Formes fatales: The naturalism of Zola, the poetic realism of Renoir, and American film noir

In this thesis, I define cinecriture, or film writing, by applying psychoanalytic theory to literary and filmic texts. I take up similar fatalistic scenarios in works of French poetic realism (1930-1939) and American film noir (1941-1953) to demonstrate how film and scenario elude fixed or destined meanings. A reading of Zola's La Bete humaine uses Civilization and Its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle to discern those elements of the novel which create its repetitive returns to violence and aggression and to show how the "blockage" of these texts returns unceasingly to the same preoccupations. Zola's novel coincides with and dramatizes the Freudian attempt to systematize of the human psyche by means of fixed laws in search of origins.;Jean Renoir's version of La Bete humaine displays archetypal content in its identification with Greek myth, but the surface of the adaptation bodies forth a new and original cinecriture that sets cinema in play--or at odds with--the myths of origin found in Zola. This double movement is shown by coordinating givens of literary and film history, studying the film closely, and projecting its themes and obsessions toward what the film seems to herald: the convention of film noir. Renior's film translates the obsessional in Zola as well as his fatality of heredity, but, in doing so, flattens and de-dramatizes the novel's realism and addressed problems of optics and visibility.;Because of their unabated restaging of forms of violence, I argue for a congruency of the texts of Zola, Renoir, and film noir. American film noir is a cinema of confinement, of concentrationary space that seemingly has no history in it. Yet the violence of the Second World War is felt in the perpetual war of the characters. The psychoanalytic concepts of an originary memory, originary violence, the primal scene, and the return of the repressed are displayed in film noir in ways that are specific to the medium of cinema and that account for what is essential in the spectator's relation to the film act.