Neuchatel Female Trouble Retrospective Blurs Gender and Genre

variety.com:

Ben Croll Upon taking the reins of the Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) last year, incoming artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder marked his first edition with Scream Queer, a thematic retrospective that explored the thorny and thrillingly diverse forms of queer representation in genre fare.

Now building on the success of that well-received program, the NIFFF director wanted to deliver a sequel of sorts. “We want to continue last year’s investigations and to take our thematic journeys a step further,” Walder explains. “You could say that this focus will continue to ask and answer the same questions with a slightly different emphasis.” And so here comes Female Trouble, a 20-film, century-spanning spotlight built on a French play-on-words that blurs gender and genre.

Starting with Mario Roncoroni’s silent serial “Filibus,” which mixed sci-fi motifs with gender-fluidity and lesbian desire all the way back in 1915, and on through Jacques Tourneur’s “Cat People” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” some three decades later, the program will spotlight a number of recognizable archetypes from cinema’s golden age. “The Femme Fatale is a woman who leads men to ruin,” says Walder. “Whereas the Nasty Woman of early cinema goes to the theater, smokes and contradicts her husband in public, breaking out of the role assigned to her by society.

But even if vilified – with the Femme Fatale usually punished by end of the film – these characters are, paradoxically, often the most free.” Skipping a few generations ahead, the retrospective programmers made a point not to dwell on the substantial number of rape-and-revenge thrillers that defined the heyday of exploitation cinema. “Even if we could contextualize them, we just got