Abstract
Diva was one of the most popular films of the 1980s, both inside and outside France. It seemed to mark a break in French cinema, and Beineix has been seen, along with Besson and Carax, as part of a 'new new wave'. Indeed Frederic Jameson, in an influential essay published in 1982, defined Diva as the first French postmodernist film, dissecting its combination of old and new.' This essay will be concerned with that combination of old and new. After reviewing Jameson's argument, the essay will explore what makes Diva 'new' (the parody of the traditional policier, the use of the image, and its apparently contemporary concerns with the status of women), and what makes the film 'old' (the status of women, and the neo-Romantic quest). The aim is to develop jameson's argument and to sketch out an answer at the end of his essay: is Diva 'regressive or conservative recuperation' or 'a historically original imaginary solution of real contradictions, which may be explored for Utopian elements and possibilities, including some whole new aesthetic in emergence' (Jameson, p. 62; he is quoting LeviStrauss)?
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