PROOF

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements x Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction: ‘Cherchez la femme’ 1 Helen Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe 1. Ecoutez la Femme: Hear/Here Difference 9 Griselda Pollock

Part I Literary and Visual 2. The Mother of All Femmes Fatales: Eve as Temptress in Genesis 3 35 Karen L. Edwards 3. Challenging the : The Femme Fatale in Fin-de-Siècle Art and Early Cinema 46 Jess Sully 4. Silent Divas: The Femmes Fatales of the Italian Cinema Muto 60 Joy Ramirez 5. ‘You’ll Be the Death of Me’: Mata Hari and the Myth of the Femme Fatale 72 Rosie White

Part II Film Stars 6. Diabolically Clever – Clouzot’s French Noir Les Diaboliques (1954) 89 Susan Hayward 7. Fatal Femininity in Post-War British Film: Investigating the British Femme 98 Melanie Bell

vii PROOF viii Contents

8. ‘Put the on ... Mei’: Zhang Ziyi and the Politics of Global Stardom 113 Olga Kourelou 9. Gender, Genre and Stardom: Fatality in Italian Neorealist Cinema 127 Catherine O’Rawe

Part III Femmes Fatales in European and World Cinemas 10. The Femme Fatale of Spanish Retro Noir: The Recuperation of a Repressed Voice 145 Ann Davies 11. Chiaroscuro: The Half-Glimpsed Femme Fatale of Italian 157 Mary Wood 12. A Myth Is Born: The Femme Fatale in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema 170 John L. Marambio and Marcie Rinka

Part IV Hollywood 13. ‘I Can’t Tell Anymore Whether You’re Lying’: , Human Desire and the Narratology of Femmes Fatales 187 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 199 Julie Grossman 15. The Big : Feminist Film Criticism and the Femme Fatale 214 Helen Hanson

Index 229 PROOF

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 old- est 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 . (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, , 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 junc- tures 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 invit- ing further investigation. The femme fatale is thus read simultaneously as both entrenched cul- tural 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 discus- sion 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 PROOF

2 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 ‘resist- ance’ in the figure which has been picked up as a mode of feminist agency: the collection 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 ideo- logically 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), 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 cen- trality’ (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, PROOF

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 construc- tions 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 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 , 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, , Lilith, , , 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 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 bear out for Stott the PROOF

4 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 mobil- ity. 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 rela- tion 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 inter- ested 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 particu- lar 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 acous- tic 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 PROOF

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 embod- ied 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 femi- ninity and modernity, exploring a case study in myth-making: Mata Hari. She investigates the 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 gen- res (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 circu- lation 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 construc- tions of Italian neorealism, while the presence of the femme fatale in a number of neorealist films evidences the influence of Hollywood cin- ema. 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. PROOF

6 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 modi- fies 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 Donˇa 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 convinc- ingly shows that the way in which femme fatale figures are accessed by viewers is dependent on the mode of narration. By contrasting Phyllis Dietrichson () in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) with Vicki (Gloria Grahame) in Human Desire Neale shows that char- acter 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 char- acterizations. 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 oth- erwise of the female protagonist, and her reliability, observed how ‘ pronouncements from the various sides of the controversy [ ... ] repeat PROOF

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 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 con- gruences. It is true that we inevitably approach the femme fatale through the critical inheritance we have of her (Hanson demonstrates, in his- toricizing 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 pos- sibility 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 unful- filled 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 sepa- rate subject who has agency and is responsible for her decisions. In so doing, feminist critics unwittingly imitate precisely the gesture of fetishism per- formed by Walter Neff at the very beginning of Double Indemnity, when he PROOF

8 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). 3. On the Romantic recuperation of Lilith by artists such as Rossetti, see Bullen (1999). 4. See Gilman (1985: 30) on Mérimée’s (1845) as the quintessential Other: female, black, a gypsy, proletarian. 5. See also Evans (2003: 129). 6. Work by nineteenth-century positivist criminologists such as the Italian Cesare Lombroso linked femininity, , performance and prostitu- tion. See Dalle Vacche (2008: 131). 7. 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: 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. PROOF

