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

other people and developing a calculated indifference to the bodies with which one shares
public transportation and the street” (Dimendberg 2004:22).
Secondly, social instability caused by the breakup of traditional beliefs and patterns
of behaviour portrayed through the spatiality in film noir is shown to be historical and
material rather than merely existential. As Edward Dimendberg puts it:
Though frequently analyzed in relation to political conflicts of postwar America,
film noir has often been studied in isolation from the geographic dynamics of the
period. Treating the city as expression of some underlying myth, theme, or vision
has tended to stifle the study of spatiality in film noir as a historical content as
significant as its more commonly studied formal and narrative features.
(Dimendberg 2004:9)
Dimendberg’s analysis is an attempt to reconstruct the noir philosophy of despair
around the notion that results from the success of form over content. It tries to draw some
interesting parallels with contemporary theories of spatiality, and articulating them with a
“space of representation”. Thus, often adapted from crime stories set in the metropolis, film
noir possesses a literary background that explains its enduring anxiety with the menacing
but captivating city. Its powerful and inescapable presence in noir productions is indeed
derived from the hard-boiled writers whose novels already involved the representation of
specific spatialities. Whether conveying the spirit of Hammett’s San Francisco, Chandler’s
Los Angeles, or New York neighbourhoods such as Greenwich Village, the spatial
movement of the noir protagonists varies in these films. We can observe this in a set of
noirs such as This Gun for Hire, where we see Phillip Raven moving from San Francisco to
Los Angeles in an effort to get even with Gates for setting him up; Detour in which Al
Roberts leaves New York for Los Angeles in search of the “stardom” in Hollywood; or,
Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice, a drifter that lands up in a small
California roadside café. In the striking opening to Possessed (1947), for instance, Louise
Howell Graham (Joan Crawford) wanders dazed through a real downtown Los Angeles
asking for “David” as if in a trance. The empty streets, the tall, silent buildings, the oblique,
early morning light which casts elongated shadows and the use of rain-streaked windows
are all a ghostly projection of her tormented character, blurring the distinction between
reality and Louise’s imagination.
The opposite, that is moving from the city to the country, also occurs in films such
as Tourneur’s Out of the Past to be analysed later, or in Mann’s Desperate (1947), which
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