Female characters as neurotic male projections in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Francois Truffaut's La Sirène du Mississippi

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 10 University of Würzburg (Neuphilologisches Institut) language: English abstract: This paper will try to illustrate the basic concepts of negative femininity and positivemasculinity in film noir created by the male gaze. By making use of feminist filmtheory and especially Laura Mulvey's essay Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema(1975) Alfred Hitchcock's acclaimed film noir Vertigo (1958) will be compared toFrançois Truffaut's very own version of a film noir La Siréne du Mississippi3 (1969).The focus of the comparison will lie on the display of misogyny in order to hold up malehegemony and hide male neurosis and dependency.