix Credit: The Kobal Collection.

include Erzsébet Báthory, the Bloody Countess, and Mata Hari, the notorious spy. The figure of the femme fatale also became popular in cinema during the silent era. For example, in North American cinema, the vamp became a common character in the early twentieth century. Vamp, a term which comes from the word ‘vampire’, is used to describe a glamorous and exotic woman who is known as a heartless seductress. Her allure

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is irresistible and the men she seduces are depicted as helpless victims. In the North American tradition, the vamp is often represented as foreign, usually of undetermined Eastern European or Asian ancestry. Developed as the sexual counterpoint of the good girl represented by wholesome actresses such as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, the most notable vamps of Hollywood’s silent screen were Theda Bara and Pola Negri. The femme fatale was a character who not only captivated the imagination of Hollywood, but seduced Mexican audiences as well. During the 1920s, Hollywood produced over 600 films a year, many of which were exported to Latin America. Mexican movie-goers were undoubtedly familiar with the character of the femme fatale who appeared in those Hollywood exports. The relationship between Mexico and the United States during the Second World War also helped the femme fatale make her transition to the Mexican screen. In exchange for military co-operation, inexpensive labour and guaranteed sales of raw materials, Mexico received numerous loans and technological aid to invigorate its economy and reposition itself in the world market. Such capitalistic development favoured the national film industry. In 1942, the Mexican government created the Banco Cinematográfico, a lending agency created to consolidate development of the industry. As part of the programme to aid Mexican industrial development, Hollywood also granted technological help and raw material to the national industry (de la Vega Alfaro 1995: 85). Many Mexican stars, directors and film technicians were also trained in Hollywood and many Hollywood genres were assimilated into Mexican cinema (Hershfield 1996: 7). Like other national cinemas, Mexican cinema has had to deal with the fact that American studios controlled film marketing; it had to either find its own way of attracting viewers or depend on Hollywood’s aesthetic conventions as well as its superior technology and financial power. That is, it had to ‘emulate the standards of production set by a transnational cinema with an established repertoire of moving images that called into question Mexico’s very right to access the “civilizing horizon” ’ (Noble 2005: 30). The Mexican audience developed an affinity for Hollywood films, and Latin American film-makers were compelled to craft technically superior films with well-developed narratives similar to those Hollywood was producing. As Andrea Noble states, dealing with Hollywood is about acknowledging how the narrative logic of its products – continuity editing, narrative causality and the

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construction of the time-space coherence that have traditionally characterized this cinema’s mode of film-making – has had a profound influence on what kinds of expectations audiences bring to the film-viewing experiences. (Noble 2005: 13–14) When Hollywood encountered a language barrier with the introduction of sound in the 1930s, film-making in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, began to flourish in response to the audience’s desire for films in Spanish. During its Golden Age, the Mexican film industry imitated Hollywood by mass-marketing its actors and actresses and creating a star system that catapulted to fame the likes of Cantinflas, Pedro Infante and María Félix. It also focused on producing a number of Hollywood-style film genres such as slapstick comedies, musicals, historical epics, and family melodramas and created the Ariel Awards, Mexico’s version of the Oscar (Stacy 2002: 308). Although early sound film production in Mexico was dominated by foreigners, such as Russian Sergei Eisenstein, director of ¡Que Viva México! (1932), Mexico’s proximity to Hollywood allowed Mexican film-makers to work with sound at a time in which other Latin American countries were still producing silent films (Stacy 2002: 308). Fernando de Fuentes was one of the first Mexicans to work with sound. Best known as Mexico’s first auteur and creator of Mexico’s first original genre, the comedia ranchera or ranch comedy, de Fuentes began his career as second assistant director on Santa (Moreno 1932), the first ‘talkie’ produced in Mexico. Based loosely on Federico Gamboa’s 1902 novel, Santa is the story of a young, innocent girl who is seduced, abandoned and forced, out of shame and economic necessity, into a life of prostitution. Depicting Santa as a suffering victim of circumstance with a heart of gold, the tragic story can be read as a morality tale that reinforces traditional standards of appropriate feminine behaviour (Standish and Bell 2004: 140). De Fuentes’s work with Sergei Eisenstein on Santa surely informed the creation of his femme fatale, Doña Bárbara. Although one can certainly identify a transnational influence in the construction of the Mexican version of the femme fatale due to Mexico’s proximity to Hollywood, there are also certain iconic figures in Mexican culture that reflect the same good versus evil paradigm: the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche. The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, represents the virtuous, self-sacrificing mother while La Malinche, the mistress and interpreter for Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, is considered a fallen woman who betrayed her people by some, while others consider her the mother of the mestizo

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(Hershfield 1996: 7). As one would expect, any mention of a ‘fallen woman’ brings to mind La Malinche, the woman who was the major link in unifying the Spanish and Aztec cultures. In addition to being his mistress, La Malinche guided Cortés into Aztec territory, translated for him and served as a sort of diplomatic advisor. For all of this, Doña Marina, her Christian name, has been converted into a palimpsest for the invasion of Aztec land by the Spaniards. The historical event has been described, interpreted, and converted into a symbolic construct that is reinterpreted by each successive generation...[La Malinche] may be considered the first woman of Mexican literature just as she is considered the first mother of the Mexican nation and the Mexican Eve, symbol of national betrayal (Messinger Cypress 1991: 1–2). On the other hand, the Virgin of Guadalupe is revered as a most positive figure, a model for all womanhood to follow. For Rosario Castellanos, a feminist Mexican writer, the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche are less ambiguous figures. She agrees that only positive elements are associated with the figure of the Virgin, an observation supported by specialized studies by literary critics, historians, and sociologists. Veneration of the Virgin transcends pure religiosity and has become equated with a sense of unselfish motherhood and positive national identity. La Malinche, at the opposite pole, embodies both negative national identity and sexuality in its most irrational form, sexuality without regard to moral laws or cultural values (Messinger Cypess 1991: 6–7). Noble adds that ‘More specifically, this female identity is associated with the “defiled and abused” Malintzin/Malinche, the interpreter and lover of Hernán Cortés’ (Noble 2005:100). Although there have always been images of fallen women in Mexican culture, the figure of the femme fatale became particularly popular in the films produced during the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. Doña Bárbara represents one of the many films that followed the ‘fallen woman’ trend that began with Russian director Arcady Boytler’s La mujer del puerto (The Woman of the Port, 1934). Based loosely on stories by Guy de Maupassant and Leo Tolstoy, La mujer del puerto is the story of a young woman who is forced into a life of prostitution after the death of her father and the discovery of her lover’s indiscretions. Exhibiting

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a strong influence from the German Expressionist School, the scenery, light and shadows were carefully crafted to enhance the mood of the film. Expressionism made its way to the United States during the Second World War, when many German film-makers fled the war and immigrated to Hollywood. Their techniques had a profound effect on filmmaking around the world, but one of the genres most influenced by Expressionism was film noir. Although the term film noir was first used by French critic Nino Frank to categorize a style that emerged out of US cinema in the mid-1940s, La mujer del puerto can be categorized as a film noir because of the influence of Expressionism (Rush Rivera 2007: 1). La mujer del puerto prefigures the popular cabaratera or nightclub melodrama of the 1940s, such as La mujer sin alma (Woman Without a Soul, de Fuentes 1943), Las abandonadas (Abandoned Women, Fernández 1945), Salón México (Fernández 1949), and Aventurera (The Adventuress, Gout 1950). Cabareteras evolved as a response to Hollywood’s film noir: characterized as erotic melodramas with complicated storylines, cabareteras invariably took place in a seedy cabaret. Surrounded by marginal characters, the principal protagonist was always a woman forced into a life of shame but who was endowed with a natural talent for singing or dancing that inevitably helped her to become successful and control those around her (Sublette 2004: 552). In order to understand why women who have deviated from traditionally defined feminine gender roles seem to captivate the imagination, we must first consider how gender roles have usually been defined. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico, gender roles for both men and women were rather rigidly delineated. While the public sphere of work was defined as a predominantly masculine arena, the private sphere of hearth and home was considered the feminine realm of influence. The division of these two spheres subsequently defined the social and economic roles of men and women. Men were the wage-earners while women were expected to marry and raise children. Cultural expectations about what was considered men’s and women’s work changed with the social and economic upheaval of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). Many rural and urban lower-class women found themselves caught up in the struggle and had no choice but to become actively involved, especially in the military aspects of the revolution. The famed soldadera or the Mexican soldier’s woman accompanied the military units into battle.1 While some women did fight during the conflict, the majority completed domestic tasks in support of the troops. The armies depended on women to forage and prepare the soldiers’

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food, wash their clothes and tend their wounds (Macías 1982: 40). Although the soldadera is perhaps the best-known female figure of the Mexican Revolution, numerous women who were trained and educated in vocational and normal schools also participated in various phases of the struggle as journalists, propagandists and political activists.2 The Revolution also created a new political system, which women, as well as men, helped to shape, and introduced Mexico to new ideas about social reform, welfare provision and gender relations (Buck 2002: 59). Although their participation in the Mexican Revolution had expanded their social role and enabled their participation in the public sphere, women in post-revolutionary Mexico struggled to maintain their right to the social equality promised to them by the leaders of the Revolution. The unprecedented economic boom of the 1940s, coupled with the reinstitution of the bracero programme in the United States, necessitated Mexican women’s continued participation in the workforce. This changing social role, brought on by industrialization and urbanization, was perceived as a threat to the family-as-nation model by some members of Mexican society, who expected post-revolutionary women to return to the domestic sphere and resume the more passive roles reserved for them. This contradiction placed women in an ambivalent position, which is evident in the cultural production of the era. The good woman/bad woman paradigm evident in Fernando de Fuentes’s film, Doña Bárbara, demonstrates the debate surrounding the role of women in post-revolutionary Mexico. Although set in a time and place distant from post-revolutionary Mexico, de Fuentes’s film addresses several of the same concerns that Mexican President Lázaro Cardenas (1934–40) faced in the modernization of post-revolutionary Mexico: agrarian reform and women’s rights. Doña Bárbara, an adaptation of Rómulo Gallegos’ regionalist novela de la tierra, is the story of the settlement of the Venezuelan plains.3 Doña Bárbara is a tyrannical rancher, whose cruel and barbarous personality has been shaped by her experience and environment. Having been raped as a young woman, Bárbara vows to punish all men for her mistreatment. Using her sexuality to advance her position, Bárbara becomes Doña Bárbara, the powerful cacique of a large ranch stolen from Lorenzo Barquero. Barquero, one of her first victims, now lives in a decrepit hut on the outskirts of Doña Bárbara’s ranch with his daughter Marisela, a wild and uncivilized young woman, the unacknowledged and illegitimate daughter of Doña Bárbara. Known as la devoradora de hombres, or the man-eater, Doña Bárbara is considered a femme fatale for various reasons. First, Doña Bárbara dresses

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and acts like a man. Instead of wearing dresses or skirts, Doña Bárbara wears the typical costume of the llanero or the cowboy of the Venezuelan plains. While surveying her land alongside her peones or workers, she rides astride her horse like a man instead of riding side-saddle like a proper woman of her day. Second, Doña Bárbara is open about her sexual desires and freely indulges them. In a time in which women were not supposed to derive any satisfaction from sex and sexual relations were supposed to occur only between a heterosexual couple for the sole purpose of procreation, Doña Bárbara has sex for pleasure and uses her sexuality to gain social and economic power. Third, she rejects her maternal role and abandons her daughter, Marisela. Instead of being a wife and mother, roles which the Mexican government defined as essential to the formation of a prosperous modern nation, Doña Bárbara becomes the owner and overseer of a ranch, a job traditionally held by men. Although her behaviour differs little from the behaviour of a male rancher, she is feared for her despotic control of the land and despised for her aggressiveness, characteristics deemed unladylike in women. Her control of the territory remains unchallenged until the arrival of Santos Luzardo, a young lawyer from Caracas who returns to his birthplace to take charge of his cattle ranch. As the representative of civilization, Santos Luzardo’s reappropriation of his stolen land and his desire to instill law and order in the region are seen as challenges to Doña Bárbara’s authority, which is based on lawlessness and violence. Santos and his civilizing project prove to be a match for Doña Bárbara and, little by little, Doña Bárbara acquiesces to Santos’s demands. Santos’s superiority is intricately connected to his masculinity. He is considered the representative of patriarchal authority and must demonstrate his power and dominance. Upon his arrival at the ranch, the peones or ranch hands make fun of Santos because he is somewhat of a dandy and an outsider. In response to their challenge, he proves his manhood by taming a wild horse from the plains. After breaking the horse and teaching it to obey his commands, Santos gains the respect of the other men and establishes his position of authority over his land and his workers. This scene prefigures the way in which Santos will exert his will over the errant female, Doña Bárbara. Santos must displace the femme fatale from her position of dominance in order to establish his patriarchal authority. In addition to creating land reforms, Santos’s second civilizing process includes the rescue of Marisela from her wild, uncivilized state. When Santos first meets Marisela, she is lying in a field at the edge of stream like a wild animal. Santos befriends Marisela and teaches her

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how to act, dress and talk like a proper young woman. In order to successfully establish his reforms, Santos must educate women so that they comply with the programmes of the state. By giving Marisela guidelines for appropriate feminine behaviour, Santos reinforces patriarchy’s definition of what a woman should be – beautiful, charming and docile. Marisela is presented as the epitome of femininity and Doña Bárbara’s complete opposite. Santos’s reforms have a profound effect on both women and soon he becomes a love interest for both mother and daughter. The rivalry between Doña Bárbara and Marisela is intense and prompts Doña Bárbara to transgress yet another boundary. In an effort to conquer Santos Luzardo, Doña Bárbara resorts to using black magic. In her bedroom, Doña Bárbara constructs an altar and places Santos’s picture in the centre. As she chants several incantations, Doña Bárbara is veiled in almost complete darkness and she appears both sinister and dangerous. In a predominantly Catholic country, Doña Bárbara’s use of black magic is seen as anti-Christian behaviour, which makes her a marginal figure and adds to her status as a femme fatale. In spite of her efforts to woo Santos through sinister means, Doña Bárbara is no match for him. Santos’s mere presence, however, causes both women to swoon. The effect is most noticeable in Doña Bárbara. Not only does she lose her potency, she also finds herself abandoning her masculine ways. For example, Doña Bárbara surrenders land to Santos without a fight and begins to wear more feminine clothing in his presence. Although Doña Bárbara tries to conquer Santos Luzardo, his heart belongs to Marisela. In a scene that reinforces the good woman/bad woman paradigm, Doña Bárbara approaches Santos’s house with the intention of killing her daughter and rival, Marisela. Outside in the darkness, Doña Bárbara stands alone with a pistol in her hand. Inside the house, Santos and Marisela can been seen laughing and embracing one another. The juxtaposition between the dark exterior and the brightness of the well-lit interior of the house clearly reinforces the idea that the femme fatale is an outsider who has no place in the civilized world created by Santos Luzardo’s reforms. Unable to kill her rival, Doña Bárbara disappears and Marisela and Santos live happily ever after. The role of Doña Bárbara established María Félix (1914–2002) as a formidable actress in Mexican film. Her performance was so memorable that she became México’s femme fatale by antonomasia: that is, María Félix’s life and star persona mixed to such a degree that she became known to the Mexican public as La Doña or the Iron Lady (our translation)

