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

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Figure 20. The Last Laugh The influence of lighting codes in German Expressionism reinforces our implicit understanding of the characters’ thinking in film noir. These codes are particularly important and set a stylistic precedent for expressing innermost conflicts and obsessions and repressed violence and vulnerability. The type of irrational violence - mixed with strong doses of horror so appropriate to that period - is to be found in productions already mentioned, such as Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks) and Nosferatu (1922). Both the young poet (William Dieterle) and the motivated young broker, Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), respectively, play the roles of panicking men, manipulated this way and that by older figures who try to control them in what becomes a love triangle. Different noir productions contain the same love triangle trope, such as in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Both are taken from James M. Cain’s novels of treachery and murder which, as we know, became the noir films’ ability to depict amour fou, that is, love relationships which go beyond the bounds of the normal. Likewise, both productions disclose femmes fatales, Cora Smith (Lana Turner) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Whereas the former is helpless and feels trapped in her marriage to Nick (Cecil Kellaway), Phyllis is much more manipulative, constructing her 106
plots with calculating precision. German cinema also featured classic femmes fatales before 1940s film noir. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929) casts Louise Brooks in the role of Lulu, an enticing and free-spirited girl who seems to have all men fall under her domineering and yet somehow also naive spell. Even highly respectable Dr Schön (Fritz Kortner) and his son Alwa (Francis Lederer) find it difficult to get away from the allure of this femme fatale and are drawn into an inescapable spiral into tragedy. The whole film is shot deploying a sensual and Expressionist décor (notable work by cinematographer Günther Krampf) so as to accentuate male sexual obsession and entrapment. Another example that immediately comes to mind is Joseph von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), starring Emil Jannings in the role of Immanuel Rath, the middle-aged Professor who becomes infatuated with a nightclub dancer, Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich). One night he happens to go to “The Blue Angel” club where Lola works, and inevitably falls in love with her. In my opinion, this film bears striking similarities with Lang’s Scarlet Street, analysed in detail in Part IV. In both, conventional men fall for beautiful women, Kitty (Joan Bennett) and Lola, respectively, and are reduced to figures of ridicule by these cold-blooded and manipulative femmes fatales. Immanuel Rath falls short of his strong beliefs and is laughed at behind his back. In both films, the men are bedazzled by the women’s allure (Kitty first appears in her transparent plastic raincoat like a bonbon in cellophane; Lola dresses in showbiz outfits, exposing her shoulders and thighs, merely the promise of sexual availability), and with an energy that makes the men’s fall not only believable but inevitable. Finally both directors convey the attitude that those who live by their imagination can become helpless victims of it in a cruelly realistic world. Considered by many to be the first film noir, Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) demonstrates the most overt influences yet of German Expressionism on American film noir. This unheralded B-film serves as a good way to show Weimar cinema taking root in America. Firstly, we have Peter Lorre, as the stranger, the psychopathic male who brutally throat-slashes his victims, and newspaper reporter Mike Ward (John McGuire) who is the star witness at the trial of an innocent taxi driver, Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Frank Partos writes a script which stresses paranoia and claustrophobia, especially when we see the stranger lurking in the shadows on the stairwell of the building 107
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Joaquim da Silva Universidade de Av
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To Antonio, who made this possible.
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Acknowledgements This long journey
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Finally, I owe a huge debt of grati
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keywords abstract Film Noir, genre,
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2 Social and Political Influences o
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2.4 Joseph H. Lewis................
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Figure 42. Force of Evil ..........
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I. Introduction: Paving the Way for
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term that the film industry itself
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about which films themselves consti
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also, in the films’ fundamental n
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American films after the Nazi occup
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we also find a disruption of the wo
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oth in these French productions of
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Hollywood feature films but it did
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throughout this work); and c) to di
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odies, or as killers and crooks, bu
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these films was to confer on them a
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writer, director, producer, and art
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cinema does not have the power of
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Before working on The Dark Mirror,
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y taking it “from the outside.”
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and many, if not most, films would
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1.1.1 Dashiell Hammett In 1929, Das
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tough appearance, by their occupati
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Apart from “The Continental Op”
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unsettling when for example shootin
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1.1.2 Raymond Chandler Raymond Chan
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Figure 4. The Big Sleep the chaotic
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eleased to the big screen by MGM wi
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most fastidious visions of London i
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hometowns and move into bigger citi
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Double Indemnity started the trend
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has happened, but, as if hypnotized
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Page 75 and 76: Home (1937) - were two living proof
Page 77 and 78: which collapses the distinction bet
Page 79 and 80: Figure 10. Deadline at Dawn Alex’
Page 81 and 82: 1.1.6 William Riley Burnett Another
Page 83 and 84: Figure 11. High Sierra The Asphalt
Page 85 and 86: 1.1.7 Conclusions What made the det
Page 87 and 88: fiction managed to provide for a de
Page 89 and 90: escalation in illegal drinking plac
Page 91 and 92: Ben Hecht story and despite being p
Page 93 and 94: Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?”
