Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

titlecard when the film opens alerts us to the theme of mental collapse, the impact of
psychoanalysis, the demented mise-en-scène, and the lighting for dramatic effect.
From the camera’s position, the Usher mansion, at least from the inside, is
extraordinarily visualised. The vast gloomy spaces of the mansion with its dark corners,
the wind blowing threateningly through the windows, become the central space of the film.
After all, “Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, and the house all shared one common
soul”, says the author in his book. Indeed, it is visually in my opinion that the film excels
since it manages through photography, camera prisms and multiple exposures to show the
altered mental state of the characters, with a sense of cosmic anguish and dementia.
Some of the key stylistics techniques used by Watson and Weber in this film reveal
the immediate influence of Robert Wiener’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Murnau’s
Nosferatu from the German cinema, namely the theme of Doppelgänger 22 or the puzzling
montages using mirror effects and Expressionistic sets. In fact, the eccentric mise-en-scène
projects a certain degree of narrative endorsement, however bizarrely, through its
disconcerting visions, namely frames filled with optically colourful images of Madeline’s
undead face, or the excellent overlay of two shots of the same staircase in such a way so as
to resemble some twisted cord of rope, and expressing the idea of the steps leading to the
tomb.
Since most of the accounts of the origins of film noir have predominantly put the
emphasis on the hard-boiled tradition and its male-centredness on the detective-hero, this
chapter on Gothic Romance aims to show the Gothic legacy in noir Hollywood
productions. At a time when female audiences were increasing, the Hollywood heads of
production knew how to take advantage of this emergent form in the American forties. The
first really successful Gothic noir was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). The film was
based on a Daphne du Maurier novel and was produced by David O. Selznick, who
22 Traditionally, Doppelgänger has come to designate any double or look-alike of a person, a shadow self that
is believed to accompany every person, but normally somebody evil or the bearer of bad omen, like death.
The topic of the Doppelgänger was also central to the German cinema, as I will show in the next chapter. In
film noir, many productions concentrated on the doublings of characters, like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt
(1943), Siodmak’s Dark Mirror (1946), or Reinhardt’s The Guilty (1947). Interestingly, these “double”
characters are all family-related: uncle/niece; identical twins; two sisters, respectively. Some of these noirs
examples are discussed next.
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