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

that he is involved with a crook. When he falls in love with Roman’s lady, Lorna (Michèle
Morgan), things get complicated and the chase begins immediately but mostly in Chuck’s
tortured mind. This bizarre chase truly is about a self lost in amnesia and delusion, a motif
common in many of Cornell Woolrich’s dark and oppressive characters adapted for
American noir.
Lady in the Lake, of which Robert Montgomery is not only the director but he also
plays detective Phillip Marlowe through the agency of the camera lens, is the epitome of
the subjective camera (p. 45). The visual trickery of this subjective-camera experiment was
considered at that time an important innovation (even if it did not fully meet
Montgomery’s expectations). Together with Murder, My Sweet, this Marlowe film
introduced some stylistic and narrative techniques which would become more and more
influential in subsequent noir films: notably first-person voiceover narration and
flashbacks.
From the illustrations above, it is possible to notice that a good number of noir
films reflect the disillusioned desires and active fears of their protagonists in the physical
world. The subjective emphasis found in these noir productions, through dream sequences
or visual traits, betrays its inspiration in the German style and simultaneously bears the
influence of the first-person narration and flashbacks so commonplace in the crime novels
of the hard-boiled writers, as seen in earlier chapters. In short, the extremely calculated and
carefully composed mise-en-scène that was anti-naturalistic found in Expressionist cinema
was also used in film noir. In addition, Expressionism’s narrative patterns also influenced
film noir - the complexity of narration, that Thomas Elsaesser stresses, was indeed another
common major characteristic to both filmic movements, which cultivated decentred
narratives, placed in frame tales or doubled stories, voiceovers and flashback narrations.
So far I have acknowledged how Expressionism (essentially a movement of artists
and intellectuals against bourgeois values) functioned as an attempt to convey an
underlying truth through the distortions and abstractions of external forms, as a challenge
to express a character’s subjectivity, and often demented individuality. For that purpose,
Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague), which was
first released in 1913, but remade in Expressionist style in 1926, is another important film
and part of the list above of seven films presented by Barry Salt. The movie uses the
Expressionist device of the double or the Doppelgänger and it tells the story of a young
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