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

term that the film industry itself employed. For the latter, generic norms obviously offered
(as they still do) the advantage of simplifying decision-making processes, and, from an
iconographic viewpoint, posters and billboards helped draw viewers into the “generic
audience” category. I further show that genres were an artificial construct with the purpose
of making life easier for the movie business. I recognise that genre guided audience
expectation and that studios were thus identified by their own production of films of a
certain genre type: for instance, Warner Brothers was known for contemporary social
problems; MGM for musicals; Paramount for sophisticated comedy-dramas, and Republic
and Monogram for Westerns, and so on.
A certain identicalness was also demanded regarding the exhibitions of films.
Theatres would first feature A-productions of about ninety minutes followed by B- or lowbudget
films which could often be screened in less than seventy-five minutes. These films
were cheaper to produce as they required less lighting and smaller (not so well-known)
casts, and limited-scale sets. I therefore suggest that film noir was a result of the B- crime
film (a genre in its own right), suited to low budgets, and much associated with a particular
studio – RKO. Content as well as form were decisive in making this type of film, many of
them turning out to be some of the best noir films. 1 In order to keep spectators glued to the
story as it went into its second reel, the film plot had to be constructed in a simple manner,
with a strong graphic impact (somewhat different from the hard-boiled novels and pulp
stories of the Black Mask magazine from which they may have been derived), and not
liable to open interpretations. This group of films ended up reflecting the “dark” mood of
anguish and insecurity that existed in the American society of the time.
The diachronic path of film noir is, in fact, splintered, making it difficult to apply
practical categorisation, and it constantly evokes the problem Raymond Borde and Étienne
Chaumeton identified in their Panorama du film noir américain: “The existence over the
last few years of a “série noire” in Hollywood is obvious. Defining its essential traits is
1 Throughout this study, I refer to the fact that many actors and actresses whose names are closely associated
with film noir would not know at that time that the movies they were playing in were actually noir
productions. The best example to me still is a roundtable interview that was presented on TCM channel with
Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, and Colleen Gray (whom I had the privilege to interview as well
about this issue). The programme was called The Dark Days of Summer, and the four of them unequivocally
replied they had no idea that they were playing in noir productions. The same point applies from the
consumption point of view; no moviegoer consciously chose to watch a noir film instead of a musical or a
Western.
3