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to symbolize her widely-known power and magnetism. Born in Sonora, Mexico, María de los Angeles Félix Güereña was the only girl in a family of twelve children and grew up dealing forcefully with men, behaviour quite unexpected of a señorita of the times. During her lifetime, Félix continued to push the limits of what was considered acceptable feminine behaviour. She was married an astonishing five times, most notably to composer Agustín Lara, who immortalized her in the song María Bonita, which was often played whenever she appeared at a public event. It is also commonly thought that she was the mistress of Mexico’s ‘playboy’ President, Miguel Alemán (1946–52) (Crow 1980: 725). María Félix was as beautiful, alluring and sultry as any of her female counterparts in Hollywood, and biographers can only estimate the number of admirers and lovers she had. In an interview, Mexican writer, Elena Poniatowska, asked Félix how she would compare herself to the likes of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Dolores del Río. Félix responded that she represented ‘the successful and indomitable Mexican woman. I do not submit. I never have’ (Poniatowska 1998: 159). Félix’s refusal to conform to patriarchy was evident in her personal life, and her defiance shaped her performance of Doña Bárbara. Depicted in the media as the ‘man-eater’ par excellence, Félix was already known to audiences as a femme fatale. Her not-so-private private life gained her the reputation of a strong, sexual woman known for her sensual beauty. Her dark locks, assertive brows and dark eyes were her trademarks. Although many found her face hard and inexpressive, Félix conveyed a myriad of emotions by simply raising a brow. Félix’s defiant gaze prompted Mexican author Octavio Paz to describe her as a woman ‘with the audacity to defy the ideas machos have constructed of what a woman should be’ (Vallance 2002). On screen as Doña Bárbara, Félix visually asserts her dominance. Except for the first scene of the movie, in which the young, innocent Bárbara is raped by the boatmen, Félix almost always appears on a higher physical plane than the male actors. Her position of power within the film recalls her penchant for collecting and controlling her husbands and lovers off screen. Fernando de Fuentes’s Doña Bárbara is a classic example of melodrama. By definition, the word ‘melodrama’ blends the words ‘melody’ and ‘drama’ to describe a romantic and sensational work, filled with music and song, which has a happy ending. Before the advent of television, and during the peak days of radio, there were many companies that broadcast melodramas. In Latin American countries, families gathered around the radio, usually at night, to follow the sensational episodes of some ill-starred lover. The Mexican audience’s fondness for melodrama

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was so great that it has been described as ‘flow[ing] in the[ir] blood’ (González Rubio 1995: 22). Melodramas of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema attracted audiences of all social classes because the nation lived a unique period in which films were for everybody: For the first time in the history of the cinema, spectators were able to enjoy a reasonably sustained, regular repertoire of films in their own language, featuring local songs and music, dealing with issues special to national cultural identity, which were embodied by a range of stars who were fast becoming established as household names (Noble 2005: 91). Later, however, in the 1950s, these audiences were divided: melodramas were for the populacho or commoners and more sophisticated and expensive films were for the new middle class. ‘Melodrama languished for many years in a critical desert, accused of complicity with suspect ideological structures [ ... ] it was perceived to be an excessively sentimental, escapist form of entertainment that appealed primarily to an “uncultured” [especially female] mass audience’ (Noble 2005: 97). It is a well-known fact that Mexican films of the Golden Age were extremely popular in all of Latin America, especially among the people who could not read the subtitles of English-speaking films fast enough. As other scholars have indicated, melodrama is often characterized by its didactic nature. Mexican melodrama, in particular, has been defined as a ‘drama of identification’, which ‘served as the principal vehicle for the transmission of new habits and the reiteration of codes of behavior’ for the newly urban, poor working class (Hershfield 1996: 44). That is, Mexicans did not only go to the movies to see themselves as they were; rather, they went to learn how they should ‘become’. If we accept the didactic nature of Mexican melodrama, what is de Fuentes’s film trying to teach Mexico’s citizens, especially the female ones? It is necessary to first consider the social and political landscape in post-revolutionary Mexico, in particular the Cárdenas regime. In order to modernize the Mexican economy, Cárdenas’s programmes relied upon a gendered ideology of production with a sharpened separation between the feminized realm of reproductive labour and subsistence production and the masculinized realm of wage labour (Olcott 2002: 108). The Mexican Revolution, however, had significantly redefined feminine social roles. Women of all social classes had participated in the Revolution; many left the domestic sphere and entered the masculine

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public world of work. Since the Cárdenas regime’s programmes relied heavily on men and women conforming to their socially prescribed roles, tension arose among Mexico’s citizens because of a difference between the government expectations of women and women’s desire for more rights and responsibilities. Because of this tension, a debate on the appropriate social role of women emerged in post-revolutionary Mexico and three different sectors vied for women’s allegiance. While more conservative factions such as the Catholic Church tried to reinforce the importance of women’s maternal role, radical, anarchist and communist groups clamoured for an expansion of women’s rights, including suffrage. The Cárdenas regime tried to bridge the gap between the far right and the far left by establishing ligas femeniles or women’s leagues, which sought to define the meaning of post-revolutionary womanhood. Although the ligas femeniles allowed women to organize and play a more active public role in the modernization of Mexico, the Cárdenas regime used the women’s leagues to link femininity to performing their reproductive labours and protecting their families and communities (Olcott 2002: 109), thus reinforcing the image of the mujer hogareña or domestic woman. The leagues, which remained under the control of the all-male ejidal or land committee, charged women with duties ranging from urban planning and planting decorative trees to maintaining the ‘dignity and respectability’ of their homes and neighbourhoods and ensuring community participation in public health campaigns (Olcott 2002: 118). Although the ligas femeniles seemingly allowed women a more active role in the public masculine sphere, the emphasis placed on domesticity demonstrates an effort to relegate women to an inferior position in the domestic sphere and the roles of wife and mother. Many of the Mexican films produced in the 1940s that were funded by the government reinforced the government’s ideology on gender roles, and de Fuentes’s Doña Bárbara is no exception. The fact that the femme fatale is expelled and the good girl remains seems to suggest that women cannot be leaders. Women like Doña Bárbara who attain the same status or power as men are seen as dangerous. Although Doña Bárbara’s use of power for personal gain differs little from that of her male counterparts, her actions are characterized as a misuse or an abuse of power. Marisela, the good girl, ends up with the man because she has conformed to the role that patriarchy has defined for her. If we read Santos and Marisela’s union as a symbol of the family-as-nation model, the political implications are clear: women who take a leadership role and transgress the bounds of patriarchy’s definition of appropriate feminine behaviour, such as Doña Bárbara, will find themselves

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alienated from the rest of society, while women like Marisela, who behave according to their prescribed social roles, will be happy and prosperous. In conclusion, our analysis of Fernando de Fuentes’s Doña Bárbara has demonstrated that the use of the good woman/bad woman paradigm reflects an effort to reinscribe patriarchal privilege and control into post-revolutionary gender roles. By juxtaposing the image of the devoradora de hombres with the image of the mujer hogareña, Doña Bárbara inscribes in the cultural imagination of Mexican citizens definitions of appropriate and inappropriate feminine behaviour. Interestingly, the debate about the role of women in Latin America continues today. In recent years, women have gained positions of power that have traditionally been reserved for men.4 Perhaps in response to the ever-changing social role of women, the character of the femme fatale has been revived in several remakes of Fernando de Fuentes’s 1943 classic. In 1998, the US-based Venezuelan, Betty Kaplan, directed an Argentine film production of Doña Bárbara featuring Argentinian actress Esther Goris. Three telenovelas or soap operas have also been produced: one in Peru in 1964, one in Venezuela in 1975 and one in 2008 by Telemundo, the leading Spanish-speaking American network, starring Mexican actress Edith González. Telemundo’s 120-episode series of Doña Bárbara has had an average viewership of over 600,000, and the fact that Doña Bárbara continues to intrigue a new generation of viewers suggests that there is still something that we love to hate about successful and powerful women.

Notes 1. Although the term soldadera is sometimes used to describe women who fought in battle during the Mexican Revolution, it most commonly refers to the girlfriends, widows and wives who followed the men into battle. Sharing the harsh living conditions of the war, these camp followers were an integral part of the army, although the majority of their labour was domestic not militaristic. 2. Three women who best exemplify the intellectual contributions of women to the Revolution are journalist Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875–1942), schoolteacher Dolores Jiménez y Muro (1848–1942) and feminist private secretary of President Carranza, Hermila Galindo de Topete (1896–1954) (Macías 1982: 25). 3. Novela de la tierra is a type of Latin American novel in which the landscape is another character, just as it is in the Hollywood Western. 4. For example, Latin America now boasts of having had six female presidents; Chilean Michelle Bachelet and Argentine Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

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recently joined the ranks of the likes of Argentine Isabel Martínez de Perón (1974–6), Nicaraguan Violeta Chamorro (1990–7), Guyanan Janet Rosenberg Jagan (1997–9) and Panamanian Mireya Moscoso (1999–2004).

Works cited Buck, S. A. (2002), Activists and Mothers: Feminist and Maternal Politics in Mexico, 1923–1953. Dissertation. State University of New Jersey. Crow, J. (1980), The Epic of Latin America, 3rd edn, Berkeley: University of California Press. De la Fuente, A. M. (2008), ‘SPTI Reteams with Telemundo’, Variety, 25 January, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117979637.html? categoryid=14&cs=1&nid= 2562 (accessed 1 February 2009) De la Vega Alfaro, E. (1995), ‘Origins, Development and Crisis of the Sound Cinema (1929–64)’, in P. A. Paranaguá, Mexican Cinema, London: British Film Institute, pp. 79–93. Doña Bárbara, Dir. Fernando de Fuentes, Perf. María Félix, Julián Soler, Clasa Films Mundiales, 1943. González Rubio, J. (1995), ‘El callejón de los milagros’, Dicine: Revista de difusión cinematográfica 63, 18–37. Hershfield, J. (1996), Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940–1950, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Macías, A. (1982), Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Messinger Cypress, S. (1991), La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth, Austin: University of Texas Press. Noble, A. (2005), Mexican National Cinema, New York: Routledge. Olcott, J. (2002), ‘Worthy Wives and Mothers: State-Sponsored Women’s Organizing in Post-Revolutionary Mexico’, in Journal of Women’s History 13:4, 106–31. Poniatowska, E. (1998), Todo México, Tomo 1, México, D.F., México: Editorial Diana. Rush Rivera, J. (2007), ‘La mujer del puerto’, in Cine las Américas, 4 October, http://w w w.cinelasamericas.org/yearound/sin/mujer_del_puerto.html (accessed 1 February 2009) Stacy, L. (2002), Mexico and the United States, Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish. Standish, P. and Bell, S. M. (2004), Culture and Customs of Mexico, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Sublette, N. (2004), Cuba and Its Music, Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Vallance, T. (2002), ‘María Félix: Defiant goddess of Mexican cinema’, The Independent, 12 April, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ maratildeshya-fatildecopylix-729916.html (accessed 18 April 2009)

Part IV Hollywood

13 ‘I Can’t Tell Anymore Whether You’re Lying’: Double Indemnity, Human Desire and the Narratology of Femmes Fatales Steve Neale

In The Film Studies Dictionary, Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant and Jim Hillier define femme fatale as follows: ‘From the French for “fatal woman”, a female character who uses her beauty to lure and entrap men, leading to their downfall and, usually, death’ (Blandford et al. 2001: 95–6). While gender-specific iconography, the femme fatale’s ‘beauty’, plays a part here, it is clear that aspects of narrative – a series of events, a set of agents and a process of transformation – are also involved. Motivations, actions and consequences – luring and entrapment, downfall and death – play key parts as well. Similar points are made by Mary Ann Doane, for whom narrative and knowledge, especially knowledge as to the nature of the femme fatale’s character and motives, are particularly important. ‘The femme fatale’, she writes, is the figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma. For her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is that she never really is what seems to be. She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, manageable. In thus transforming the threat into a secret, something which must be aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered, the figure is fully compatible with the epistemological drive of narrative, the hermeneutic structuration of the classical text. (Doane 1991: 1) By looking at Double Indemnity (1944) and Human Desire (1954), this chapter seeks to highlight the extent to which and the ways in which 187

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the mechanisms of narration can be used not only to construct or reinforce the stereotype of the femme fatale, but also to complicate or even to undermine it. Double Indemnity was directed by Billy Wilder for Paramount Pictures, Human Desire by Fritz Lang for Columbia. Both have been cited as examples of ‘film noir’, a loosely defined group of crime melodramas produced in the United States somewhere between the late 1930s and the late 1950s. The figure of the femme fatale is often said to be a defining ingredient of noir. While this is to ignore numerous films cited as noir by its initial proponents in France and its subsequent proponents in the United States and Britain, films such as T-Men (Mann 1947), Brute Force (Dassin 1947), Force of Evil (Polonksy 1948), The Blue Gardenia (Lang 1952) and Touch of Evil (Welles 1958), the force of association between noir and femmes fatales is such that ‘femme fatale’ is often used as a term to label the eponymous protagonists of such canonic noirs as Laura (Preminger 1946) and Gilda (Vidor 1946), even though they are not femmes fatales at all. The term has been applied more appropriately to the character of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity, which is perhaps why so many discussions and definitions of noir begin by discussing this film. I too want to begin with Double Indemnity, not because it exemplifies noir, but because it exemplifies some of the narratological devices, properties and ingredients at issue in the construction of a femme fatale, and because it too exhibits moments of equivocation, moments of uncertainty or illegibility of the kind noted by Doane. In Double Indemnity, insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) initially encounters Phyllis in the film’s first flashback, when she appears on the upstairs landing in the Dietrichson house wearing only a towel. Drawing attention to her state of undress, Neff tells her that her husband’s insurance is due for renewal. ‘I’d hate to think of your having a smashed fender or something while you’re not ... fully covered,’ he says. ‘I think you know what you mean,’ she replies, and she tells him to wait downstairs while she dresses.1 At this point, we follow Neff along the hallway and into the living room. His voice-over, delivered in retrospect, describes the contents of the room, but informs us that he was really thinking ‘about that dame upstairs and the way she had looked at me. And I wanted to see her again close.’ To use Murray Smith’s terms, we are here both ‘spatially attached’ to Walter and afforded ‘subjective access’ to his feelings and thoughts (Smith 1995). We are neither attached to Phyllis, who is upstairs off screen, nor granted subjective access to her. (There is no equivalent for her of Walter’s voice-over.)

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We become attached to her briefly as a cut to a close-up of legs and her anklet shows her walking downstairs to join him. But this moment serves as much to represent Neff’s desire as it does to indicate Phyllis’s whereabouts, and, as the camera dollies back to reveal her buttoning her dress, she and we rejoin Neff as she applies her lipstick then as they walk across the room to the living room chairs. Phyllis sits down. Neff comments on her anklet. Phyllis crosses her legs and asks about her husband’s insurance policy. As Neff replies, she rises from her chair and walks away from him and across the room to the right. The camera follows her, leaving Neff still talking but now out of frame. Her back is turned to Walter, but we can see her face. She is clearly pensive. But, although we are spatially attached to her rather than him, and although we are privy to the expression on her face, her expression is unreadable. We have no access to her thoughts, no way of knowing what she is thinking. At this point at least, she is illegible. Illegibility and a concomitant lack of attachment and access remain hallmarks of the way Phyllis is represented throughout Double Indemnity, though an important exception occurs during the scene in which Walter kills Phyllis’s husband (Tom Powers) in the back of her car. Phyllis signals to Neff by honking on the car horn. As she does so, the camera moves in to reframe her face in close-up while the killing takes place off screen. We are thus briefly attached to her rather than Walter once again. This time, though, the expression of ruthless satisfaction on her face, to which we alone are privy, is much more legible, allowing us much more unequivocal access to her reactions, feelings and thoughts. Her feelings for Neff, though, are far from clear, and, while they appear to be clarified later on, they are rendered equivocal once again in the scene in which Walter kills her. Towards the end of the film, Lola Dietrichson (Jean Heather), Phyllis’s daughter-in-law, tells Walter that Phyllis killed Lola’s mother. He begins to suspect that Phyllis has set him up, that she does not really love him but has merely used him to dispose of her husband and to make herself rich by collecting on his life insurance. In order to free himself from Phyllis and from detection by claims inspector Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), he plans to kill Phyllis and to pin the murder on Nino Zachetti (Byron Barr). He arranges to meet Phyllis at the Dietrichson house. When he arrives, she is already there. He delivers a speech that refers back to the events depicted in the initial flashback sequence. It attributes thoughts to her to which neither he nor we have had access, as we have seen: ‘Just like the first time I came here isn’t it? We were talking about automobile insurance. You were thinking about murder. I

