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

the films’ production, in the roles of writing sources or novels, as adaptors or screenwriters,
or as female directors or female producers” (Hanson 2007:7). Such films, moreover,
portray female points of view in complex ways which question the abovementioned
polarity of noir female characterisation.
Just as noirs are more about the how rather than the what in their crime detection
plots and with their femmes fatales, we understand that at the end of the film they are
caught and eventually die, and yet it is the way that they die that makes an impression on
us. Feminist work on film noir and gender, such as that by Christine Gledhill and Janey
Place, demonstrate this. Gledhill argues that in film noir “certain highly formalized
inflections of plot, character and visual style dominated at the expense of (...)
comprehensive solution of crime (...) which offer[s] a world of action defined in male
terms: the locales, situations, iconography, violence” (Gledhill 1998:27). All these are
indeed conventions suggesting the male domain:
Women in this world tend to split into two categories: there are those who work on
the fringes of the underworld and are defined by the male criminal ambience of the
thriller – bar-flies, night-club singers, expensive mistresses, femmes fatales, and
ruthless gold-diggers who marry and murder rich old men for their money; and
then there are women on the outer margins of this world, wives, long-suffering
girl-friends, would-be fiancés who are victims of male crime, sometimes the object
of the hero’s protection, and often points of vulnerability in his masculine armour.
(Gledhill 1998:28)
When discussing about film noir and its potential classification in the genre debate,
the role of the femme fatale has to be considered since she is characterised as unknowable.
This fact further accentuates her sexuality and brings a new range of female characters of
the forties out from the shadows. Marie Ann Doane describes in a particularly interesting
way the noir femme fatale and the issue of knowledge and its possibility or impossibility,
articulated through matters of femininity and visibility:
In the classical Hollywood cinema, there are two types of films within which the
contradictions involved in the patriarchal representation of woman become most
acute – melodrama and film noir. Of the two, it is film noir which establishes a
disturbance of vision as the premise of the film’s signifying system. The lighting
style implies a distortion of an originally clear and readable image and the
consequent crisis of vision. Since the epistemological cornerstone of the classical
text is the dictum, “the image does not lie”, film noir tends to flirt with the limits of
this system, the guarantee of its readability oscillating between an image which
often conceals a great deal and a voice-over which is not always entirely credible.
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