ABSTRACT
The first French postmodernist film enjoys an advantage denied its American equivalents (those of Brian De Palma): the privilege of a historical conjuncture. May 10, 1981, the date of the first left government in France for thirty-five years, draws a line beneath the disappointing neo-romantic and post-Godard French production of the 1970s, and allows Diva (1981), directed by Jean-Jacques Beneix, to emerge (rightly or wrongly) with all the prestige of a new thing, a break, a turn. As with Godard (but the comparison stops there), the novelty would seem to lie in the realm of the image; several generations of post-Hitchcock productions have taught us to ignore (or at best to tolerate) the thriller framework as a pretext for watching something elsealthough it would have been interesting to reread this brutal and perfunctory, amateurish plot in terms of the tradition of the French policier itself, so unfamiliar and so little known here.