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was thinking about that anklet.’ He goes on to accuse her of wanting to get rid of him. She denies his accusations. ‘Save it,’ he replies. ‘I’m telling this ... It’s been that Zachetti guy all along, hasn’t it?’ ‘That’s not true,’ she retorts. ‘Doesn’t matter if its true or not,’ he retorts. Realizing that he plans to shoot her, she shoots him. He moves towards her. Unwilling or unable to fire a second shot, she says that he is wrong about her involvement with Zachetti, but right about her character: ‘I never loved you Walter, not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago.’ At this point, just as Phyllis’s character and motives appear to be laid unequivocally bare, uncertainty and illegibility are reintroduced. They are further compounded when Phyllis tells Walter that she now really loves him. He goes on to kill her. But, because of the lack of independent access we have had to her thoughts, feelings and actions, because of the lack of independent corroboration we now have for what she says, we have no way of knowing whether she is lying or telling the truth. She may be telling the truth. Or for pragmatic reasons – because her life is under threat – she may be telling Walter what she thinks he wants to hear, confirming his account of her behaviour, actions and character in order to convince him that she has changed, that she now really loves him, in order to save her own life. We cannot be sure, just as we cannot be sure as to whether her earlier account of her husband’s brutality – ‘he gets drunk and slaps my face,’ she says to Neff – are true either. Issues such as these – issues to do with access, knowledge and character motivation – are what I now want to explore in more detail in Human Desire. Human Desire is both a loosely adapted and updated version of Émile Zola’s novel, La Bête Humaine, and a transposed and updated remake of Jean Renoir’s film version, which was produced and released in France in 1938. Because the film is not as well known as Double Indemnity, and because an understanding of the narrative is essential to my arguments, it is important to provide a detailed synopsis. Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) has returned to his job as a train driver after a period of duty in the US army in Korea. He has been invited by friend and co-driver Alec Simmons (Edgar Buchanan) to resume residence at the Simmons household. Alec’s daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case) is particularly pleased to see him. Meanwhile, assistant yard master Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) is sacked following an argument with his boss (Carl Lee). On returning home, Carl asks his wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) to use her influence with Owens (Grandon Rhodes), a wealthy businessman, to help him get his job back. Although initially

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reluctant, she finally agrees. They journey by train to New York. Vicki visits Owens while Carl waits in a friend’s apartment. She returns much later than expected and tells Carl that he now has his job back. Carl becomes suspicious. (‘Did you thank him?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘How?’) He tries to embrace her. ‘Don’t paw me,’ she says. ‘I’m sick of it from all of you.’ Realizing that Owens may also have ‘pawed’ her, Carl flies into a jealous rage and beats her into telling him that Owens forced her into a sexual relationship while she was living in his house as a teenage girl. He makes her write Owens a letter suggesting a rendezvous on the train home later that evening. Carl murders Owens on the train. Spotting Jeff in an adjacent carriage, he sends Vicki to engage him in conversation so that he himself can get away. She does as she is asked. After an initial exchange of remarks, Jeff invites her into an empty compartment. He tries to kiss her. She resists and walks away. He merely smiles and shrugs his shoulders. Back at home, Carl tells Vicki that he has the letter he forced her to send to Owens. He threatens to take it to the police if she ever tries to leave him. At the inquest into Owens’s death, and in response to a look from Vicki (whom he now knows is Carl’s wife), Jeff says that he does not recognize anyone in the courtroom as having been in the carriage in which Owens was killed. Later on, following a coincidental meeting in Duggan’s Bar, Jeff helps Vicki get a drunken and jealous Carl safely back home. Jeff asks Vicki about her presence in the train carriage. She tells him she went to see Owens to thank him for getting Carl his job back, but found him dead. She says she could not tell anyone, not even Carl, because Carl is prone to bouts of jealousy and violence: ‘He’s done things to me I can’t even talk about.’ She shows Jeff some bruising on her shoulder. Jeff is shocked and sympathetic. ‘I’ll never be able to thank you for what you said at the inquest,’ she says as she nestles into his arms. The following morning, Carl tells Vicki that he loves her. She shuns him. ‘If I can’t have you, as long as I’ve got the letter no one else is gonna have you,’ he says in response. Vicki and Jeff begin an affair. Ellen is jealous and upset. She offers Jeff the chance to begin a ‘decent’ relationship with her by inviting him to the railway employees’ dance. Meanwhile, Vicki tries but fails to find the letter. She meets Jeff in the rail yard later that night. She tells him how unhappy she has been with Carl. She asks him what it was like in Korea: ‘Is it difficult to kill a man? I mean as a soldier.’ Later on, Jeff asks Vicki to leave Carl. She says she can’t. She tells him that Carl killed Owens because he thought she and Owens were having an affair. ‘Were you?’ he asks. She shakes her head.

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‘Why didn’t you tell the truth Vicki?’ She tells him about the letter. ‘If he shows it to anybody – the police – they’d think I did it. That’s why I can’t leave him ... That’s why I had to lie to you.’ Jeff accuses her of telling him only to implicate him, to prevent him from going to the police. He gets up to leave. She tries to stop him. ‘Carl must have known something about you and Owens,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she replies. ‘I grew up in his house ... Carl used to imagine the most terrible things about me and Owens. Then he’d beat me and beat me until I’d admit that they were true. I used to admit them. He did the most horrible things. They weren’t true, Jeff. They weren’t true.’ Jeff asks why she agreed to meet Owens. ‘He begged me ... He wanted that job more than anything in the world. I didn’t want to go to him. I knew Carl would only use it later.’ She rushes into the bedroom and bursts into tears. Jeff follows her. ‘I was so afraid you’d go,’ she says. But Jeff is convinced: ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Some time later, Vicki tells Jeff that she needs to see him. Carl has been fired. They are leaving town tomorrow. ‘Carl says I have to go with him ... If only we’d been luckier; if only something’d happen to him.’ Apparently determined to kill him, Jeff follows Carl through the railway yard later that night. He is next seen calling on Vicki. ‘I didn’t do it,’ he says. ‘Why not?’ she replies in anger. ‘It’s all wrong Vicki. The whole thing’s been wrong from the beginning. And I feel dirty.’ ‘You feel! Your conscience didn’t stop you from making love to me, did it? ... I guess it’s only people like Carl who can kill for something they love.’ ‘It takes somebody who has no conscience and no decency,’ he replies. ‘First you had to get me to keep my mouth shut at the inquest didn’t you? A couple of lies took care of that. Then I fell in love with you and you were sure of me. And all it took was a little push to get me to kill Carl. You never loved me.’ ‘It’s not true. It’s not true. I loved you, no matter what I said or did.’ ‘That’s a lie. You never told me the truth about anything, not even Owens, did you?’ Vicki replies: ‘My mother worked for Owens. He had a big house outside town. His wife had been ill for years. I was sixteen. He didn’t pay me any attention. Then one day he came down to the pool and found me swimming ... I was too frightened to say anything. I tried to get away. I tried to escape ... When Carl found out, all he could see was his own jealousy ... I thought it’d be different with you, Jeff ...’ ‘I can’t tell anymore whether you’re lying and I don’t care. Because it’s finished.’ ‘You don’t mean that, Jeff. You can’t mean that. You’re all I have in the world. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll go to Carl. I’ll go to the police. Anything, Jeff. Only you mustn’t leave me. You can’t!’ ‘Why can’t I?’ ‘Because I

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love you.’ He hands her the letter (‘I found it in Carl’s pocket’). Then he walks out. The following morning, Vicki boards a train to leave town. Jeff is the driver, Alec the co-driver. Unaware of Vicki’s presence on the train, Jeff is looking at the ticket to the dance given him by Ellen. Carl enters Vicki’s compartment. He pleads with her to stay. He tells her he’ll give her the letter. ‘You haven’t got it,’ she says. ‘You haven’t got anything. You haven’t got me or a job or the letter or anything ... I’m in love with Jeff and he walked out on me. Do you know why? Because I wanted him to kill you and he couldn’t. You never knew me. You never bothered to figure me out. Well I’m gonna tell you something. Owens did have something to do with me, but it was because I wanted him to. I wanted that big house he lived in. I wanted him to get rid of that wife of his. But he wasn’t quite the fool you are. He knew what I was after. And you know what? I admired him for it. If I’d have been a man I’d have behaved exactly as he did.’ Carl attacks her, strangles her to death, then slumps down on a seat. Jeff drives on unawares and untroubled. Aside from differences in period, in location, and in the number and names of characters, one of the key differences between Human Desire and Zola’s novel and the 1930s film is that Carl (the equivalent of Roubauld) replaces Jeff (the equivalent of Jacques) as the man who kills Vicki as well as Owens (the equivalents of Sêverine and Grandmorin respectively).2 Another is the nature of the relationship between Vicki and Owens and their equivalents, and the status of the accounts the women provide of it. In contrast to the novel and the earlier film, the nature of this relationship and the accounts Vicki provides are rendered equivocal, not only because of the differences between them, but also because of the dramatic and pragmatic contexts in which they occur.3 This in turn complicates our understanding of Vicki, and renders any reading of her character and motives equivocal as well. While the consequent quotient of illegibility supports a possible reading of Vicki as a femme fatale, I will argue that this is qualified by the emphasis placed on the behaviour of the men with whom Vicki is involved and to whom she addresses the accounts she gives of her feelings, thoughts and motives as well as those she gives of her relationship with Owens. Vicki delivers four accounts of her relationship with Owens: the first to a jealous and violent Carl on returning late from her meeting with Owens; the second to Jeff when he accuses her of having conspired to involve him in an affair in order to protect herself; the third in response to Jeff’s decision to leave; and the fourth to Carl at the end of the film. None of these accounts receives independent corroboration: we never

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hear anyone else’s account; there is no prologue showing us what really happened in the Owens household; and there are no flashbacks to Vicki’s past. When Vicki meets Owens in New York, there are no conversational references to what may or not have happened between them, nor are there any scenes in which Vicki tells the truth to a disinterested confidante. In addition, we are rarely attached to Vicki on her own, and thus have little or no access to her motives, feelings or thoughts other than in scenes with the men with whom she is involved. For all these reasons, and because we witness her lying to Jeff about the reasons for her presence in the railway carriage and about having discovered the body of Owens, the film allows us to invoke the tropes of illegibility, deceit and enigmatic untrustworthiness associated with the figure of the femme fatale. There are parallels with Phyllis Dietrichson’s motivations in the second account, and traces of contemporary fatale iconography in the film’s presentation of Vicki’s body, deportment and dress. In addition, there is a convention that if there are several accounts of events in novels, films and plays the last account is the truth, and the last account of Vicki’s relationship with Owens is the account most consonant with the stereotype of the femme fatale as a woman who uses her sexuality in a transgressive way to further her own selfish aims and ambitions. However, there are a number of factors that serve to qualify or undermine this convention and with it the notion that Vicki is really or simply a femme fatale. All four accounts are delivered to male interlocutors in contexts that justify or motivate both what she says and the way she says it. In the case of the first account, she is physically beaten into telling Carl what he wants to hear, to confirm his jealous suspicions. We know that she was reluctant to meet with Owens. Indeed we know she initially refused to see him. We also know that she only agreed to do so to please her husband. She says that Owens forced her into a sexual relationship, and, whether true or not, this is perfectly consonant with her status as a powerless victim of powerful men. The second account is delivered in response to Jeff’s suspicions. He asks her if she was having an affair with Owens. Vicki is in a vulnerable position. Although there are grounds for misleading him, for casting herself in a sympathetic light in order to secure his allegiance, and although we know that she is lying when she says she found Owens dead on the train, we know her denial of an affair with Owens is true because we know of her initial refusal to see him. When she tells Jeff that Carl ‘used to imagine the most terrible things’ and that he used to beat her into admitting that they were true, we know that this is

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at least partially true – the extent to which Carl is simply imagining things about her past is, as I shall argue, never quite clear – because we have witnessed his behaviour on her return to the apartment in New York and because, like Jeff, we can now see the bruising on her shoulder. The third account is delivered in response to the fact that Jeff has not killed Carl, that he has says he feels dirty and wants to leave her, and that he says she has never loved him and has never told him the truth about ‘anything, not even Owens’. The account she gives casts her once again in the role of a passive and powerless victim: ‘I was sixteen ... He didn’t pay much attention to me before. When he did I was too frightened to say anything.’ She also says that Carl ‘found out’, thus implying, at least in retrospect, that he did not entirely ‘imagine things’. Having been lied to by Vicki before, Jeff’s response – ‘I can’t tell anymore whether you’re lying and I don’t care. Because its finished’ – is perhaps justifiable. Because she is trying to prevent him from leaving her, there are grounds for suspecting that she may be lying once again. However, the sincerity of her distress when he tells her he is leaving her and the sincerity of her denials when he says that she never loved him – each instance of which is conveyed in and through the details of Gloria Grahame’s performance and neither of which is subsequently qualified by later events or lines of dialogue – are only matched by the way she says ‘Because I love you’ when Jeff asks her why she says he cannot leave her. Moreover, if her sincerity complicates our reactions and our understanding, if Grahame’s performance gives us convincing access to Vicki’s real feelings, her initial riposte to Jeff (‘You feel! Your conscience didn’t stop you from making love to me, did it?) invites us to qualify any subsequent sympathy we may feel for him. As she implies, he is a little too self-righteous, a little too eager to disavow his earlier behaviour. He is a little too quick to claim the moral high ground, just as he was a little too quick to make a pass at her on the train, and just as he will soon be a little too quick to contemplate using the ticket to go to the dance and thus take advantage of Ellen’s youthful and inexperienced feelings for him. Vicki’s fourth and final account differs from the others in a fundamental way. The accounts she has given hitherto have all cast her as a powerless victim and have all been delivered to men in positions of power, men who are abusing her physically or threatening to leave her. But the account she gives here occurs at a point at which Carl appears bereft of the power he once had had. Because she now has the letter, she sees herself as the one with the power, and she marks this

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perception both through what she says and the way that she says it. He pleads with her to stay. He says he’ll never mention Owens again. He says he’ll give her the letter. She rises from her seat to face him. ‘You haven’t got anything. You haven’t got me or the job or the letter.’ She even uses the fact that Jeff has left her to mark her contempt. It is thus unsurprising that the account she goes on to give of her relationship with Owens is entirely consonant with her new-found sense of agency. No longer the helpless and innocent victim, it was she who wanted Owens, she who wanted him ‘to get rid of that wife of his’, she who wanted ‘that big house he lived in’. If like Jeff he eventually rejected her, if like Jeff he refused to help her further aims, she says she admired him for it. ‘If I’d have been a man,’ she says, ‘I’d have behaved exactly as he did.’ This final account may well be the truth. But we cannot be sure because it cannot be corroborated and because it can so easily be seen as the sort of account that would enable Vicki to mark her new-found sense of power, as the sort of account Carl is least likely to want to hear, as the sort of account designed to produce maximum humiliation and thus exact maximum rhetorical revenge for the way he has treated her. Her sense of power, though, turns out to be misplaced. In concluding her account, she invokes the notion of manhood: ‘If I’d have been a man,’ she says, ‘I’d have behaved exactly as he did.’ But she was not a man. She is not a man. Owens was. And, despite what she says, Carl still is. He may not be a man in the sense she intends to imply, but his male pride has now been wounded and his male strength – the physical power he still possesses, the physical force he is still more than capable of wielding – now comes to the fore as Vicki is attacked and strangled to death. If the nature of Vicki’s past relationship with Owens is ultimately unknowable, if the differences between the accounts she provides and the contexts in which they are provided render them illegible, if the reasons for Vicki’s behaviour are never quite clear, and if the tropes of the femme fatale are invoked in these and in other ways, a number of final points need to be noted. The only time Vicki sets out to engage the interest of another man is when Carl instructs her to distract Jeff on the train after Owens’ murder. We are given no reason to doubt that she really loves Jeff, and, if she is indeed a femme fatale, she is ultimately fatal to no one but herself. In addition, and on the other hand, the differences between Vicki’s accounts and the contexts in which they occur draw as much attention to the motives, behaviour and power of her male interlocutors as they do to Vicki herself, and this is further underlined by the content of these accounts,

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which focus in turn on the motives and actions of Owens, yet another powerful man. For all these reasons, descriptions of Vicki as ‘amoral and sexually manipulative’ (Ballinger and Graydon 2007: 190) and of Human Desire as ‘muddled’ (Maltin 2008: 643) strike me as either inaccurate or reductive. Human Desire is similar to a number of other Hollywood films directed by Fritz Lang, most notably Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), The Woman in the Window (1944) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). In all these films, the representation of events, characters and motives are only equivocally, provisionally or artificially aligned with a narrative truth. Moreover, while Lang’s films occasionally idealize female characters, they rarely idealize male ones. From Secret Beyond the Door (1948) to The Blue Gardenia, from The House by the River (1950) to While the City Sleeps (1956), from The Big Heat (1953) to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Lang’s films are full of male bullies, male sex killers and nominally clean-cut male protagonists whose traits are persistently darkened. Human Desire is no exception.