Index

‘sinascape’ 115, 125 Bara, Theda 20, 53–6, 172 2046 113, 115, 119–20, 126 Barthes, Roland 14, 18, 60, 67, A ciascuno il suo (We Still Kill the Old 84 n.7 Way) 163 Basic Instinct 224 Abandonadas, Las (Abandoned Baudelaire, Charles 47, 56, 66, 76 Women) 175 Bazin, André 137 Abbas, Ackbar 21 Beardsley, Aubrey 47, 54–5, 66 Abril, Victoria 149 Bedelia 100, 101, 218 Académie des Beaux Arts 48 Bernhardt, Sarah 56, 57, 58 n.9 Adam 3, 35–45 Berry, Chris 115 Adams, Casey 16 Berry, Sarah 80–2, 84 n.4 and n.5 Adorno and Horkheimer 11, 21–5, Bertini, Francesca 63–7, 70 27, 31 n.3 Bête Humaine, La (Film) 131, 139, 190 Adrian 82 Bête Humaine, La (novel) 190 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 223 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt 197 Allan, Maud 51, 52, 53, 76, 83 n.2 Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) 128, Allan, Richard 13 133, 134, 159 Amantes (Lovers) 149, 150, 152–4 Big Heat, The 197, 207 American film noir 6, 70, 71, 99, 130, Big Sleep, The 71, 218, 220 133, 140, 150, 199–213, 214, 216, Bitter Rice (Riso amaro) 5, 128, 129, 217, 222 132–7, 159 An Unmarried Woman 223 Blanche Fury 99 Anderson, Benedict 145, 146, 155 Blasetti, Alessandro 130 Andrews, Dana 199 Blue Dahlia, The 136, 210 Angela 168 n.5 Blue Gardenia, The 188, 197 Anna Christie 80, 82 Body of Evidence 224 Apuzzo, Carla 168 n.5 Bogart, Humphrey 211 Aranda, Vicente 149, 151 Boileau, Pierre 89, 90 Archetypal 4, 35, 36, 40, 43, 72, Boleslawski, Richard 84 n.5 83, 107 Bolkan, Florinda 163 Archetype 3, 5, 33, 36, 47, 57, 61, 67, Bonnard, Mario 159 131, 170, 217, 225 Bonnard, Pierre 57 n.2 Aristarco, Guido 134, 138 n.10 Borde and Chaumeton 133 Assassini dei giorni di festa (The Bordwell, David 221–2 Holiday Killers) 168 n.5 Bouchardon, Pierre 79–80 Assunta Spina 60, 63–9 Boytler, Arcady 174 Aurier, G.-Albert 48 British film noir 98, 103 Bronfen, Elisabeth 2, 7–8 n.1 Babington, Bruce 10, 103, 111 and n.2 Bacall, Lauren 71, 220 Brown, Clarence 80 Bal, Mieke 36, 44 n.5 Brunsdon, Charlotte 215, Bandito, Il (The Bandit) 157, 159–62, 223, 226 167 n.3 Brute Force 188

