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

its modernist sensibility, enabled film noir to embody a critical stance within popular
cinema, which had customarily sought to reassure and comfort its audience. Spectators
could see in film noir a fissure opening up and a space emerging not bounded by the usual
rules and inhibitions.
Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton concluded that film noir with its “oneiric,
bizarre, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel” vision was in consonance with the pessimism and
angst felt widely in American society. Viewers would see their own feelings of distrust and
anguish reflected in these noir movies, and therefore these elements, expressed in terms of
their complex contradictions in motives and actions, would be brought out in interaction
with the spectator. In this Part III, I thus seek to present the various elements that constitute
the thematic contents (the city as jungle, the instability of sexual relations, corruption and
perversity as endemic, etc) and motifs of film noir, and ultimately to comment on what
these films tell us about American society of the forties at its most unvarnished.
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