Notes 1. Phyllis does not deliberately stage her initial appearance in a towel in order to engage Neff’s sexual interest: she is initially unaware as to who has called at the house and why. It is Neff who draws attention to her state of undress, thus making plain his desire. Phyllis exploits Neff’s desire, but it is he who makes the first move. In line with arguments made by Karen Edwards elsewhere in this book, Neff is presented in this sequence (and indeed elsewhere in the film) as immature, as a man behaving like an adolescent boy. His inappropriate sexual joking, his fresh-faced and eager expression, and the fact that he is framed from above (in contrast to Phyllis, who is framed from below) all underline this. 2. The novel was written and set in 1890, at a time when France was at war. Renoir’s film was shot and set in the 1930s. Both stress heredity as a major factor in the lives and motives of the characters. Unlike Renoir’s film, the contemporary setting of Human Desire restores an ongoing war as a point of reference, but its place in the denouement in the novel, which culminates in a train crash involving troops on the way to the front, has been eliminated, along with any references to heredity. As the killer of Sêverine (and of at least one other female character who arouses his desire), Jacques is clearly a fatal male. As far as I can determine, none of the writing on Zola’s novel describes Sêverine as a femme fatale, though Martin O’Shaughnessey describes her as both ‘a social victim and femme fatale’ in his discussion of Renoir’s film (2000: 144). 3. In the novel and in Renoir’s film, it is clear that Sêverine was forced to sleep with Grandmorin. It is stated in the novel that she is not in love with Jacques at first. However, it is also stated that she does not seduce him, that he is already in love with her, and that she later falls in love with him.

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Works cited Ballinger, A. and Graydon, D. (2007), The Rough Guide to Film Noir, London: Rough Guides. Blandford, S., Grant, B. K. and Hillier, J. (eds) (2001), The Film Studies Dictionary, London: Arnold. Doane, M. A. (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Maltin, L. (ed.) (2008), Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, New York: Plume. O’Shaughnessey, M. (2000), Jean Renoir, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, M. (1995), Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, Cinema, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

14 ‘Well, Aren’t We Ambitious’, or ‘You’ve Made up Your Mind I’m Guilty’: Reading Women as Wicked in American Film Noir Julie Grossman

This chapter will focus on the misreadings of women in noir, first by the men whom they encounter within the films, and second by film viewers and critics who then perpetuate, and eventually institutionalize, these misreadings. The first part of my title comes from an early scene in The Postman Always Rings Twice, the film adapted from James Cain’s novel and directed by Tay Garnett in 1946. Postman, featuring John Garfield as Frank Chambers and Lana Tuner as Cora Smith, remains a central text in the original cycle of film noir movies made in the post-war period. In the scene from which my title is drawn, Frank sarcastically responds to Cora’s declaration about the Twin Oaks, the roadside diner where she lives and works with her drunken and seemingly innocuous husband Nick (Cecil Kellaway). Unsatisfied, Cora has ambition: ‘I want to make something of this place. I want to make it into an honest to goodness –’. Frank, a drifter who comes to the diner answering a ‘Man Wanted’ sign, interrupts Cora’s speech, ‘Well, aren’t we ambitious.’ At that point Frank claims her expression of desire as his own, and kisses her, as the music swells. Frank’s dismissal of Cora’s ambition represents a common rejection by characters in film noir of women’s subjectivity, their desires and dreams for richer (fuller and more productive) lives. Instead, film noir’s male protagonists project their own desires and fears onto women, which often results in casting psychologically three-dimensional, albeit hardboiled, female characters as femmes fatales. This process explains the second part of my title, taken from the scene in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), in which Laura (Gene Tierney) accuses Mark McPherson (Dana 199

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Illustration 9 Image of Gene Tierney in Laura (1944) Credit: 20th Century Fox / The Kobal Collection.

Andrews) of just the kind of projection that is, I believe, in play when we talk about representations of women in noir. Laura’s expression during this interchange reflects a cynicism caused by McPherson’s interrogation and distrust of her. The interchange captures an important moment in male–female relationships in film noir, one of the crucial narrative points at which men demonstrate suspicious

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ideation about women (sublimated in McPherson’s case into his obsessive–compulsive play with a hand-held baseball game). Further, one of my central points in this essay is that we often collude with and are overly influenced by male protagonists such as McPherson in our viewing alliances, violating the spirit of the representation of female characters in these films by superimposing the strict terms of the femme fatale onto them. Film noir movies very often provide a narrative context for understanding why the so-called bad women in noir make the difficult choices they make. However, the misreading of women by men within these films extends, I am suggesting, into popular and scholarly writing, making it even more difficult to wrest the women in noir from the often damaging discourse surrounding the ‘femme fatale’. Popular fascination with the ‘femme fatale’ figure varies from characterizations of Hillary Clinton as a spin-off of Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction (during Clinton’s presidential run, NPR’s Ken Rudin said, ‘She’s going to keep coming back. They’re not going to stop her’ (quoted in Seelye and Bosman 2008) and commentator Peggy Noonan mocked Clinton, ‘Dan, I will not be ignored’ (Noonan 2008)) to Manohla Dargis’s characterization of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice as a ‘poisonous honey pot’ (Dargis 2007) and Eddie Muller’s description of Mildred Pierce as ‘hydra-headed’ (Muller 1998: 60): such misprision of the femme fatale in popular and academic venues mutually reinforces powerful stereotypes and reveals a systemic failure to deal with cultural ambivalence about female agency and empowerment. Critical writing about film noir’s femme fatale often resists acknowledgement of the complexity and psychological depth of women in noir. Consider, for example, Foster Hirsch’s Detours and Lost Highways (1999), which offers a great many insights into noir and neo-noir.1 However, Hirsch’s treatment of the femme fatale figure repeats a pattern of reading women according to an overly narrow conception. Hirsch has the following to say about Lana Turner as Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice: One look and Frank’s a goner. Turner was an exemplary Hollywoodmade mannequin who walked like a beauty contestant and spoke in a studio-trained voice that had been scrubbed free of any signs of individual identity. As a performer, she simply put herself on display; she’s an obedient young woman who emotes in a purely manufactured style. Her performance as Cora has no depth or resonance, and wasn’t meant to. Following the mold created by James Cain, her

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character is simply a cheap, sexy blonde who sets a ‘real man’ on fire. (Hirsch 1999: 56) Hirsch makes a good point in contrasting the earthy Cora Papadakis in the novel with the more glamorous representation of Cora Smith by Lana Turner in the film. However, the contrast should not keep us from reading the film on its own terms and in relation to other representations of women, domesticity and desire in film noir. While it is the case that the novel is preoccupied with presenting Cora in animal terms (language about biting hellcats and cougars is almost obsessively repeated in the first pages of the novel), in the film, Cora’s ambition to ‘be somebody’ and make a successful business of the Twin Oaks (beyond her place as wife and cook) characterizes her subjectivity. Turner’s Cora is hailed by the American Movie Channel as ‘one of the hottest portrayals of a sultry and seductive femme fatale’ (Dirks 2009), but the film’s presentation of her is considerably more complicated than is traditionally allowed by the label. With Phyllis Dietrichson, Cora has been dubbed ‘two of the [femme fatale’s] most powerful screen incarnations’ (Spicer 2007: 91), and yet Cora is shown by the film to be desperately confined and victimized by the limitations imposed on her desires and her ambition by the enforcement of conventional domesticity. This point is best exemplified by the scene in the film in which Nick tells Cora that, instead of working to build the Twin Oaks into a successful business, the Smiths will be moving to northern Canada to take care of Nick’s half-paralysed sister. Northern Canada figures here as a withdrawal from a place of possibility for Cora, as well as a cold cancellation of her desire; the paralysis of Nick’s sister represents the helplessness of Cora to act on her desires. The image of paralysis is forcefully carried over in the shot that ends this scene, as Cora walks up the stairs into the darkness, arms paralysed by her side, stunned and defeated. That in this scene the otherwise ineffectual Nick claims the privileges of patriarchy – he demands that Cora become domestic nursemaid to his sister (‘what was good enough for my father is good enough for me’) – foregrounds the patriarchal traditions Cora is up against. Also interesting is the fact that Silver and Ursini, in their The Noir Style, choose the composition of this scene to show how Cora ‘completely dominates the frame’ (Silver and Ursini 1999: 121). Cora is standing behind the table where the two men sit. While one reading has her dominating the field of vision, a counter-reading reveals that she is caught and excluded from the meaningful interaction between the male characters. The counter-reading is made possible

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not by focusing upon Cora’s sexuality, but by considering both her ambitions and fears. This makes her appear less of a ‘quintessential’ femme fatale, but rather a woman trapped by patriarchy and desperate about her situation. Cora’s subjectivity, her story about desire and the felt burdens of gendered social roles (wife, sister) is elided by insisting on her being a femme fatale. Admittedly, Foster Hirsch defines Turner’s Cora with such rigidity in part to contrast Turner’s portrayal with Jessica Lange’s ‘tremulous’ performance in the 1981 remake, but, even in the comparison, Hirsch insists on prescribing the original-cycle femme fatale in a way that suggests a distinct value in maintaining the category of the destructive femme fatale as fixed: ‘Lange’s sensitive, tremulous performance only reinforces the immutable noir logic that a “femme fatale” cannot be humanized: see Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity’ (Hirsch 1999: 60). The ‘immutability’ of noir logic is dependent upon the fixedness of the femme fatale, an assertion I believe should be challenged. I want to contest the claim that there is an ‘immutable noir logic’, since our experience of these films, and certainly what attracts us to them, is precisely their subversiveness: the contradictions that characterize the narrative and character patterns in these films. I want to point out, as well, the extent to which very few ‘femmes fatales’ really fit the strict femme fatale model of evil, opaque woman who ‘cannot be humanized’, which explains why Phyllis Dietrichson becomes canonized as the prototype for the femme fatale. In fact, most femme fatale figures are distinctly humanized within the films, sometimes through plot and setting, sometimes through our awareness of the villainy of the male protagonist, and sometimes through the star text or screen presence of the actress playing the femme fatale. One central obstacle to becoming more sensitive to the portrayals of female experience in film noir is the rigid way feminist perspectives are conceived of by some critics. Hirsch claims, referring to Cain’s Postman, ‘The original material was not written under a feminist watch and can profit little from a humanizing feminist perspective’ (Hirsch 1999: 56). Neither was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales written under a modern ‘feminist watch’, and yet this has not delegitimized reading the Wife of Bath’s tale as a text that has things to tell us about language, class and female power. The defensive tone of phrases such as ‘feminist watch’ keeps Hirsch, I think, from engaging the diversity of feminisms and their potential for helping us to understand the role of the femme fatale: the extent to which texts can be usefully subjected to a variety of feminist

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approaches in ways that will illuminate the text, the cultures that produced and were influenced by the texts, and the reading practices that can dramatically affect the reception of the text in criticism and popular culture. The point is not to dismiss one critic’s reading of the femme fatale, but to examine the network of psychological and social expectations that inform our readings of these films and that may impede our ability to read these texts fully and in a way that brings out their nuances, ambiguities and contradictions. I think here, for example, of Kathie Moffett, the femme fatale figure who places second to Phyllis Dietrichson in the competition over which femme fatale is more bad, a ‘who’s-worse’ game my film noir students play with vigour. Says James Maxfield in The Fatal Woman at the beginning of his interesting chapter on Out of the Past: It is perhaps only my personal tastes that lead me to conclude that Jane Greer is the most attractive female lead of all the noir films of the forties; but certainly the character she plays in this film, Kathie Moffett, is a more plausible deceiver of men than earlier fatal females such as Phyllis Dietrichson or Helen Grayle. While it is difficult to imagine any man with reasonable intelligence and a survival instinct being taken in by the hard, obviously experienced, dyed blondes, Phyllis and Helen, it is much easier to believe that an otherwise intelligent private detective like Jeff Markham would accept the word of a soft, young, natural brunette like Kathy [sic]. (Maxfield 1996: 54) The oddity of this extremely personal and impressionistic response, which falls away from the surrounding text, exemplifies a habit of projecting ideation about the femme fatale onto real women. This kind of blurred association of women in noir with gender phantoms keyed to ‘real-life’ results in a continual reassertion of the femme fatale as a fixed object and category. The projection of gender ideation onto readings of film noir can be seen, as well, in the psychological typing of fictional characters undertaken by psychologist Scott Snyder, who extends fatal-woman affect to the actresses who performed in film noir movies: The famed film noir actresses themselves often possessed a physiognomy and cinematic presence reflective of Cluster B personalities. Barbara Stanwyck, the ‘undisputed first lady of noir’, had a scornful, taut face and voice. Her posture was tight and defensive in keeping with a tough screen presence. A deadly, cold, sensuality characterized

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many of her films. Veronica Lake’s face barely moved. Her voice and bearing were notable for their angularity, frigidity, and sleekness. She was shy, yet sexy, with a hazy, muddled quality; chiseled features and flawless beauty highlighted by a translucent Nordic complexion completed the picture. An efficient, dominating, wise-cracking quality set her apart. Joan Crawford had a screen persona characterized by fierceness, willfulness, and an almost diabolical, tyrannical ferocity with which she fought her enemies. She could dispatch men without compunction. (Snyder 2001: 162–3) The quote demonstrates a collapse of distinctions among realms: the actress herself; the ‘femme fatale’ persona; even publicity clichés, since the final sentence is strikingly similar to Warner Brothers’ own advertising for film noir in the 1940s. Such blurring needs to be examined as one piece in the puzzle of how and why the femme fatale has been constructed and why the category has remained so central to readings of noir over the years. The category of the femme fatale, projected across the realms of representation and the real, fulfils a need that seems quite persistent in the culture to scapegoat women whose lives do not follow an easily digestible pattern; these women’s choices invite far more negative criticism than the ‘High Plains Drifter’ (or the detective who goes ‘down these mean streets ... not himself mean’) is subjected to for his moral limitations and ambiguities. Film noir movies present women as varied and complex, and as responsive to social changes that empowered and victimized them. These films reflect anxieties that help us to see how limited cultural discourse about empowered and empowering women remains. Andre de Toth’s Pitfall (1948) is an excellent example of a film noir movie with wonderfully jumbled portraits of gender and a tone of moral ambiguity that calls into question our knee-jerk characterizations of noir men and women. The film begins with our introduction to the stalwartly and monosyllabically named John Forbes (Dick Powell), an insurance agent who lives in the suburbs with his wife Sue (played by Jane Wyatt, who would gain fame six years later as a domestic icon as the mother in television’s Father Knows Best). The couple have a son, Tommy (Jimmy Hunt), who repeatedly lionizes his daddy as the hard-boiled hero in the family, wanting to hear stories about the war, disappointed to find out that his dad was stationed in Denver, Colorado rather than on a romantic and violent front line abroad. Pitfall explores the burden of gender roles, not just through its deflation of masculine role-playing, but also through its portrait of Mona

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Stevens (Lizabeth Scott), the female ‘outsider’ figure who nevertheless becomes the moral centre of the film. Mona first meets Forbes when he comes to her house to reclaim the gifts given to her by Smiley (Byron Barr), who has committed insurance fraud to buy presents for Mona. On first meeting Forbes, Mona catalogues the things Smiley gave to her, asking, ‘Why is it that people grow attached to things that don’t really matter at all?’ She also explains to Forbes why she was with Smiley – ‘I liked Smiley mostly because he was nice to me’, a comment that suggests that normal life for Mona doesn’t usually include nice guys but bad men, brutes and gangsters. Certainly the film’s representation of Mona’s dark experience with all the men in the film justifies her low expectations. Forbes has an affair with her and doesn’t tell her he’s married; MacDonald (Raymond Burr) stalks Mona, who eventually shoots him to defend herself. Although Mona is desperate to get away from the brutal MacDonald, it is she who is scapegoated at the end of the film, while Forbes gets off scot free after he himself kills Smiley. Mona’s marginalized role is prefigured earlier in the film, when she learns that Forbes is home sick one day (really home recovering from his beating from MacDonald). Mona drives to his house to deliver chicken soup. Realizing as she approaches the house that the woman standing outside it is Forbes’s wife, Mona says, ‘I think I’m on the wrong street’, a comment that resonates with Mona’s status as a permanent outsider. Mona is a hard-boiled female character, one of the many femmes modernes in film noir, whose desires and ambitions are accentuated at the same time as they are overlooked or elicit disdain within the story. The femme moderne has aspirations but is desperately confined by social rules enforced by the men who govern female activity. In Pitfall, Mona expresses her pride in owning a profession (about modelling, she says, ‘that’s my business’). Mona’s ambition is figured in one scene in her love of adventure, sailing with her hair in her face, while beside her John Forbes sits stiffly with his hat on, doing double takes on her every time the boat changes gear or makes a turn. If the film is ambivalent about the domestic life John Forbes leads before he meets Mona and his criminal life later in the film, the film seems remarkably unambiguous about its eliciting sympathy for Mona Stevens. In this case, as in others, institutionalized studio promotion exploits the gender categories that undergird the femme fatale figure. Pitfall’s stunning tag line is, ‘A man can be as strong as steel...but somewhere there’s a woman who’ll break him!’ The promotion deeply misrepresents the tone and character patterns in the film – ‘the unforgettably