229 PROOF

230 Index

Cabaratera films 175 De Putti, Lya 54 Cabiria 67 De Santis, Giuseppe 128, 132–7 Caduta di Troia, La (The Fall of De Sica, Vittorio 159 Troy) 67 Dead Reckoning 210 Cain, James M 13, 129, 131, 138 n.5 Dear Murderer 99–103, 105, 107, 111 and n.10, 199, 201, 203, 208 Decadentism 3, 5, 47–9, 51, 54, 56, Calamai, Clara 5, 127, 129–31, 138 n.6 61, 63, 64, 65–6, 69 Caldwell, Lesley 128, 138 n.5 and Devil in a Blue Dress 148 n.6, 159, 161 Diaboliques, Les 5, 89–97 Campo de’ Fiori 159 Dietrich, Marlene 56, 57, 81, 179 Cárdenas, Lazaro 176, 180–1 Dijkstra, Bram 4, 46, 62, 75, 76 Carillo, Enrique Gomez 48, 50 diva 4, 5, 60–70, 71 n.2, 130, 131, Carmen (film) 53 132, 137, 139 n.11, 157, 167 n.1 Carmen (novella) 8 n.4 Dmytryk, Edward 71 Carroll, Madeleine 102 Doane, Mary Ann 1–4, 14, 31 n.2, Catholicism? 66, 145, 146, 161, 46, 61–2, 72, 74, 80, 102, 107, 167, 178, 181 109, 110, 132, 136, 137, 139 n.19, Chan, Kenneth 117–18 148–9, 154, 164, 187, 188 Chang, Chen 116 dolente, La 4, 6, 158 Cheung, Maggie 116–17, 119 Doña Bárbara 170, 173, 174, 176–9, Chinatown 222 181, 182 Chinese femme fatale 114–15 Doña Bárbara (2008 series) 182 Chow, Yun Fat 116 Double Indemnity 2, 6, 7 n.2, 70 n.2, Chuan (My Dreamboat) 120 94, 187–90, 203, 209, 218, 221 Cineguild 101 Dowling, Constance 139 n.20 Clash by Night 209–10 Dowling, Doris 5, 136, 139 n.20 Cleopatra (film) 53, 55, 56 Draper, Herbert 9, 18–20 Clouzot, Henri Georges 5, 89–97 Duncan, Isadora 76, 77 Clouzot, Vera 90 Dyer, Richard 2, 102, 105, 12, Comencini, Cristina 168 n.5 125, 135 Common Touch, The 103 Conseguenze dell’amore, Le (The Ealing Studios 101 Consequences of Love) 166 Easy Money 101–4, 105 Cotten, Joseph 14, 17, 18 Eden 11, 35 Cowie, Elizabeth 137, 160, 207, 220 Eisenstein, Sergei 173 Crawford, Joan 94, 205, 209 Ettinger, Bracha 27, 29, 31 n.5 Crimson Key, The 136 Eve 1, 3, 4, 5, 24, 31 n.10, 35–45, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 170, 174 (Wo hu cang long) 114, 116, 119 Curtiz, Michael 94, 208, 221 Fa Mulan 116, 118 Faludi, Susan 224 Dagover, Lil 81 Farewell My Lovely 223 Dalle Vacche, Angela 8 n.6, 62–3, 66, Fari nella nebbia (Headlights in the 70 n.1, 131, 167 n.1 Fog) 139 n.12 Damiani, Damiano 168 n.5 Fatal Attraction 210, 224 Daughter of Darkness 99, 101, 107–11 Félix, Maria 171, 173, 178–9 Daybreak 99, 101 Felman, Shoshanna 6–7, 8 n.7 de Fuentes, Fernando 6, 170, 173, Felski, Rita 75–6 175, 176–82 Female ambition 211 PROOF

