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

the idea was to maintain standards of quality since they produced high-cost films; however,
for the second, these films constituted an accessible type of product that could attract an
audience at a lower cost. To a degree, Hollywood (while overseeing all these aspects
through a professional control over production and marketing) developed and transformed
new measures for narrative elaboration and suppression. Among the many different factors
that I describe throughout this work, the need to produce low budget films and be as
creative within distinctive styles as possible contributed to the differentiation of product
from that of the established A-films from the major studios. After the years of the
Depression, a need to attract audiences back to the cinema was strongly felt, and thus Bfilm
production as a part of double features exhibition became a calculated measure to
redress the situation.
As I explain in the chapter “Censorship and Politics”, film noir is a form
symptomatic of its own time and a reflection of production policies in both artistic and
technological terms. With the emergence of B-films in the market, they were soon
perceived by filmmakers as a cheaper way of being different and as an opportunity to
experiment with cinema techniques. The demands of wartime production, together with the
ideological shift that embraced the controversial issues mentioned before, led filmmakers
and film personnel to turn to the production of B-noirs, in stark contrast to other
standardised A-film forms which were much more in conformity with the requirements of
the Motion Picture Production Code. On the other hand, in practical terms, the appearance
of B-films not only meant customers were able to watch two different movies for the price
of one single entrance but film noir also provided them with new sophisticated pleasures,
with its generally masculine orientation, which would reveal itself to be successful in this
changed context of reception.
Film noir became thus the form of choice for certain studio companies to survive
and prosper by producing appealing adult entertainment throughout the forties. From the
viewers’ perspective, this type of film challenged and unsettled the spectator,
differentiating it from all other art forms. With this kind of complicit game at the emotional
level, so to speak, the spectator obtains his or her satisfaction and pleasure mediated
through a set of rules and conventions. We might enquire then why some studios
manifested a dismissive attitude towards these films, while others were eager to maintain
them. Part of the answer to this issue seems to be that this particular kind of alienation, with
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