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exciting story of one man’s pitfall ... a pitfall with lips too warm ... and a heart too cold!’ (Pitfall Pressbook, BFI). The narrative structure, as well as Lizabeth Scott’s performance, belies such a characterization of Mona, who is portrayed with warmth and sympathy, while Pitfall’s promotion materials project the role of femme fatale onto her to tap into audience’s preoccupation with bad women. As in so many film noir movies, Mona has a story of her own, an insight increasingly attended to by feminist film critics such as Elizabeth Cowie, who takes issue with the notion that film noir is a ‘male preserve’ (Cowie 1993: 125), and Helen Hanson, who focuses on film noir’s ‘narrative trajectory as a female journey to subjectivity’ (Hanson 2007: xvi). Mona’s story, like Gloria Grahame’s noir roles (Debby Marsh in The Big Heat (Lang 1953) and Vicki Buckley in Human Desire (Lang 1954)), is marked by ambition, trauma and female insight into her condition, often eloquently expressed. And yet, in the case of Pitfall, the promotional tag is a fascinating misprision, since the only way in which Mona could be conceived of as a ‘breaker’ of men, a femme fatale of sorts, is in her power to elicit desire in others. Mona says of Smiley, ‘He was too much in love with me’. This is a way of understanding smart, beautiful and powerful women that recurs in both critical and popular ideations, one that is clear in critical approaches to advertising executive Laura Hunt, a figure discussed earlier. Laura is a film centrally concerned with male projection, desire and working women, but the critical focus has been less on Laura’s ambition and more on her alluring sexuality. Eugene McNamara says about Laura, for example, that her ‘beauty is dangerous to men, as is the beauty of all Fatal Women. But, unlike the classic Fatal Woman, Laura is unconscious of her power’ (McNamara 1982: 29). McNamara’s analysis is strangely incoherent, since the essay is sympathetic toward the representation of Laura but cannot keep from dismissing her. Without making explicit the connections between the myth of the fatal woman and our projections of mystery and villainy onto innocent women, the essay elicits such analysis. Male desire, as in Lydecker’s (Clifton Webb) and McPherson’s obsessions in the film Laura, redounds destructively on women. McNamara ends his essay with an overdetermined example of just such denial of female subjectivity in favour of projection: ‘And Laura herself? In her distant niche, forever out of reach. Remember, she’s only a dream’ (McNamara 1982: 29). Cultural difficulty in responding to realistically complex and divided portraits of ambitious women leads us in many cases to impose or

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project restrictive categories on the hard-boiled women portrayed in film noir. Readings of Mildred Pierce (Curtiz 1945), for example, seem to me a good illustration of such limited purview. Mildred Pierce struggles to advance her professional life as she spoils her selfish and statusobsessed daughter Veda. Many viewers, including feminist film critics, have seen the film as an attack on bad mothers. Nina Liebman, for example, argues that the film blames Mildred’s ambition and concludes by reinstating patriarchy and casting Bert as the final figure of authority and worth, unlike in James Cain’s novel (Liebman 1988). Liebman certainly echoes Veda’s own charge against Mildred – ‘It’s your fault I’m the way I am’ – but certainly we are not supposed to identify with Veda’s point of view. The film portrays Mildred’s plight sympathetically, from her desperate initial near-suicide through her ambition to leave her unemployed and unfaithful husband, whose affair with ‘Mrs. Beiderhoff’ seems intended to restore a masculinity Bert feels is lacking at home, where his enterprising wife Mildred bakes pies to sell to neighbours for extra cash. Mildred’s spoiled treatment of Veda remains the critical crux in readings of this film, with judgments on Mildred’s ‘bad parenting’ becoming the source for locating her as ‘the problem’ in this story. I would suggest that a shift in orientation, from Mildred’s character to a wider view, allows for greater understanding of the film’s representation of family, work, gender roles and post-war reflections on the American Dream. Veda is obviously a wildly undeserving focus of Mildred’s efforts and attention, but the film’s overdetermined treatment of this aspect of the story is clearly a strong reflection of larger psychosocial contradictions regarding women’s social roles. Moreover, while the narrative operation of Mildred Pierce recovers Bert as a positive force toward the end of the film, that change is only a result of Bert’s growing respect for Mildred’s independence and self-sufficiency. In the end, Mildred is endorsed by Bert, not patriarchically dominated by him, as she is at the beginning of the film. Mildred is smart and she is attractive – not necessarily sexual, although, again, the promotional posters for the film, as in the misleading captions for Pitfall, situate her as a dangerous femme fatale figure. Warner Brothers advertised Mildred Pierce as a bad woman – ‘She’s the kind of woman men want ... but shouldn’t have!’ (Mildred Pierce, Pressbook, BFI). Although these taglines are disingenuous, and Mary Beth Haralovich (1999) has shown how they tap into a number of conventional portraits of women (mother, actress, lover), they are interestingly bulwarked by more contemporary popular commentary,

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such as Eddie Muller’s in his discussion of the film. With a tone equal to the original trailers and taglines (as in Snyder’s analysis of the affect of noir actresses discussed earlier), Muller says of Mildred, ‘She’d dig her high heels into anyone’s back to gain purchase in the social register’ (Muller 1998: 60). Muller goes so far as to label Mildred an ultimate femme fatale, a ‘hydra-headed woman–mother, moneymaker, homemaker, whore’ (1998: 60), which should surprise anyone familiar with the film’s portrait of this ambitious, hard-working and concerned female character. Muller’s description of Mildred, ‘in her rise from hash-slinger to cutthroat capitalist’ (1998: 60), elides the whole of the story, in which Mildred is betrayed not only by Veda but also by her second husband Monte and her business partner Wally, who sell her interests in the business she built out from under her. Muller explicitly cultivates the blurring of Mildred’s character with Joan Crawford’s life, a breakdown of a distinction of realms discussed earlier (‘Like Mildred,’ Muller says, ‘[Crawford] was ruthless in her quest for the brass ring ... If this sounds suspiciously like the plot of a film noir, wait–it gets thicker’ (1998: 60). Muller’s investment in describing Mildred as an emasculating figure is again tonally off-point but echoes general anxieties concerning the ‘femme fatale’s’ busting up of manhood (Muller later refers to Crawford’s own ‘ball-breaking bluntness’ (1998: 60)). Such projections are, I am suggesting, a repetition of patterns of reading women presented within the films themselves. Further, promotion, advertising, and film criticism collude to recast a film’s sympathetic representation of female struggle and agency as malevolent, as in the ‘special teaser’ promotion Warner Brothers employed to excite interest in the film: ‘Please don’t tell anyone what Mildred Pierce did’ (Mildred Pierce Pressbook, BFI). The film itself, in its narrative, in its portrait of male exploitation or dismissal of women, and in the compelling presence of Joan Crawford, sympathetically examines the difficulties of balancing post-war realities of female drive and ambition with traditional gender roles. Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night (1952) is another example of film noir’s overlooked sympathetic portrait of women brutalized by dysfunctional social institutions. In his DVD commentary to the film, Peter Bogdanovich calls Clash By Night more a ‘triangle or love story’ than a film noir movie. The triangle is certainly a common noir trope, in, for example, Double Indemnity, Gilda, Out of the Past and Scarlet Street, but, if Clash By Night is a love story, it is certainly a perverse one, in which the male lover, Earl (Robert Ryan), is a misogynist brute with whom viewers can little identify. Instead, the film, based on a

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Clifford Odets play, is a treatment of failed ambition, like so many noir films. The film is about disappointed American dreams, and the violent distresses that lurk beneath middle-class life, especially for women in post-war America. Indeed, Lang himself reveals that he had read about ‘the background of the moral changes after the war, women working, not satisfied with just being housewives. ... [and] about the increasing number of wives that would have affairs’ (cited in Porfirio et al. 2002: 58). In Clash By Night, Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck) is a pessimistic drifter who refers to herself twice in the film as ‘hard-boiled’. Of her past, we know that Mae loved a politician ‘who didn’t tear a woman down’ and made her feel ‘more than herself, not less’. When he died, he left her money but his family took it to court, and ‘I near drowned in his family’s outrage.’ The social cards stacked against her, Mae contends with husband Jerry’s (Paul Douglas) brutally misogynist uncle (who believes that women, like horses, should be whipped) and her lover Earl, the often drunk film projectionist. The high-angle shots of Mae talking about getting old and lonely, as she first resists marrying nice-guy Jerry, underscore her alienation as a woman with desires who understands the limits of middle-class gender roles: ‘Find yourself someone with a baby carriage,’ she says to Jerry, imploring him not to be ‘so eager to make a mistake’ with her. ‘He thinks I’m Red Riding Hood,’ she later says of Jerry, a complaint that echoes other noir female insistence that the men see only what they want to see when they fall for, then turn on, women.2 Jerry’s ideation surrounding Mae shifts, as so many male protagonists’ visions of women do, revealing the unstable nature of such projected fantasies: Scotty in discovering ‘Madeleine’ is Judy in Vertigo (Hitchcock 1958); Johnny, in discovering that Joyce Harwood is married to Eddie in The Blue Dahlia (Marshall 1946); Travis Bickle, spurned by the initially ‘angelic’ Betsey to finally insist that she’ll ‘burn in hell like the rest of them’ in Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976). ‘You’re rotten,’ says Jerry. ‘I know, Jerry,’ replies Mae. But the film doesn’t present Mae as ‘rotten’. The film presents Mae as lost in a dim household or in her itinerant travels, struggling within a modern and alien landscape where women should ‘expect nothing’, as she says, and just get a little ‘older, duller, and little stupider’ as they age. At the end of the film, Mae opts for ‘duties, obligations, responsibilities’, but not before the film presents the roles that are governed by these values to be depressingly restrictive. In the 1947 film noir Dead Reckoning (Cromwell 1947), Rip Murdoch (Humphrey Bogart) explains his domestic fantasy about controlling

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female agency to Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott). Rip says: Women ought to come capsule size, about four inches high. When a man goes out of an evening, he just puts her in his pocket and takes her along with him and that way, he knows exactly where she is. He gets to his favorite restaurant, he puts her on the table and lets her run around among the coffee cups while he swaps a few lies with his buddies. Comes time in the evening he wants her full size and beautiful. He waves his hand and there she is full size. But if she starts to interrupt he just shrinks her back to pocket size and puts her away. Coral (whose other increasingly masculine names in the film, ‘Dusty’ and ‘Mike’, reflect the film’s preoccupation with changing gender roles) responds initially that the speech is the ‘most conceited statement I’ve ever heard’, and, later, Rip says to Coral, ‘Get back in my pocket.’ Rip’s overdetermined speech signals the fact that a mastery of female agency is a prime force in motivating men in noir and a central source of resistance and rebellion in motivating women in noir. In one sense, film noir movies demonstrate the violent consequences, not necessarily of changes in the social order, but of not recognizing the variety of perspectives on offer in stories of modern life, including the crucial point of view of the female subject. Closer attention to the narrative logic in noir, especially the stories of female ambition and the narrative impact of male suspiciousness of women, can play a crucial role in broadening our methods for reading film. As I have been arguing, these narrative operations have been obscured by an over-reliance on the ‘femme fatale’ figure. Such a shift in orientation may not only help to unearth the female stories and gender trauma represented in film noir – distressing narratives that surely at times characterize modern and contemporary social interaction – but may also contribute to a more sustained fascination with the films themselves, rather than the gendered clichés of aggressive female sexuality that hover around our reading and discussions of film noir. A more vigorous cultivation of discussions about female ambition and insight might transform the femme fatale – in popular and academic discourse – into something more complicated and meaningful than a figure of fatal sexuality, an interpretive dead-end that makes film noir nihilist in a way that is belied by the profound and variegated interest these films hold for viewers and critics.

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Notes 1. Hirsch is also the author of the very useful book The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (1981; 2001). 2. The destructiveness of this process is precisely described by Angela Martin in relation to Gene Tierney’s Laura, who ‘only expresses anything of the femme fatale inasmuch as that is projected through the behavior of the men around her. ... it is the male characters whose shadows are thrown; it is the male characters who produce ‘the fatal’: Laura just brings out what is already there (which is, of course, the real female crime in film noir)’ (Martin 1998: 213–14).

Works cited Cain, J. M. (1992), The Postman always Rings Twice, 1st Vintage crime/Black Lizard edn, New York: Vintage Books. Cowie, E. (1993), ‘Film Noir and Women’ in J. Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir, New York: Verso, 1993. Dargis, M. (2007), ‘Review of the Star Machine by Jeanne Basinger’, The New York Times, 30 December. Dirks, T. (2009), ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’, American Movie Channel, http://www.filmsite.org/post.html, 29 May. Hanson, H. (2007), Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, London: I.B. Tauris. Haralovich, M. B. (1999), ‘Selling Mildred Pierce: A Case Study in Movie Promotion’, in T. Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirsch, F. (1981), The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, San Diego: A. S. Barnes; Tantivy Press. Hirsch, F. (1999), Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir, New York: Limelight Editions. Kaplan, E. A. (ed.), (1998), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI. Liebman, N. C. (1988), ‘Piercing the Truth: Mildred and Patriarchy’, Literature in Performance, 8:1, 39–52. McNamara, E. (1982), ‘Preminger’s Laura and the Fatal Woman Tradition’, Clues, 3:2, 24–9. Martin, A. (1998), ‘ “Gilda Didn’t do any of those Things You’ve been Losing Sleep Over!”: The Central Woman of 40s Films Noir’, in E. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI. Maxfield, J. F. (1996), The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir, 1941–1991, Madison and London: Associated University Presses. Muller, E. (1998), Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Mulvey, L. (1975/1989), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3, 6–18, reprinted in Mulvey (1989), Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Noonan, P. (2008), ‘Can Mrs. Clinton Lose’, The Wall Street Journal, W14.

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Porfirio, R, Silver, A. and Ursini, J. (eds) (2002), Film Noir Reader 3: Interviews with Filmmakers of the Classic Noir Period, New York: Limelight Editions. Schatz, T. (1997), Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Seelye, K. Q. and Bosman, J. (2008), ‘Media Charged with Sexism in Clinton Coverage’, The New York Times, 13 June. Silver, A. and Ursini, J. (1999), The Noir Style, Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. Snyder, S. (2001), ‘Personality Disorder and the Film Noir Femme Fatale’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 8:3, 155–8. Spicer, A. (2007), European Film Noir, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

15 The Big Seduction: Feminist Film Criticism and the Femme Fatale Helen Hanson

The questions that motivate this essay are ones that arose at the beginning of this project: what has the femme fatale been as a cultural figure or formation? How is this figure mobilized and modified in different media, at distinct historical moments and in diverse national and transnational contexts? And what does this mobilization and modification tell us about those issues of gender in these contexts? A key strategy of the project at its inception was to try to broaden the critical landscape in which ‘the’ femme fatale figure was set, namely to move away from a critical conception of the femme fatale as solely originating out of American film noir. However, it is back to American film noir that I want to turn in this essay. It is a ‘turn back’ in that I want to trace the currency of the femme fatale figure of American cinema in the 1940s for and within feminist criticism since the 1970s. How this figure came to have currency for a foundational moment in feminist film criticism prompts an awareness of how two distinctly different moments interact, what Jane Gaines has called the ‘two presents’ of feminist film theory (2004: 113). I want to consider whether and how the femme fatale figure continues to have currency and relevance in the era of ‘post-feminism’, and in doing so I want to reflect on the processes of feminist conceptions of the past and the femme fatale’s historicization.