Index 231

Female characterization 6, 35, 66, 90, Femme vitale 43 95, 109, 113, 114, 118, 119, 205, Ferroni, Giorgio 167 n.3 207, 215, 217–22 Fetishism 2, 3, 7, 13–15, 21, 30, 81, Female poisoner 5, 100, 101 94, 124, 163 Feminist film criticism 6, 214–25 Feyder, Jacques 80 Femme fatale – see also Diva, Eve, Film Noir good-bad girl, La Dolente, Lilith, See under La Malinche, Medusa, Siren, (American film noir) Vamp, Spider Woman (British film noir) Femme fatale – access to/knowledge (gothic noir) of 2, 188–9, 194–5, 221–2, 223 (Italian film noir) Femme fatale – association with Film noir Film noir 2, 132, 188 association with femme fatale 2, Femme fatale – and Art Deco 81–2, 132, 188 164 Fine è nota, La (The End is Known) Femme fatale – and Art Nouveau 74 168 n.5 Femme fatale – and Catholicism 66, Fitzmaurice, George 80 145, 146, 161, 167, 178, 181 Flaubert, Gustave 50, 65, 66 Femme fatale – and Decadentism 3, Fonda, Jane 222 5, 47–9, 51, 54, 56, 61, 63, 64, Force of Evil 188 65–6, 69 Ford, Glenn 12, 190, 219 Femme fatale – and female Franciolini, Gianni 139 n.12 spy 72–88 Franco, General Francisco 145, 146 Femme fatale – and Symbolism 3, 5, Francoism 6, 146–55 47–9, 51, 55, 56, 74 Franklin, Carl 148 Femme fatale – and the prostitute 1, French poetic realism 131, 132 4, 76, 78, 115, 119, 120, 123, 146, Freud, Sigmund 26, 31 n.1, 75 170 Fury 197 Femme fatale – and the Virgin Mary 69, 158 Gabin, Jean 131, 139 n.12 Femme fatale – British 99, 101, 109 Gaines, Jane 214, 215 Femme fatale – Chinese 114–15 Gainsborough Studios 98, 101, Femme fatale – feminist readings 218, 219 of 115, 117, 118 Gallegos, Romulo 176 Femme fatale – ideation of 6, 201, Garbo, Greta 14, 56, 57, 67, 73, 80–3, 204, 207 84 n.5 and n.7, 179 Femme fatale – illegibility of 3, And Mata Hari 80–3 188–90, 193–4 Garfield, John 129, 199 Femme fatale – Italian 158–60, Garnett, Tay 2, 129, 138 n.5 and 165–7 n.10, 199, 221 Femme fatale – motivation of 2, Gassman, Vittorio 136 6, 38, 41, 71, 187, 190, 194, Gautier, Théophile 47, 58 n.8 221, 222 Genesis (Book of) 5, 35–44 Femme fatale – transnational Genre transmissions of 3, 5, 114–15, and gender 63–70, 92–5, 98–100, 122–5, 130, 132, 135, 138, 173, 115–18, 127–38, 158–67, 214, 216 172–3, 175, 216–22, 225 Femme Fatale (film) 225 blending of 5, 225 Femme moderne 206 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 13 PROOF

232 Index

German Expressionism 175 House of Flying Daggers (Shi mian mai Germi, Pietro 168 n.3 fu) 113, 116, 119 Gérome, Jean-Léon 51 How to Marry a Millionaire 13 Ghezzo, Flora 134–5, 137, 139 n.15 Human Desire 6, 187, 188, 190, 193, and n.21, 161 197, 2 07, 221 Gibbons, Cedric 82 Huston, John 70 n.2 Giddis, Diane 223 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 47, 49 Gilda 2, 11–13, 31 n.2, 105, 133–6, Huyssen, Andreas 3, 4, 72 188, 209, 218, 220, 221 Gioventù perduta (Lost Youth) 168 n.3 immigration Girotti, Massimo 5, 127, 129–31 In nome della legge (In the Name of the As homme fatal 130–1 Law) 168 n.3 Gledhill, Christine 102, 103, 106, Investigation of a Citizen Above 110, 215, 223 Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino globalisation 115, 124, 167 al di sopra di ogni sospetto) 163–5 Gómez, Carmelo 150 Irma Vep (1996) 117 González, Edith 182 Ismailowitsch, Ladislas 53, 58 n.3 Good-bad girl 4, 136, 139 n.20, Italian black neorealism (Neorealismo 220, 221, 223 Nero) 159, 167 n.3 Goris, Esther 182 Italian film noir 6, 157–9 Gothic-noir 99, 100 Italian giallo 158, 167 n.2 Grahame, Gloria 6, 90, 195, 207 Italian neorealism 5, 127–39, 159, 163 Greer, Jane 71, 204 Italian peplum 162 Gundle, Stephen 133, 134, 139 n.16 and n.17, 157 James, Henry 6, 7 Gynt, Greta 101–7, 111–13 Jiarenqu 113, 125 n.1

