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

Abstract

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 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.