The currency of a conceptualization It is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous, and above all exciting sexuality ... [The] operation of myth is so highly stylized and conventionalized that the final ‘lesson’ of the myth often fades into the background and we retain 214

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the image of the erotic, strong, unrepressed (if destructive) woman. (Place 1978: 48) To ask why [these questions] were forgotten is to ask why we forgot them. (Gaines 2004: 113) To ask why the femme fatale emerged as a body of ideas at a particular juncture in the formation of feminist film criticism is to try to understand the strategies and protocols influencing a specific moment of feminist thinking. To ask the question is not to enact a post-feminist ‘disavowal’ of second-wave feminist approaches (Brunsdon 2005: 114), nor to construct a periodization between a contemporary approach and one that is ‘over’. There are neglected, or forgotten, questions to pose about the femme fatale, specifically through a more nuanced historicization of the figure, particularly in relation to the emergence of new modes of female characterization in the period, the array of films in which the femme fatale is found, and the gendered address of the figure. These questions have not been explored, perhaps because the image of the femme fatale has been rather dazzling and distracting as an image of transgression. Essentially the femme fatale as formed as theoretical icon, instance or figure is at once ahistorical and simultaneously marked in formation by a certain moment of feminist thinking. When second-wave feminist critics turned their attention to film and popular culture in the 1970s there was an invigorating sense of an important and political critical language being forged. The terms of this feminist critical language emerged out of a particular confluence of cultural theory and identity politics. Theoretical approaches to film, informed by concepts of ideology, of linguistics and of psychoanalysis (Baudry 1974; Comolli and Narboni 1969; Metz 1975) converged with the need to inflect these approaches for a feminist critical practice (Gledhill 1978a; Johnston 1976; Mulvey 1975). Identifying the Hollywood studio system as a male-dominated mode of production producing narratives that ideologically reproduced women’s cultural oppression, the primary and urgent project was to evolve feminist interpretative strategies that could locate and interrogate women’s place in that cinema. Issues of address, of the processes of identification and the politics of representation were explored, most memorably in Laura Mulvey’s critique of the marginalized place of the female spectator by the mainstream studio-era Hollywood text (1975). This was a confluence of debates out of which the femme fatale was formed as a (potentially) feminist figuration. In her introduction to the 1978 edition of Women in Film Noir, E. Ann Kaplan condenses the

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appeal of the femme fatale figure as a figure of resistance. Film noir offered a ‘placement’ of women distinct from ‘other genres’, which disrupted social definitions as they were expressed in film fictions (1978: 16). The femme fatale was also defined as textually disruptive, as ‘the obstacle to the male quest’, a sexual distraction that is ‘desirable but dangerous’. Thus the femme fatale of the 1940s embodied a resistance which spoke to a developing feminist critical practice in the 1970s. The potency of this resistance was foregrounded in a ‘reading against the grain’, a ‘progressive or subversive’ strategy. Hence Janey Place ‘produces’ a subversive reading of female resistance across a range of 1940s films by attending to the power of the femme fatale figure as a form of myth that is both reexpressed within, and transcends the limits of, particular films’ narrative structures or the boundaries of genre more generally (Place 1978: 35–6). Of course the boundaries, dimensions and definitions of film noir have always been in flux, and, as Steve Neale has noted, critical work on film noir frequently opens by stating the difficulty of producing a definition of the noir phenomenon ‘coupled with an insistence, nevertheless, that there is a phenomenon, that can be accounted for’ (2000, 152). As the body of noir criticism has expanded so, of course, have the number and variety of films under the ‘noir’ designation. Film Noir is now understood to have an international history (Vincendeau 1992), to be a transnational phenomenon (Fay and Nieland 2009; Spicer 2007) and to be characterized by its hybridity and multiple influences (Bould 2005). However, while the boundaries of film noir have frequently been questioned, its constitutive parts have been less often challenged. The trend of much revisionist work has been to place film noir in a wider terrain and to highlight its heterogeneity; but the formation of the femme fatale as described above has tended to remain rather uncontested. As a mythic figure, embodying resistance through the sexuality that simultaneously transgresses societal norms and exposes the terms of its repressive definition, the femme fatale figure has been seductive to a feminist critical practice. I am thinking of ‘seductive’ in both its senses of ‘alluring’ and ‘distracting’. Within critical frameworks the crystallization of ideas embodied by the femme fatale forms film noir in her own image. The presence of a ‘strong’, ‘sexy’, ‘independent’ female character comes to stand for a ‘transgressive’ role, seductive in that this transgression is read as symptomatic of sociocultural anxiety, and seductive in that it closes down or contains a wider range of questions that might be asked about American film noir. A wider range of questions needs to be asked about the account of film noir and its gender dynamics in order to be able to assess how present,

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how noted and how transgressive female characters were perceived to be in their contemporaneous context. These questions include: How did the film industry conceive of audiences for the crime film? And what forms of exploitation did they employ? To what extent is it correct to conceive of film noir as a ‘male’ genre, and what would a shift in this perception mean to the account of the femme fatale as ‘transgressive’? To what extent were modes of female characterization in the crime film noted as distinctive?

The crime film and ‘femme’ appeal: gender and genre in ‘the classic’ noir cycle Despite its tough image as a ‘male-centred’ genre (Thomas 1992: 59), the ‘classic’ cycle of film noir, beginning in Hollywood in the early 1940s, always had a strong appeal to female audiences. Given the perceived importance of the female audience to Hollywood studio producers (Schatz 1999: 70), it is unsurprising that the noir crime film incorporated a wide range of narratives, themes and female character types to exploit what Variety reviewers termed ‘femme appeal’. Frank Krutnik lists the ‘woman’s picture crime thriller’ as part of the quite heterogeneous array of Hollywood crime films in the 1940s (Krutnik 1991: 193). Angela Martin has documented the significant presence of Hollywood films noirs centring on female protagonists in the 1940s (Martin 1998), and it is clear that narratives driven by active and adventurous female sleuths form part of film noir’s repertoire of stories and were marketed as covering crime from ‘the woman’s angle’ (Hanson 2007: 6–32). Within debates about the constitution and ontology of film noir it is rare to find a specific focus on the traditions of character types. In the same way as ‘film noir’ is a term and concept that is retrospective and reconstructed, so, too, is the critical formation of the femme fatale as formed within distinct feminist approaches to film. Tracing some of the cultural archetypes that precede the cinematic femme fatale is what this collection of essays is about, and they show that the fatal female is inflected in ways that, while they share thematic similarities, are distinctly culturally and historically specific. It is clear that the female characters of American film noir embodied novel traits as the ‘classic cycle’ developed in the 1940s. Contemporaneous commentators on both sides of the Atlantic perceived a new ‘toughness’ in the crime film, this toughness incorporating a shift in modes of female characterization. In the New York Times Fred Stanley remarked

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on a production trend for ‘stories of illicit romance and crime’ sparked by the success of Paramount’s Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) (Stanley 1944). In the following year Lloyd Shearer charted ‘the wholesale production of lusty, hard-boiled, gat-and-gore crime stories ... studded with high-powered Freudian implication’ (Shearer 1945). In October 1946 the editorial of British fan magazine Picturegoer ran under the heading ‘Will the Goody-Goody Heroine Survive?’ and conversationally explored the demise of the ‘goody-goody heroine’ with its readers as follows: Why are so many of the present screen heroines so tough? This question has been put to us many times recently, and the only logical answer we can give is that you the picturegoers who pay, like them that way. The era when movie heroines had to be sweeter than a chocolate sundae and wind up in the hero’s arms appears to have run its course. Not that we don’t have films with such girls, or in a case like Stolen Life Bette Davis, as twins, gives us both the proverbial angel and the new type of heroine, the ruthless woman who pays any price for what she wants. Gainsborough pictures have used a similar formula in Madonna of the Seven Moons, Wicked Lady, Caravan and The Magic Bow. But you will agree that in most cases it is the ‘bold’ woman who gets the better acting part. Looking through some recent films we note Kitty, Scarlet Street, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gilda, The Big Sleep, Bedelia, Saratoga Trunk, The Diary of a Chambermaid and Pink String and Sealing Wax. In each a star was given the part of a pretty, bold and ruthless woman. Checking up on future productions we find that Hedy Lamarr in The Strange Woman will be a selfish domineering woman who ruins lives to achieve her desires ... . Doubtless you will recall many other examples which will convince you that the question asked at the heading of these notes is likely to be answered in the negative. Good girls will always be welcome as long as they are not primped-up, dressed-up dolls, but so will the ‘bad’ girls be as long as they are honest and real, and keep within the tenets of good taste. (Anon 1946) Picturegoer pinpoints a trend in female characterization, but interestingly it locates ‘ruthless’ women in a range of genres, which encompass the costume film, the epic and the western as well as titles commonly

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listed within the ‘classic’ noir cycle. The magazine analyses this new ‘formula’ in female characterization, listing film examples that exploit an oscillation between ‘the proverbial angel’ and ‘the new type of heroine, the ruthless woman who pays any price for what she wants’. It illustrates this with reference to Warner Bros’ A Stolen Life (Curtis Bernhardt 1946) a ‘twin’ drama in which Bette Davis plays the contrasting good and bad counterparts locked in fatal competition for the love of Bill Emerson (Glenn Ford). The female adventurers of British Gainsborough melodramas who live doubled or secret lives also exploit this trend. It is notable that Picturegoer, addressed to a predominantly female fan community, confidently assumes the tough heroine has an exciting appeal to women. It attributes this appeal to the fact that ‘it is the “bold” woman who gets the better acting part’. The variety in the tough female, noted by Picturegoer, is part of a wider tendency in the period, identified by Steve Neale, who shows that ‘femmes fatales ... are identified and labelled in various ways’ (2000: 162). His analysis of trade press and reviews demonstrates that ‘femmes fatales were by no means restricted to noirs’ (163). Neale illustrates that variants on the femme fatale were identified by contemporary reviewers in films such as The Locket, which exemplified the trend for ‘vicious womanhood’,1 and Ivy (1947) which exploited ‘the murderous ladies cycle’.2 The spread and variety of tough female characters coincides with industry research undertaken into female filmgoers’ preferences during the 1940s. A Gallup Poll from July 1941 reported that ‘women tended to prefer romance and serious drama, while men preferred action and comedy’ (Schatz 1999: 70). Later in the decade, in the 1946 peak year of cinema attendances, Motion Picture Herald reported an audience poll from Woman’s Home Companion which found that 54 per cent of (female) respondents preferred ‘romantic dramas’ and 29 per cent ‘mystery films’ (Schatz 1999: 70). While these polls only give broad indications of film genres and general preferences, it is notable that female preferences were more varied than criticism on either film noir or ‘the woman’s film’ has often acknowledged (Neale 1993). Neither do they easily or exclusively map onto a schema of ‘the woman’s film’ as it has been formed in critical histories of Hollywood. For example, Maria LaPlace’s definition captures a summation of the critical ambit of the terms: The woman’s film is distinguished by its female protagonist, female point of view and its narrative which most often revolves around the traditional realism of women’s experience: the familial, the domestic,

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the romantic – those areas where love, emotion and relationships take precedence over action and events. (139) But the way that this female-centredness was expressed in studio productions was quite mixed and heterogeneous. A more pragmatic approach is taken by Jeanine Basinger, who argues that the ambivalences and contradictions of the studio era woman’s film were evident in that the films tried to have it both ways at once, to please all the audience. All movies tried to reach the female audience, just as all movies tried to reach the male audience or at least have a little something for everyone ... Obviously, filmmakers knew that this wasn’t possible, and they aimed their genres and star vehicles at a segment of the audience, but their fantasy was that everyone would go to everything all of the time. (Basinger 1993: 445) The Hollywood woman’s film exploited trends in characterization across an array of genres, blending or adapting its mode of address to offer female audiences divertingly ambiguous characters. These trends were noted by Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, in their analysis of the ‘recurrent patterns’ in American films after 1945. Reviewing patterns of characterization in the 1940s they argue that: Current American films have produced the image of the good-bad girl. She is a good girl who appears to be bad. She does not conceal her apparent badness, and uncertainty about her character may persist through the greater part of the film. The hero suspects that she is bad, but finally discovers this was a mistaken impression. Thus he has a girl who has attracted him by an appearance of wickedness, and whom in the end he can take home and introduce to Mother. (Wolfenstein and Leites 1950: 27). They see the good-bad girl as exemplified by Gilda (Rita Hayworth) in Gilda, Pat Ruscombe (Dorothy McGuire) in Till the End of Time (Edward Dymtryk 1946), Vivien Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) in The Big Sleep and Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone 1946). The ambivalent female characterization that Wolfenstein and Leites detect in these films has similarly been identified by feminist approaches wishing to revise or review a picture of the gender dynamics of film noir. Both Elizabeth Cowie (1993) and

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Angela Martin (1998) discuss a range of dramas in which female characterization is rendered complex in narratives that mix concerns traditionally within the orbit of the ‘woman’s film’ with crime. Films such as Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz 1945), Nora Prentiss (Vincent Sherman 1947) and The Unfaithful (Vincent Sherman 1947) all extend the problems of romance into a sphere of crime, and explore the consequences of this from a female perspective. By being placed in the sphere of crime the central female protagonists, Mildred (Joan Crawford), Nora and Chris (both played by Ann Sheridan), all oscillate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Other examples of mixed female characterization have been identified by Julie Grossman, in her analysis of ambitious female characters exemplified by Laura (Gene Tierney) in Laura (Otto Preminger 1944), Cora (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett 1946), and Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) in Pitfall (André de Toth 1948) in this volume. The blending of genres in these films has consequences for their narrational modes, and affects how viewers might engage with, or understand, the characters in them. Steve Neale makes clear how key narration is to the understanding of character in his discussion of Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) and Human Desire (Fritz Lang 1954) in this collection. In his discussion of how narrational dynamics shift according to genre, David Bordwell characterizes narration in the detective film as restricted, with mystery constructed in its gaps and retardations, in comparison with a more ‘expressive’ or ‘communicative’ narration in ‘melodrama’ (1985: 63–73). He notes that these dynamics construct contrasting emotional nexuses. In the detective film this is typically ‘stable but concealed’ (71); in the melodrama the narration is highly communicative of the state of characters’ feelings. The ambiguity of the ‘good-bad girls’ discussed above is constructed by narration that plays between communicative and concealing modes. Mildred Pierce, for example, famously opens by suggesting Mildred murdered her husband, casting her as ‘bad’, while her voice-over and the long flashback sequence in which she describes her rise from waitress to restaurant owner is communicative of her interiority, and gives a slant on narrative events from her perspective, crucially establishing Mildred’s motivations, and finally resolving the murder mystery by proving her innocent.3 This insight, or access, to character interiority has been most influentially identified in Richard Dyer’s discussion of Gilda (1978), but, as these other examples suggest, female character construction is quite complex across a wider range of films noirs and dramas in the 1940s.

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Female independence and genre in the 1970s Ambivalent and ambiguous female characterizations recurred as film noir underwent a revival in the 1970s. Alan Pakula’s 1971 film Klute has been the subject of a good deal of debate within feminist film criticism. The terms of that debate provide some insights into the shifting conceptualizations of women in film noir and the address or usefulness of the genre for women via the constitution, characterization of, and access to female characters within the films. Klute’s plot is driven by an investigation into the disappearance of family man Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli). Led by detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland), the investigation takes the action into Gruneman’s past life and his contact with Bree Daniels. Bree is a savvy New York call girl with ambitions to be an actress and is played by Jane Fonda in an Oscar-winning role. During the course of his inquiries Klute becomes involved with Bree. She becomes increasingly threatened by a former colleague of Gruneman’s, Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi). Cable has a psychosexual obsession with call girls; he has recorded his interaction with Bree and torments her with ‘breather’ phone calls and calls in which he plays back the tape. At the denouement of the film Cable corners Bree in a warehouse in the garment district, intending to kill her, until Klute intervenes. The film ends ambiguously with Bree leaving New York with Klute, even though she has told her psychotherapist that she is not going to leave the city. Although the film is eponymously titled for its investigator figure, considerable attention is paid to the character of Bree, her interiority, feelings and motivation. As Klute begins his investigation, Bree comes into the action as a figure in Gruneman’s past. But Bree is never simply positioned as an antagonist or obstacle to Klute’s investigative quest. From the opening of the film the narration is not restricted to what Klute knows, but neither is it omniscient. It shifts between Bordwell’s two narrational ‘dynamics’ discussed earlier. This is not to argue that Klute is female-centred in a comparable way to the dramas or ‘women’s films’ of the Hollywood studio era discussed earlier, but through the character, and characterization, of Bree the film offers ways of thinking through some complex questions of female identity/subjectivity that were being debated in the 1970s. It has been acknowledged that Klute’s investigative narrative gives the film some generic alliances with a revival of American film noir exemplified by films such as Marlowe (Paul Bogart 1969) The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman 1973), Chinatown (Roman Polanski 1974),

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Night Moves (Arthur Penn 1975), and Farewell My Lovely (Dick Richards 1975) (Giddis 1973/1976: 195; Gledhill 1978b: 6). However, it is also thematically related to a group of films that centre on the ‘independent woman’ (Brunsdon 1982/1997: 54–66). Brunsdon shows that films such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese 1974), Three Women (Robert Altman 1977), Looking for Mr Goodbar (Richard Brooks 1977) and An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky 1978) are ‘concerned with the conflicting demands on, and contradictory and fragmented nature of, femininities constructed within masculine hegemony’ (54). Brunsdon pinpoints the interest of these films for feminist criticism, arguing that they address a new female consumer subject becoming evident in the 1970s partly in response to the women’s liberation movement and partly in response to shifting patterns in work and family life that permitted young women more social and sexual freedoms and a more aspirational lifestyle (1982/1992: 47–9, 54–5).4 In one of the earliest feminist critical discussions of the film Diane Giddis argues that Klute is ‘of particular interest to women’ (195) in that it dramatizes issues of control, self-determination and autonomy via Bree’s contradictory desire for a relationship with Klute and ambivalence about surrendering her independence (199–200). The film’s narration is quite explicit in conveying Bree’s oscillation between these choices. The film offers access to Bree’s perspective, in scenes portraying her frustration as she tries and fails at modelling and acting auditions and scenes showing how she handles her clients. Particular access is offered to Bree’s sessions with her psychotherapist, and voice-overs from these sessions are repeatedly laid over and sometimes play against the visual action. This renders the complexity of Bree’s character, suggesting the way that she deliberates between different courses of action. This is particularly clear at the film’s ambivalent ending; visual action shows Bree and Klute leaving her empty apartment together as her voice-over tells her psychotherapist that she is not convinced it will work out with Klute. Bree is an interesting figure precisely because of her ambivalence and movement between different roles. While the film is allied to film noir, Bree does not possess the ruthless traits of deadly intentions ascribed to a femme fatale figure. As Linda Ruth Williams notes, she is closer to the ambiguous but ‘more sympathetic sister, the good-bad girl’ (2005: 115).