Hanson, Curtis 148 Kaplan E Ann 2, 215 Harper, Sue 98, 101 Kar-wai, Wong 113, 120 Hathaway, Henry 13 Kent, Jean 101 Hawks, Howard 13, 71 n.2 Klute 222–3, Hays, Will 84 n.4 Krutnik, Frank 90, 91, 217 Hayworth, Rita 11–12, 104–5, 133–5, 220 L.A. Confidential 148 Headlights in the Fog (Fari nella Lacan, Jacques 15, 20, 24, 27, 31 n.5 nebbia) 139 n.12 and n.9 (Yingxiang) 114, 119 Ladoux, Georges 79 Hershfield, Joanne 170, 172, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) 128, 174, 180 133, 134, 159 Hirsch, Foster 201–3, 212 n.1 Lang, Fritz 188, 197, 207, 209, 221 Hitchcock, Alfred 90, 210 LaPlace, Maria 219 Holiday Killers, The (Assassini dei giorni Last Seduction, The 224 di festa) 168 n.5 Lattuada, Alberto 159, 167 n.3 Homer 10–13, 15, 18, 19–21, 24, 25, Laura 188, 199–200, 207, 212, 221 26, 30, 70 Le Queux, William 72 Homme fatal 99, 131–2, 137, 138 Lee, Ang 114 Hong Kingston, Maxine 118 Lefebvre, Jules-Joseph 57 n.2 Hong Kong film industry 116 Leites, Nathan 98, 220 House by the River, The 197 Lesbian 57, 83, 89, 90, 96, 97 PROOF

Index 233

Leung, Tony 120 Mezzogiorno, Giovanna 166 Li, Gong 116, 119, 123 MGM 80, 81, 82, 129 Lilith 3, 8 n.3, 26, 170 Mildred Pierce 94, 201, 208–9, 221 Lim, Song Hwee 124 Millet, Kate 35 Lingqi, Kong 123 Milton, John 35, 40 Lockwood, Margaret 99–101 Miró, Pilar 149 Lombroso, Cesare 8 n.6, 71 n.3 Modernity 4, 5, 12, 21, 56, 62, Long Goodbye, The 222 66, 72, 74, 75, 81, 82, 116, Looking for Mr Goodbar 223 121, 123, 162 Lost Weekend, The 136 Monroe, Marilyn 13, 14, 16–18, 30 Lost Youth (Gioventù perduta) 168 n.3 Morain, Alfred 79, 80 Lovers (Amantes) 149, 150, 152–4 Moréas, Jean 47 Moreau, Gustave 48–50, 58 n.6, 66 MacMurray, Fred 188 Morocco 57 Madeleine 100–2 Moseley, Rachel 108 Magnani, Anna 159–61, 164 Mujer del puerto, La (The Woman of the Malinche, La 4, 6, 170–4 Port) 174–5 Mallarmé, Stéphane 47 Mujer sin alma, La (Woman Without a Maltese Falcon, The 70 n.2 Soul) 175 Mambo Girl (Mambo Nülang) 120 Muller, Eddie 201, 209 Mamoulian, Rouben 84 n.7 Mulvey, Laura 13–15, 19, 31 n.4, 62, Man in Grey, The 100 121, 215 Mangano, Silvana 5, 133–6, 139 n.16 Murder My Sweet 71 n.2 And Rita Hayworth 133 Murphy, Robert 98, 99, 100, 101, 103 Marcus, Millicent 133, 135, Mussolini, Vittorio 132 138 n.2, 160 My Dreamboat (Chuan) 120 Marengo, Davide 166 Marlowe 222 Naldi, Nita 54 Martin, Angela 2, 107, 136, 212 n.2, Narcejac, Thomas 89, 90 217, 221 Navarro, Ramon 83 Mata Hari 4, 5, 72–85, 171 Nazimova, Alla 54–6, 57, 58 n.7 Mata Hari (film) 80–3 Nazzari, Amedeo 159, 160 and Art Deco 81–2 Neale, Steve 6, 137, 216, 219, 221, Matrixial theory 27–30, 31 n.5 225 n.1 Maxfield, James 70–1 n.2, 204 Negra, Diane 47, 54, 224 McGuire, Dorothy 220 Negri, Pola 54, 172 McKenna, Siobhan 101, 107 Neo-noir 147, 158, 201, 224 McLaren, Anne E 113, 115 Neorealismo nero (Italian black McRobbie, Angela 224 neorealism) 159, 167 n.3 Medusa 3, 31, 160, 162, 166 New Woman 66, 73, 74, 77, 81, 82 Melodrama 63, 64, 83, 98, 101, 107, Niagara 13–18 134, 137, 158, 159, 173, 175, 188, Night Bus (Notturno bus) 166 219, 221 Night Moves 223 Mexican melodrama 179–80 Noble, Andrea 172, 173, 174, 180 Memoirs of a Geisha 114, 115, 119, Nordau, Max 71 n.3 122, 123, 124 Notturno bus (Night Bus) 166 Mérimée, Prosper 8 n.4 Messinger Cypress, Sandra 174 objectification 117, 121, 122, 135 Mexican Revolution 175–6, 180–1 Obsession (Dmytryk) 99 PROOF

