Essay Competition

I initially became interested in my paper’s subject matter shortly after arriving on campus, when PSU’s student-run theater—the Fifth Avenue Cinema—held a screening of Mississippi Mermaid projected from a 35-mm film print. I had not seen 35-mm film projected before (my only theatrical viewing experiences had been after the adoption of digital projection in commercial cinemas) and was amazed by the magical quality of the image as well as by the narrative of the film. I was particularly captivated by the character Marion Vergano and the quality she represented—an essence that seemed to be at the heart of numerous other literary and cinematic works.

Due to the formative aspect of the experience, I often thought of Mississippi Mermaid subsequently and considered it whenever I saw apparent parallels in other works. Although I had previously heard of Truffaut, I had not investigated his other films extensively until I read his book-length interview with Alfred Hitchcock. Since I had seen most of Hitchcock’s films and appreciated his work, I began watching Truffaut’s films. It was in this context that I first saw The Bride Wore Black, which I noticed had many similarities to Mississippi Mermaid and had been made only a year before it; indeed, the earlier film told the story from Julie Kohler’s perspective, in contrast with the focus on Louis’s viewpoint in the later film.

After I took a course with Prof. Berrettini on film noir—a genre of which the femme fatale was a major element and arguably a defining characteristic—I began thinking of both films again. As with many scholarly terms, I had previously heard the phrase outside the academic context, but I had not fully understood the significance of the femme fatale both in cinematic history and as a representation of women on screen that could hold societal implications.

 

However, it was only when I took another course with Prof. Berrettini, this time on film noir outside Hollywood, that I considered writing about the topic for a school paper. For me, the greatest surprise at this stage was to see Mississippi Mermaid again and recognize that Marion Vergano initially presents herself as Julie Roussel. I had forgotten this detail, and the fact that the central character in The Bride Wore Black is also named Julie led me to research the connection.

Another surprising experience when I conducted my research for the paper was to see how many writers have considered one or both films without placing them explicitly in connection with one another or without analyzing the role of the femme fatale. Studies of the films tend either to survey Truffaut’s career—briefly discussing each of his films in the context of his life rather than the works’ narratives—or focus entirely on a single film, analyzing it without necessarily relating it to other similar works. Given Truffaut’s fame, the former approach was more common, and I regretted having to omit from my final paper an excellent career-surveying article written by David Bordwell when he was a graduate student in 1971.

 

I also had to remove most of the material on Truffaut and much of the background on the femme fatale that I originally wanted to include. The paper needed to examine the stories of Julie and Marion, not the men who try to constrain them, and I felt an excessive focus on the director would weaken the analysis I intended. Nonetheless, I chose to end with the question of the femme fatale’s significance for Truffaut, as his commitment to record the character type in multiple films made me wonder what woman or women he may have known who formed the model for Julie and Marion.