Conclusions Bree’s ambivalent position had currency for debates about female independence as they were articulated in the 1970s. Film noir and its gender

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dynamics continued to shift, partly as an element of popular culture’s dialogue with, and incorporation of, popular versions of feminist discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. While the ‘independent woman’ was one example of how these ideas were personified in the 1970s, other figurations came into play as feminism itself became ‘periodized’ through popular media debate. The term ‘post-feminism’ was forged in the 1980s and rapidly became a popular concept, conveying the sense that feminism was ‘over’, but one creating difficulties for an ongoing, engaged feminist debate. Angela McRobbie has described the post-feminist ‘social and cultural landscape’ as one in which elements of feminism have been ‘taken into account’ and rendered mainstream in institutions of power (2009: 1). McRobbie analyses how this strategy foregrounds the way in which tropes of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ have become inextricably connected to the contemporary young female subject (11). She shows how exercising these choices is part of a wider process of ‘female individualization’. While this process seems to offer choice, McRobbie suggests that it is highly structured, invoking self-monitoring and an increasing attention to the production and performance of the self (18–19). Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra have suggested how these ideas of choice have become refracted through popular culture, noting that post-feminist texts often offer ‘hype empowerment’ (2005: 107) by commodifying female agency. But they also note that post-feminist texts frequently offer ‘highly ambivalent pleasures’ (2005: 108). This is illustrated in a number of neo-noir thrillers in which new versions of the femme fatale take centre stage as narrative antagonists, sexual performers and sexual threats, and the mode of address of the neo-noir thriller has been questioned by a number of feminist critics. Susan Faludi has seen Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne 1987) as a ‘backlash’ movie, portraying male fears of female empowerment (1992: 140–52). Similarly, neonoirs such as Presumed Innocent (Alan Pakula 1990), Disclosure (Barry Levinson 1994) and The Last Seduction (John Dahl 1994) stage their narratives in the workplace, where femme fatales are respectively a trainee lawyer Carolyn Polhemus (Greta Scacchi), corporate executive Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) and sales executive Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino). These characters perform brilliantly, but their rise to success can never be disentangled from their sexuality, collapsing the distinction between brains and body. The explicit and active sexual scenarios that are acted out in these films, and others such as Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven 1992), Body of

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Evidence (Uli Edel) and Femme Fatale (Brian de Palma 2002), mark a complex address where empowerment is synonymous with commodified sexuality. Kate Stables argues that in a global mediascape genre tropes are easily marketable, and she sees the femme fatale ‘as a universal archetype, as a marketing ploy, but most significantly as an anxiety pointer’ (1998: 171). Linda Ruth Williams reveals a kind of genre blending in contemporary cinema, that between film noir and the erotic thriller. She traces this genre fusion at different levels of the market, showing how noir plots and character types are evident in direct-to-video and mainstream feature film release formats. These new contexts rework the femme fatale: Not only is she sassy, strong and spectacular, epitomising avarice and lust in a way which appeals to an international audience, this focus on money and sex means that she readily lends herself to a cross-fertilisation of noir and porn, leading female viewers into new generic territory. She is a handy genre trope which has continued to sell – the covert pleasures women have found in the 1940s punished femme fatale have mutated into the overt saleability of the 1990s getaway-with-it-version (2005: 122). Perhaps ultimately it is the ambiguity of the femme fatale that affords the figure such an enduring currency for feminist approaches to film, as well as constituting a challenge to those very approaches. Fatal female figures, the ways in which they are placed within genres, narrative strategies and regimes of representation, and the ways in which they are part of an ongoing dialogue with popular incarnations of female identity in different contexts will continue to be a fertile area of debate. Femmes fatales always prompt questions, and for critics there’s nothing more engaging, or seductive, than that.

Notes 1. Time magazine’s review of The Locket, 3 May 1947, cited in Neale (2000: 163). 2. Variety review of Ivy (1947) cited in Neale (2000: 163). 3. See also Cook (1998). 4. See also Rosalind Coward (1978), and Hilary Radner’s conception of ‘public femininities’ formed and circulated by the media and popular culture in their responses to, and popular incorporations of, feminism (Radner 1993).

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Works cited Anon. (1946), ‘Will the Goody-Goody Heroine Survive?’, Picturegoer, October. Basinger, J. (1993), A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Baudry, J. L. (1974/1992), ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, reprinted in G. Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings: Fourth Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 302–12. Bordwell, D. (1985), Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Methuen. Bould, M. (2005), Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City, London: Wallflower. Brunsdon, C. (1982), ‘A Subject for the Seventies’, Screen 23:2, 20–9, reprinted in Screen Tastes: From Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes, London: Routledge. Brunsdon, C. (2005), ‘Feminism, Postfeminism, Martha, Martha and Nigella’, Cinema Journal, 44:2, 110–16. Comolli, L. and Narboni, J. (1969/1992), ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, reprinted in G. Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings: Fourth Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 682–9. Cook, P. (1998), ‘Duplicity in Mildred Pierce’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI, pp. 69–90. Coward, R. (1978), ‘ “Sexual Liberation” and the family’, m/f, 1, 7–24. Cowie, E. (1993), ‘Film Noir and Women’, in J. Copjec (ed.), Shades of Noir, London: Verso, 1993. Dyer, R. (1978), ‘Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI. Faludi, S. (1992), Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, London: Chatto and Windus. Fay, J. and Nieland, J. (2009), Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization, London: Routledge. Gaines, J. (2004), ‘Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory’, Cinema Journal, 44:1, 113–19. Giddis, D. (1973/1976), ‘The Divided Woman: Bree Daniels in Klute’, reprinted in B. Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods: Volume 1, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gledhill, C. (1978a/1992), ‘Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism’, reprinted in G Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings: Fourth Edition, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gledhill, C. (1978b), ‘Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI. Hanson, H. (2007), Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film, London: I. B. Tauris. Johnston, C. (1973/1976), ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, reprinted in B. Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods: Volume 1, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaplan, E. A. (1978), ‘Introduction’, in Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI. Krutnik, F. (1991), In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, London and New York: Routledge.

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LaPlace, M. (1987), ‘Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film: Discursive Struggle in Now Voyager’, in C. Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Essays on Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, London: BFI, pp. 138–66. McRobbie, A. (2009), The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, London: Sage. Martin, A. (1998), ‘ “Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over!”: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI, pp. 202–28. Metz, C. (1975), ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen, 16:2, 14–76. Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16:3, 6–18. Neale, S. (1993), ‘Melo Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term “Melodrama” in the American Trade Press’, Velvet Light Trap, 32, 66–89. Neale, S. (2000), Genre and Hollywood, London and New York: Routledge. Place, J. (1978) ‘Women in Film Noir’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI. Radner, H. (1993), ‘Pretty is as Pretty Does: Free Enterprise and the Marriage Plot’, in J. Collins, H. Radner and A. P. Collins (eds), Film Theory Goes to the Movies, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 56–76. Schatz, T. (1999), Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, Berkeley: University of California Press. Shearer, L. (1945), ‘Crime Certainly Pays on the Screen’, New York Times. Spicer, A. (ed.) (2007), European Film Noir, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stables, K. (1998), ‘The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema’, in E. A. Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir: New Edition, London: BFI. Stanley, F. (1944), ‘Hollywood Shivers’, New York Times, 28 May, p. 3. Tasker, Y. and Negra, D. (eds) (2005), ‘In Focus: Postfeminism and Media Studies’, Cinema Journal, 44:2, 107–33. Tasker, Y. and Negra, D. (eds) (2007), Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, Durham: Duke University Press. Thomas, D. (1992), ‘How Hollywood Deals with Deviant Male’, in I. Cameron (ed.), The Movie Book of Film Noir, London: Studio Vista. Vincendeau, G. (1992), ‘Noir is Also a French Word: French Antecedents of Film Noir’, in I. Cameron (ed.), The Movie Book of Film Noir, London: Studio Vista. Williams, L. R. (2005), The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wolfenstein, M. and Leites, N. (1950), Movies: A Psychological Study, New York: Athenaeum.

Index ‘sinascape’ 115, 125 2046 113, 115, 119–20, 126 A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old Way) 163 Abandonadas, Las (Abandoned Women) 175 Abbas, Ackbar 21 Abril, Victoria 149 Académie des Beaux Arts 48 Adam 3, 35–45 Adams, Casey 16 Adorno and Horkheimer 11, 21–5, 27, 31 n.3 Adrian 82 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 223 Allan, Maud 51, 52, 53, 76, 83 n.2 Allan, Richard 13 Amantes (Lovers) 149, 150, 152–4 American film noir 6, 70, 71, 99, 130, 133, 140, 150, 199–213, 214, 216, 217, 222 An Unmarried Woman 223 Anderson, Benedict 145, 146, 155 Andrews, Dana 199 Angela 168 n.5 Anna Christie 80, 82 Apuzzo, Carla 168 n.5 Aranda, Vicente 149, 151 Archetypal 4, 35, 36, 40, 43, 72, 83, 107 Archetype 3, 5, 33, 36, 47, 57, 61, 67, 131, 170, 217, 225 Aristarco, Guido 134, 138 n.10 Assassini dei giorni di festa (The Holiday Killers) 168 n.5 Assunta Spina 60, 63–9 Aurier, G.-Albert 48 Babington, Bruce 10, 103, 111 Bacall, Lauren 71, 220 Bal, Mieke 36, 44 n.5 Bandito, Il (The Bandit) 157, 159–62, 167 n.3

Bara, Theda 20, 53–6, 172 Barthes, Roland 14, 18, 60, 67, 84 n.7 Basic Instinct 224 Baudelaire, Charles 47, 56, 66, 76 Bazin, André 137 Beardsley, Aubrey 47, 54–5, 66 Bedelia 100, 101, 218 Bernhardt, Sarah 56, 57, 58 n.9 Berry, Chris 115 Berry, Sarah 80–2, 84 n.4 and n.5 Bertini, Francesca 63–7, 70 Bête Humaine, La (Film) 131, 139, 190 Bête Humaine, La (novel) 190 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 197 Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) 128, 133, 134, 159 Big Heat, The 197, 207 Big Sleep, The 71, 218, 220 Bitter Rice (Riso amaro) 5, 128, 129, 132–7, 159 Blanche Fury 99 Blasetti, Alessandro 130 Blue Dahlia, The 136, 210 Blue Gardenia, The 188, 197 Body of Evidence 224 Bogart, Humphrey 211 Boileau, Pierre 89, 90 Boleslawski, Richard 84 n.5 Bolkan, Florinda 163 Bonnard, Mario 159 Bonnard, Pierre 57 n.2 Borde and Chaumeton 133 Bordwell, David 221–2 Bouchardon, Pierre 79–80 Boytler, Arcady 174 British film noir 98, 103 Bronfen, Elisabeth 2, 7–8 n.1 and n.2 Brown, Clarence 80 Brunsdon, Charlotte 215, 223, 226 Brute Force 188 229

230 Index Cabaratera films 175 Cabiria 67 Caduta di Troia, La (The Fall of Troy) 67 Cain, James M 13, 129, 131, 138 n.5 and n.10, 199, 201, 203, 208 Calamai, Clara 5, 127, 129–31, 138 n.6 Caldwell, Lesley 128, 138 n.5 and n.6, 159, 161 Campo de’ Fiori 159 Cárdenas, Lazaro 176, 180–1 Carillo, Enrique Gomez 48, 50 Carmen (film) 53 Carmen (novella) 8 n.4 Carroll, Madeleine 102 Catholicism? 66, 145, 146, 161, 167, 178, 181 Chan, Kenneth 117–18 Chang, Chen 116 Cheung, Maggie 116–17, 119 Chinatown 222 Chinese femme fatale 114–15 Chow, Yun Fat 116 Chuan (My Dreamboat) 120 Cineguild 101 Clash by Night 209–10 Cleopatra (film) 53, 55, 56 Clouzot, Henri Georges 5, 89–97 Clouzot, Vera 90 Comencini, Cristina 168 n.5 Common Touch, The 103 Conseguenze dell’amore, Le (The Consequences of Love) 166 Cotten, Joseph 14, 17, 18 Cowie, Elizabeth 137, 160, 207, 220 Crawford, Joan 94, 205, 209 Crimson Key, The 136 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long) 114, 116, 119 Curtiz, Michael 94, 208, 221 Dagover, Lil 81 Dalle Vacche, Angela 8 n.6, 62–3, 66, 70 n.1, 131, 167 n.1 Damiani, Damiano 168 n.5 Daughter of Darkness 99, 101, 107–11 Daybreak 99, 101 de Fuentes, Fernando 6, 170, 173, 175, 176–82

De Putti, Lya 54 De Santis, Giuseppe 128, 132–7 De Sica, Vittorio 159 Dead Reckoning 210 Dear Murderer 99–103, 105, 107, 111 Decadentism 3, 5, 47–9, 51, 54, 56, 61, 63, 64, 65–6, 69 Devil in a Blue Dress 148 Diaboliques, Les 5, 89–97 Dietrich, Marlene 56, 57, 81, 179 Dijkstra, Bram 4, 46, 62, 75, 76 diva 4, 5, 60–70, 71 n.2, 130, 131, 132, 137, 139 n.11, 157, 167 n.1 Dmytryk, Edward 71 Doane, Mary Ann 1–4, 14, 31 n.2, 46, 61–2, 72, 74, 80, 102, 107, 109, 110, 132, 136, 137, 139 n.19, 148–9, 154, 164, 187, 188 dolente, La 4, 6, 158 Doña Bárbara 170, 173, 174, 176–9, 181, 182 Doña Bárbara (2008 series) 182 Double Indemnity 2, 6, 7 n.2, 70 n.2, 94, 187–90, 203, 209, 218, 221 Dowling, Constance 139 n.20 Dowling, Doris 5, 136, 139 n.20 Draper, Herbert 9, 18–20 Duncan, Isadora 76, 77 Dyer, Richard 2, 102, 105, 12, 125, 135 Ealing Studios 101 Easy Money 101–4, 105 Eden 11, 35 Eisenstein, Sergei 173 Ettinger, Bracha 27, 29, 31 n.5 Eve 1, 3, 4, 5, 24, 31 n.10, 35–45, 170, 174 Fa Mulan 116, 118 Faludi, Susan 224 Farewell My Lovely 223 Fari nella nebbia (Headlights in the Fog) 139 n.12 Fatal Attraction 210, 224 Félix, Maria 171, 173, 178–9 Felman, Shoshanna 6–7, 8 n.7 Felski, Rita 75–6 Female ambition 211