234 Index

Obsessione (Ossessione) 5, 127, 128, Quai des Orfèvres 90 129–32, 135, 137, 138 n.3, Queen Christina 84 n.7 139 n.15, 158 Queer 5, 89–97, 130 October Man, The 99 Odyssey, The 10–13, 18, 19–21, 24, 15, Rachilde 58 n.8 26, 30, 70 Rambova, Natascha 54, 58 n.7 Orientalism 31 n.3, 51, 53–4, 74, Regnault, Henri 48, 49, 50, 53, 57 n.2 77, 79, 80, 82, 84 n.5, Renoir, Jean 129, 131, 138 n.5, 190, 123, 134 197 n.2 and n.3 Orientalist 51, 53, 54, 77, 80, 82, 84, Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 58 n.5 123, 124 Revelation (Book of) 41 Ossessione (Obsession) 5, 127, 128, Rider Haggard, H. 3, 26 129–32, 135, 137, 138 n.3, Riso amaro (Bitter Rice) 5, 128, 129, 139 n.15, 158 132–7, 159 71, 204, 209 Rixens, Jean André 53 Roma città aperta (Rome, Open Painted Veil, The 84 n.5 City) 159 Paisà (Paisan) 159 Romanzo criminale 166 Pakula, Alan 222, 224 Rome, Open City (Roma città Papas, Irene 163 aperta) 159 Paradise Lost 35, 40 Rose e pistole 168 n.5 Pastrone, Giovanni 67 Rosi, Francesco 162–3 Péladan, Sâr 58 n.8 Rossellini, Roberto 159 Peters, Jean 16 Petri, Elio 163–4 Said, Edward 77, 83 n.1 Pietrangeli, Antonio 130 Salammbô 50, 65 Pink String and Sealing Wax 100, Salecl, Renate 24, 25, 27 101, 218 Salome 3, 4, 5, 48–58 Pitfall 205–8, 221 Salome (film) 54–6 Place, Janey 1, 2, 106, 130, 136, Salomé (play) 48, 50 138 n.9, 215, 216 Salón México 175 Placido, Michele 166 Santa 173 Post-feminism 214, 224 Sanz, Jorge 149 Postman Always Rings Twice, The Satan 41 (Film) 2, 138 n.9, 199, 201, Scott, Lizabeth 206–7, 211, 220, 221 218, 221 Secret Beyond the Door 100, 197 Postman Always Rings Twice, Senza pietà (Without Pity) 167 n.3 The (Novel) 129, 138 n.5, Serena, Gustavo 64 138 n.10, 199, 201, Shanghai 114, 119, 120, 121 203, 208 She 3, 26 Presumed Innocent 224 Shi mian mai fu (House of Flying Processo alla città (The City on Daggers) 113, 116, 119 Trial) 162 Shohat, Ella 123 Prostitute (see also femme fatale) 1, 4, Signoret, Simone 5, 89, 93–7 76, 78, 115, 119, 120, 123, Sing-song girls 113, 119–20 146, 170 Siren 4, 9–32, 107, 130 Psychoanalytic theory 7, 13, 15, soldadera 175, 176, 182 n.1 20, 27–31, 61, 62, 74, Songs of the Peach Blossom River 90, 161, 215 (Taohua Jiang) 120 PROOF