Page 95 and 96: The third originating gangster movi
Page 97 and 98: part of the recurrent patterns of v
Page 99 and 100: protagonist of Edgar Ulmer’s Deto
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Page 103 and 104: 1.3 The Gothic Romance 87 And trave
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Page 107 and 108: In Rebecca the beautiful, desirable
Page 109 and 110: forties. Thematically, the represen
Page 111 and 112: To complicate this matter further,
Page 113 and 114: trampled under by war and revolutio
Page 115 and 116: he says, when Expressionism ended,
Page 117 and 118: These early Expressionist films, wi
Page 119 and 120: student, Balduin (Paul Wegener hims
Page 121: (Tragedy of the Street, 1927, aka W
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Page 127 and 128: 1.5 French Poetic Realism Poetic Re
Page 129 and 130: (Michèle Morgan), whose godfather
Page 131 and 132: strikingly atmospheric view of the
Page 133 and 134: Jean Paulhan, editor of La Nouvelle
Page 135 and 136: Julien Duvivier’s Pépé Le Moko
Page 137 and 138: the combination of lighting effects
Page 139 and 140: peculiar expressionistic lighting a
Page 141 and 142: Figure 28. Son of Frankenstein This
Page 143 and 144: Figure 29. Murders in the Rue Morgu
Page 145 and 146: alienation mixed with nuanced perfo
Page 147 and 148: 2 Social and Political Influences o
Page 149 and 150: Liberal reforms soon became a spuri
Page 151 and 152: Polonsky, Jules Dassin, and Edward
Page 153 and 154: which are themselves historical eve
Page 155 and 156: Production Code Administration. Thi
Page 157 and 158: In this particular case, one can se
Page 159 and 160: Neff: Will you be here too? Phyllis
Page 161 and 162: against any possible theft of groce
Page 163 and 164: 2.3 Postwar Readjustment If the moo
Page 165 and 166: In this group of films, the bleak a
Page 167 and 168: explain, these noir heroes of the f
Page 169 and 170: (Gilda, White Heat, Scarlet Street,
Page 171 and 172: seething excitations” and adds th
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Romanticism present at the very hea
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to persist and overcome difficultie
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III. Noir Thematics 1 Essential Ele
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its modernist sensibility, enabled
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Wyatt), cooks breakfast, domestic r
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structures of constituted authority
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1.2 Space and the Noir City Film no
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other people and developing a calcu
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I am the city. Hub and heart of Ame
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1.3 Trouble With Girls: The Femme F
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intelligent and powerful, if destru
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significant discussion of film noir
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Nevertheless, the message is quite
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Another example of the evolution of
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deceiving women. Like many of their
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Either as a femme fatale or an homm
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1.5 Dazed and Confused: The Voiceov
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an impersonal “you” giving the
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of war veterans who, unfolding thei
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1.6 Noir Atmospherics: Cinematograp
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John Alton’s highly stylised phot
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Figure 41. Stranger on the Third Fl
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indoctrination in the movie in the
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in the popular imagination. While t
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1.7 Sounds of the City: Jazz Soundt
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music, combines with images of patr
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Figure 45. Out of the Past Non-dieg
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ealm of near-explicit sexual metaph
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the two, affirming that “Jazz is
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City, Paramount’s Union Station a
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In my analysis of The Big Combo in
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Consequently, in the fifties, we st
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2 Noir and the Film Auteur 2.1 Aute
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noticeably the case, for example, w
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point out the fact that it is only
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elationship to the way a director t
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2.1.1 Billy Wilder Billy Wilder pla
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performance is full of understated
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Figure 54. Sunset Boulevard Wilder
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Figure 55. Ace in the Hole All of B
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2.1.2 Orson Welles He may have only
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For example, in the scene above (fi
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As Leo Braudy in The World in a Fra
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slanting compositions, and brillian
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2.1.3 Otto Preminger Austrian film
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plans, June still shows her love fo
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Figure 61. Where the Sidewalk Ends
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project my viewpoint on the audienc
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postulated as the “doctrine of si
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pouvait espérer sortir de la déno
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I am at the barber's, and a copy of
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certain community, our subjective r
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interpretant” (Stam 1992:6). Here
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The notion of “text” as a disco
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only agree that these disciplines s
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2 The Universe of Motifs and Symbol
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Andrew Sarris once wrote that “If
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exception to this rule, his movies
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independent production companies in
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Figure 66. Double Indemnity In the
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Figure 67. Scarlet Street The symbo
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contorted Expressionistic grimace,
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Figure 70. Metropolis The clock mot
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Figure 71. Strangers on a Train The
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“When I was young I wanted to be
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themselves in the projection of inn
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woman in the portrait throughout I
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scenes as the attachment is purely
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(namely The Spiral Staircase and Ou
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Chris meets by accident, is a hellc
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2.1.1.4 Conclusion All in all, ther