Index 231 Female characterization 6, 35, 66, 90, 95, 109, 113, 114, 118, 119, 205, 207, 215, 217–22 Female poisoner 5, 100, 101 Feminist film criticism 6, 214–25 Femme fatale – see also Diva, Eve, good-bad girl, La Dolente, Lilith, La Malinche, Medusa, Siren, Vamp, Spider Woman Femme fatale – access to/knowledge of 2, 188–9, 194–5, 221–2, 223 Femme fatale – association with Film noir 2, 132, 188 Femme fatale – and Art Deco 81–2, 164 Femme fatale – and Art Nouveau 74 Femme fatale – and Catholicism 66, 145, 146, 161, 167, 178, 181 Femme fatale – and Decadentism 3, 5, 47–9, 51, 54, 56, 61, 63, 64, 65–6, 69 Femme fatale – and female spy 72–88 Femme fatale – and Symbolism 3, 5, 47–9, 51, 55, 56, 74 Femme fatale – and the prostitute 1, 4, 76, 78, 115, 119, 120, 123, 146, 170 Femme fatale – and the Virgin Mary 69, 158 Femme fatale – British 99, 101, 109 Femme fatale – Chinese 114–15 Femme fatale – feminist readings of 115, 117, 118 Femme fatale – ideation of 6, 201, 204, 207 Femme fatale – illegibility of 3, 188–90, 193–4 Femme fatale – Italian 158–60, 165–7 Femme fatale – motivation of 2, 6, 38, 41, 71, 187, 190, 194, 221, 222 Femme fatale – transnational transmissions of 3, 5, 114–15, 122–5, 130, 132, 135, 138, 173, 214, 216 Femme Fatale (film) 225 Femme moderne 206

Femme vitale 43 Ferroni, Giorgio 167 n.3 Fetishism 2, 3, 7, 13–15, 21, 30, 81, 94, 124, 163 Feyder, Jacques 80 Film Noir See under (American film noir) (British film noir) (gothic noir) (Italian film noir) Film noir association with femme fatale 2, 132, 188 Fine è nota, La (The End is Known) 168 n.5 Fitzmaurice, George 80 Flaubert, Gustave 50, 65, 66 Fonda, Jane 222 Force of Evil 188 Ford, Glenn 12, 190, 219 Franciolini, Gianni 139 n.12 Franco, General Francisco 145, 146 Francoism 6, 146–55 Franklin, Carl 148 French poetic realism 131, 132 Freud, Sigmund 26, 31 n.1, 75 Fury 197 Gabin, Jean 131, 139 n.12 Gaines, Jane 214, 215 Gainsborough Studios 98, 101, 218, 219 Gallegos, Romulo 176 Garbo, Greta 14, 56, 57, 67, 73, 80–3, 84 n.5 and n.7, 179 And Mata Hari 80–3 Garfield, John 129, 199 Garnett, Tay 2, 129, 138 n.5 and n.10, 199, 221 Gassman, Vittorio 136 Gautier, Théophile 47, 58 n.8 Genesis (Book of) 5, 35–44 Genre and gender 63–70, 92–5, 98–100, 115–18, 127–38, 158–67, 172–3, 175, 216–22, 225 blending of 5, 225 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 13

232 Index German Expressionism 175 Germi, Pietro 168 n.3 Gérome, Jean-Léon 51 Ghezzo, Flora 134–5, 137, 139 n.15 and n.21, 161 Gibbons, Cedric 82 Giddis, Diane 223 Gilda 2, 11–13, 31 n.2, 105, 133–6, 188, 209, 218, 220, 221 Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth) 168 n.3 Girotti, Massimo 5, 127, 129–31 As homme fatal 130–1 Gledhill, Christine 102, 103, 106, 110, 215, 223 globalisation 115, 124, 167 Gómez, Carmelo 150 González, Edith 182 Good-bad girl 4, 136, 139 n.20, 220, 221, 223 Goris, Esther 182 Gothic-noir 99, 100 Grahame, Gloria 6, 90, 195, 207 Greer, Jane 71, 204 Gundle, Stephen 133, 134, 139 n.16 and n.17, 157 Gynt, Greta 101–7, 111–13

House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai fu) 113, 116, 119 How to Marry a Millionaire 13 Human Desire 6, 187, 188, 190, 193, 197, 207, 221 Huston, John 70 n.2 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 47, 49 Huyssen, Andreas 3, 4, 72

Hanson, Curtis 148 Harper, Sue 98, 101 Hathaway, Henry 13 Hawks, Howard 13, 71 n.2 Hays, Will 84 n.4 Hayworth, Rita 11–12, 104–5, 133–5, 220 Headlights in the Fog (Fari nella nebbia) 139 n.12 Hero (Yingxiang) 114, 119 Hershfield, Joanne 170, 172, 174, 180 Hirsch, Foster 201–3, 212 n.1 Hitchcock, Alfred 90, 210 Holiday Killers, The (Assassini dei giorni di festa) 168 n.5 Homer 10–13, 15, 18, 19–21, 24, 25, 26, 30, 70 Homme fatal 99, 131–2, 137, 138 Hong Kingston, Maxine 118 Hong Kong film industry 116 House by the River, The 197

Kaplan E Ann 2, 215 Kar-wai, Wong 113, 120 Kent, Jean 101 Klute 222–3, Krutnik, Frank 90, 91, 217

immigration In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law) 168 n.3 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) 163–5 Irma Vep (1996) 117 Ismailowitsch, Ladislas 53, 58 n.3 Italian black neorealism (Neorealismo Nero) 159, 167 n.3 Italian film noir 6, 157–9 Italian giallo 158, 167 n.2 Italian neorealism 5, 127–39, 159, 163 Italian peplum 162 James, Henry 6, 7 Jiarenqu 113, 125 n.1

L.A. Confidential 148 Lacan, Jacques 15, 20, 24, 27, 31 n.5 and n.9 Ladoux, Georges 79 Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) 128, 133, 134, 159 Lang, Fritz 188, 197, 207, 209, 221 LaPlace, Maria 219 Last Seduction, The 224 Lattuada, Alberto 159, 167 n.3 Laura 188, 199–200, 207, 212, 221 Le Queux, William 72 Lee, Ang 114 Lefebvre, Jules-Joseph 57 n.2 Leites, Nathan 98, 220 Lesbian 57, 83, 89, 90, 96, 97

Index 233 Leung, Tony 120 Li, Gong 116, 119, 123 Lilith 3, 8 n.3, 26, 170 Lim, Song Hwee 124 Lingqi, Kong 123 Lockwood, Margaret 99–101 Lombroso, Cesare 8 n.6, 71 n.3 Long Goodbye, The 222 Looking for Mr Goodbar 223 Lost Weekend, The 136 Lost Youth (Gioventù perduta) 168 n.3 Lovers (Amantes) 149, 150, 152–4 MacMurray, Fred 188 Madeleine 100–2 Magnani, Anna 159–61, 164 Malinche, La 4, 6, 170–4 Mallarmé, Stéphane 47 Maltese Falcon, The 70 n.2 Mambo Girl (Mambo Nülang) 120 Mamoulian, Rouben 84 n.7 Man in Grey, The 100 Mangano, Silvana 5, 133–6, 139 n.16 And Rita Hayworth 133 Marcus, Millicent 133, 135, 138 n.2, 160 Marengo, Davide 166 Marlowe 222 Martin, Angela 2, 107, 136, 212 n.2, 217, 221 Mata Hari 4, 5, 72–85, 171 Mata Hari (film) 80–3 and Art Deco 81–2 Matrixial theory 27–30, 31 n.5 Maxfield, James 70–1 n.2, 204 McGuire, Dorothy 220 McKenna, Siobhan 101, 107 McLaren, Anne E 113, 115 McRobbie, Angela 224 Medusa 3, 31, 160, 162, 166 Melodrama 63, 64, 83, 98, 101, 107, 134, 137, 158, 159, 173, 175, 188, 219, 221 Mexican melodrama 179–80 Memoirs of a Geisha 114, 115, 119, 122, 123, 124 Mérimée, Prosper 8 n.4 Messinger Cypress, Sandra 174 Mexican Revolution 175–6, 180–1

Mezzogiorno, Giovanna 166 MGM 80, 81, 82, 129 Mildred Pierce 94, 201, 208–9, 221 Millet, Kate 35 Milton, John 35, 40 Miró, Pilar 149 Modernity 4, 5, 12, 21, 56, 62, 66, 72, 74, 75, 81, 82, 116, 121, 123, 162 Monroe, Marilyn 13, 14, 16–18, 30 Morain, Alfred 79, 80 Moréas, Jean 47 Moreau, Gustave 48–50, 58 n.6, 66 Morocco 57 Moseley, Rachel 108 Mujer del puerto, La (The Woman of the Port) 174–5 Mujer sin alma, La (Woman Without a Soul) 175 Muller, Eddie 201, 209 Mulvey, Laura 13–15, 19, 31 n.4, 62, 121, 215 Murder My Sweet 71 n.2 Murphy, Robert 98, 99, 100, 101, 103 Mussolini, Vittorio 132 My Dreamboat (Chuan) 120 Naldi, Nita 54 Narcejac, Thomas 89, 90 Navarro, Ramon 83 Nazimova, Alla 54–6, 57, 58 n.7 Nazzari, Amedeo 159, 160 Neale, Steve 6, 137, 216, 219, 221, 225 n.1 Negra, Diane 47, 54, 224 Negri, Pola 54, 172 Neo-noir 147, 158, 201, 224 Neorealismo nero (Italian black neorealism) 159, 167 n.3 New Woman 66, 73, 74, 77, 81, 82 Niagara 13–18 Night Bus (Notturno bus) 166 Night Moves 223 Noble, Andrea 172, 173, 174, 180 Nordau, Max 71 n.3 Notturno bus (Night Bus) 166 objectification 117, 121, 122, 135 Obsession (Dmytryk) 99

234 Index Obsessione (Ossessione) 5, 127, 128, 129–32, 135, 137, 138 n.3, 139 n.15, 158 October Man, The 99 Odyssey, The 10–13, 18, 19–21, 24, 15, 26, 30, 70 Orientalism 31 n.3, 51, 53–4, 74, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84 n.5, 123, 134 Orientalist 51, 53, 54, 77, 80, 82, 84, 123, 124 Ossessione (Obsession) 5, 127, 128, 129–32, 135, 137, 138 n.3, 139 n.15, 158 Out of the Past 71, 204, 209 Painted Veil, The 84 n.5 Paisà (Paisan) 159 Pakula, Alan 222, 224 Papas, Irene 163 Paradise Lost 35, 40 Pastrone, Giovanni 67 Péladan, Sâr 58 n.8 Peters, Jean 16 Petri, Elio 163–4 Pietrangeli, Antonio 130 Pink String and Sealing Wax 100, 101, 218 Pitfall 205–8, 221 Place, Janey 1, 2, 106, 130, 136, 138 n.9, 215, 216 Placido, Michele 166 Post-feminism 214, 224 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Film) 2, 138 n.9, 199, 201, 218, 221 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Novel) 129, 138 n.5, 138 n.10, 199, 201, 203, 208 Presumed Innocent 224 Processo alla città (The City on Trial) 162 Prostitute (see also femme fatale) 1, 4, 76, 78, 115, 119, 120, 123, 146, 170 Psychoanalytic theory 7, 13, 15, 20, 27–31, 61, 62, 74, 90, 161, 215

Quai des Orfèvres 90 Queen Christina 84 n.7 Queer 5, 89–97, 130 Rachilde 58 n.8 Rambova, Natascha 54, 58 n.7 Regnault, Henri 48, 49, 50, 53, 57 n.2 Renoir, Jean 129, 131, 138 n.5, 190, 197 n.2 and n.3 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 58 n.5 Revelation (Book of) 41 Rider Haggard, H. 3, 26 Riso amaro (Bitter Rice) 5, 128, 129, 132–7, 159 Rixens, Jean André 53 Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) 159 Romanzo criminale 166 Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta) 159 Rose e pistole 168 n.5 Rosi, Francesco 162–3 Rossellini, Roberto 159 Said, Edward 77, 83 n.1 Salammbô 50, 65 Salecl, Renate 24, 25, 27 Salome 3, 4, 5, 48–58 Salome (film) 54–6 Salomé (play) 48, 50 Salón México 175 Santa 173 Sanz, Jorge 149 Satan 41 Scott, Lizabeth 206–7, 211, 220, 221 Secret Beyond the Door 100, 197 Senza pietà (Without Pity) 167 n.3 Serena, Gustavo 64 Shanghai 114, 119, 120, 121 She 3, 26 Shi mian mai fu (House of Flying Daggers) 113, 116, 119 Shohat, Ella 123 Signoret, Simone 5, 89, 93–7 Sing-song girls 113, 119–20 Siren 4, 9–32, 107, 130 soldadera 175, 176, 182 n.1 Songs of the Peach Blossom River (Taohua Jiang) 120

Index 235 Sophie’s Revenge 124 Sorrentino, Paolo 166 Spanish Civil War 146, 147, 149, 150 Spicer, Andrew 98, 99, 103, 105, 106, 202, 216 Spider woman 1, 106 Spies (see also femme fatale) 72–88 Spiral Staircase, The 100 Stables, Kate 147–8, 225 Stam, Robert 123 Stanwyck, Barbara 6, 71 n.2, 94, 100, 188, 204, 210 Stoker, Bram 3 Stott, Rebecca 1, 3, 4, 46, 57, 77, 101, 110, 155 Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The 220 Suárez, Emma 149 Sutherland, Donald 222 Symbolist movement 3, 5, 47–9, 51, 55, 56, 74 Take My Life 103 Taohua Jiang (Songs of the Peach Blossom River) 120 Tasker, Yvonne 224 Taxi Driver 210 Temptress, The 72 Teo, Stephen 119–20 The City on Trial (Processo alla città) 162 The End is Known (La fine è nota) 168 n.5 The Fall of Troy (La caduta di Troia) 67 The Woman of the Port (La mujer del Puerto) 174–5 They Made Me a Fugitive 99 Three Women 223 Tierney, Gene 199, 200, 212, 221 Till the End of Time 220 T-Men 188 Todd, Ann 101 Tombolo, paradiso nero (Tombolo, Black Paradise) 167 n.3 Torre, Roberta 168 n.5 Touch of Evil 188 transnational 3, 5, 114–15, 122–5, 130, 132, 135, 138, 173, 214, 216, Trouillebert, Paul Désiré 58 n.5

Tu nombre envenena mis sueños (Your Name Poisons My Dreams) 149–54 Turn of the Screw, The 6–7 Turner, Lana 2, 129, 138 n.9, 199, 201–3, 221 Vallone, Raf 136, 139 n.20 Vamp (see also femme fatale) 4, 54, 57–8, 102, 117, 134, 147, 158, 171–2 vampire 1, 3, 4 Vampires, Les 117 Verdú, Maribel 149 Verlaine, Paul 47 Vertigo 90, 210 Vesselo, Arthur 99, 103 Vidor, Charles 2, 11, 133, 188 Vincendeau, Ginette 91–2, 96, 123, 131, 132, 139 n.13, 216 Visconti, Luchino 128, 129, 131, 134, 138 n.5 and n.10, 158 Volonté, Gian Maria 163 Walsh, Raoul 71 n.2 Waterhouse, John William 18, 21 Waterloo Road 99 We Still Kill the Old Way 163 While the City Sleeps 197 White Heat 71 n.2 Wicked ladies 98 Wicked Lady, The 100, 218 Wilde, Oscar 47, 48, 50, 53–5, 58 n.9 Wilder, Billy 2, 6, 70, 94, 136, 188, 218, 221 Williams, Linda Ruth 139 n.20, 223, 225 Withers, Googie 101, 108 Without Pity (Senza pieta) 167 n.3 Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) 114, 116, 119 Wolfenstein, Martha 98, 220 Woman in the Window, The 197 Woman Warrior, The 118 Woman Without a Soul (La mujer sin alma) 175 Woman’s film 219–21 Women warriors 116–17, 119, 121

236

Index

Wuxia pian 113, 114, 116, 119, 125 n.2 Xu, Gary 123, 125

You Only Live Once 197 Your Name Poisons My Dreams (Tu nombre envenena mis sueños) 149–54

Yahwist 35–7, 42, 44 Yeoh, Michelle 119, 123 Yimou, Zhang 113, 114, 124 Yingxiang (Hero) 114, 119

Zampa, Luigi 162 Zavattini, Cesare 128 Ziyi, Zhang 5, 113–26, 130, 137 Zola, Emile 190, 193, 197 n.2