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

To complicate this matter further, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca launched a new
discussion about the difficulty of separating genres. The film is – correctly, in my opinion -
seen as the first Gothic noir, but also as a Female Gothic film, since it has a style and
context of production which are common to both categories. Some maintain that the only
thing that distinguishes the film from noir is precisely the fact that Rebecca gives the
central role of the protagonist to a woman. However, film noir does not at all times deal
with characters that are involuntarily trapped in a difficult situation, striving against
random cruel fate, and usually doomed. Or that all noir plots always involve a hard-boiled
detective or a disenchanted male, who, because of greed or sexual attraction (to a femme
fatale), commits violent acts and crimes, and in the end both are either punished or simply
killed for their actions. Gothic noir films adopt many of the same insecure position in
relation to society’s injustices, as the male-centred dramas of classic noir. In the chapter
that I devote to the homme fatal, I will also refer to the expressive elements that disclose
and dramatise the gender conflicts and dynamics at the heart of the noir film cycle.
Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase will also be an essential film to demonstrate that Gothic
noir needs to be analysed from both a technical and a feminist point of view.
In any case, the application of the term genre seems to encapsulate a group of films
under the same designation of “film noir”, excluding the possibility of any variation, or
possible connectedness between the narratives. I consider this later and propose that maybe
the best hypothesis is to avoid setting such rigid boundaries for film noir, though I am
aware that from an academic and scholarly point of view it is helpful to have some
categorisation of this kind.
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