Index 235

Sophie’s Revenge 124 Tu nombre envenena mis sueños (Your Sorrentino, Paolo 166 Name Poisons My Dreams) 149–54 Spanish Civil War 146, 147, 149, 150 Turn of the Screw, The 6–7 Spicer, Andrew 98, 99, 103, 105, Turner, Lana 2, 129, 138 n.9, 199, 106, 202, 216 201–3, 221 Spider woman 1, 106 Spies (see also femme fatale) 72–88 Vallone, Raf 136, 139 n.20 Spiral Staircase, The 100 Vamp (see also femme fatale) 4, 54, Stables, Kate 147–8, 225 57–8, 102, 117, 134, 147, Stam, Robert 123 158, 171–2 Stanwyck, Barbara 6, 71 n.2, 94, vampire 1, 3, 4 100, 188, 204, 210 Vampires, Les 117 Stoker, Bram 3 Verdú, Maribel 149 Stott, Rebecca 1, 3, 4, 46, 57, 77, 101, Verlaine, Paul 47 110, 155 Vertigo 90, 210 Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The 220 Vesselo, Arthur 99, 103 Suárez, Emma 149 Vidor, Charles 2, 11, 133, 188 Sutherland, Donald 222 Vincendeau, Ginette 91–2, 96, 123, Symbolist movement 3, 5, 47–9, 51, 131, 132, 139 n.13, 216 55, 56, 74 Visconti, Luchino 128, 129, 131, 134, 138 n.5 Take My Life 103 and n.10, 158 Taohua Jiang (Songs of the Peach Volonté, Gian Maria 163 Blossom River) 120 Tasker, Yvonne 224 Walsh, Raoul 71 n.2 Taxi Driver 210 Waterhouse, John William 18, 21 Temptress, The 72 Waterloo Road 99 Teo, Stephen 119–20 We Still Kill the Old Way 163 The City on Trial (Processo alla While the City Sleeps 197 città) 162 White Heat 71 n.2 The End is Known (La fine è nota) Wicked ladies 98 168 n.5 Wicked Lady, The 100, 218 The Fall of Troy (La caduta di Troia) 67 Wilde, Oscar 47, 48, 50, The Woman of the Port (La mujer del 53–5, 58 n.9 Puerto) 174–5 Wilder, Billy 2, 6, 70, 94, 136, 188, They Made Me a Fugitive 99 218, 221 Three Women 223 Williams, Linda Ruth 139 n.20, Tierney, Gene 199, 200, 212, 221 223, 225 Till the End of Time 220 Withers, Googie 101, 108 T-Men 188 Without Pity (Senza pieta) 167 n.3 Todd, Ann 101 Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Tombolo, paradiso nero (Tombolo, Black Hidden Dragon) 114, 116, 119 Paradise) 167 n.3 Wolfenstein, Martha 98, 220 Torre, Roberta 168 n.5 Woman in the Window, The 197 Touch of Evil 188 Woman Warrior, The 118 transnational 3, 5, 114–15, Woman Without a Soul (La mujer sin 122–5, 130, 132, 135, 138, alma) 175 173, 214, 216, Woman’s film 219–21 Trouillebert, Paul Désiré 58 n.5 Women warriors 116–17, 119, 121 PROOF

236 Index

Wuxia pian 113, 114, 116, 119, You Only Live Once 197 125 n.2 Your Name Poisons My Dreams (Tu nombre envenena mis Xu, Gary 123, 125 sueños) 149–54

Yahwist 35–7, 42, 44 Zampa, Luigi 162 Yeoh, Michelle 119, 123 Zavattini, Cesare 128 Yimou, Zhang 113, 114, 124 Ziyi, Zhang 5, 113–26, 130, 137 Yingxiang (Hero) 114, 119 Zola, Emile 190, 193, 197 n.2