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Question: Scarlet Street had the sa
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an accepted and well-known screenwr
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Siodmak’s next two films for Univ
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money from Dundee. A more harrowing
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2.2.1 The Spiral Staircase (1946) a
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here increased by the unsteady blac
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Figure 83. The Spiral Staircase Thi
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Warren, making either of them the p
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2.2.1.2 The “Optical Unconscious
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camera is expressive, as it informs
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ordering” - appears to match this
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eyewitness, but at the same time, a
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Figure 87. The Spiral Staircase Bas
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While Cross implicitly acknowledges
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Figure 89. Affair in Trinidad Other
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However, much of this iconography t
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long, wooden staircase while trying
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Figure 93. The Spiral Staircase Fig
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of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The B
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almost part of a game, emphasising
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2.3 Jacques Tourneur Born in Paris
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a laughing audience), and broken la
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violent mishaps could have led to h
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writers like Dashiell Hammett (who,
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Chuck Tatum, a cynical, frustrated
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on, Ann, who represents his hope fo
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This kind of temporal manipulation
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ought forward by the characters of
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found Kathie: “I was glad it was
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Figure 102. Out of the Past In this
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Figure 104. The Lady from Shanghai
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Jeff: Give him time. Kathie: You ar
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Figure 106. Out of the Past The sce
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Gun Crazy, a barrage of police gunf
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2.4 Joseph H. Lewis Considered as a
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untold storied of ordinary men and
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through windows, to provide the ind
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2.4.1 The Big Combo (1955) and the
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of most noir films including The Bi
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2.4.1.1 “First is First and Secon
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In The Big Combo the unconscious tr
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It is not only in terms of narrativ
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Although the idea is not to go into
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Figure 113. Scarlet Street Neff’s
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2.4.1.2 The Big Combo and Generic T
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and knowing they are both surrounde
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As the noir movement entered the la
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V. Conclusions: 1 Genre Revisited T
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on social aspects through a dramati
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Buscombe is right: if we take a gen
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constructions that make it difficul
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Such factors have been scrutinised
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Thematically, noir films as a group
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While enforcement of the Production
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are “as often nihilistic, cynical
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which is normally not associated wi
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morality brought about by these noi
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It is within this cinematic and cri
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____________ (1994). The Semiotic C
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____________ (1992b). Farewell, My
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E Easthope, Antony (1993). Contempo
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Greenberg, Joel & Higham, Charles (
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James, David E. (2005). The Most Ty
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Malkiewicz, Kris (1986). Film Light
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N Naremore, James (1978). The Magic
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Polan, Dana (1986). Power and Paran
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____________ (2006). Ava Gardner:
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Sullivan, Ellie (1986). Jacques Lac
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Wilson, Edmund (1962). Classics and
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Appendix I: Annotated Filmography T
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Beware, My Lovely RKO 1952. Prod: C
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Christmas Holiday Univ 1944. Prod:
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Dark Corner, The Fox 1946. Prod: Fr
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Framed Col 1947. Prod: Jules Schern
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House on 92 nd Street, The Fox 1945
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Killing, The UA 1956. Prod: James B
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Mildred Pierce WB 1945. Prod: Jerry
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One Way Street Univ 1950. Prod: Leo
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Repeat Performance EL 1947. Prod: A
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Stranger, The RKO 1946. Prod: S.P.
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Unsuspected, The WB 1947. Prod: Cha
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B) Other Relevant Filmography The f
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Last Laugh, The ScreenSound 1924. P
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Appendix II The Motion Picture P
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VIII. Religion 1. No film or episod
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B. By reason of the mobility of fil
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Reasons Underlying the Particular A
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VIII. Religion The reason why minis
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146, 152, 186, 192, 229, 250, 298,
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high-contrast, 11, 46, 172 Highway
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350, 352, 353, 354, 356, 357, 359,
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Walsh, Raoul, 56, 57, 66, 73, 223,
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