Silent Divas: The Femmes Fatales of the Italian Cinema Muto

Abstract

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 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.