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

another matter” (Borde & Chaumeton 2002:17). 2 This is precisely the task that Part I of
this thesis undertakes: comprehending the complexity of the “noir phenomenon”, its
instinctive ambiguousness (in which lies much of its fascination), interrogating its traits
and core features, offering a broad cultural history of noir by means of a discussion and
analysis of a corpus of films that have come to constitute the noir movement.
It may seem strange for a group of films natively American to be identified by a
French term, film noir or “dark cinema”. Some French critics were the first to isolate
certain specific features in various American movies, which could only be released in
France after World War II. Film noir as a descriptive term was coined by cineaste Nino
Frank back in 1946 as a response to the release of four crime thrillers – The Maltese
Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity (1944) and Laura (1944) -
and what seemed to him, and other critics alike, a distinctly darkened tone to contemporary
American cinema, with their bleak vision of present-day life in American cities. This group
of sophisticated film critics became aware of a thematic similarity that existed between
these films and several novels published under the generic title of Série Noire or “dark
series”. Its later publishing competitor, Fleuve Noir, used the French word for “black” to
refer to some type of detective fiction. This way, most of the Série Noire titles were then
translations of American novels and represented the work of such authors as Dashiell
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, and Horace McCoy, as I
shall show in Section 1, when dealing with hard-boiled novels and pulp short stories.
Regardless of any possible dates for when the classic noir period commenced and
ended, film noir “has fulfilled its role by creating a particular disquiet and providing a
vehicle for social criticism in the United States” (Silver 1975:23). After all, this is the
reason why this kind of movie - or what could be called the “noir myth” – is still so
powerful and prestigious today. They were indeed “a vehicle of social criticism”, as they
represented the big conurbations of America with its unstable and crime-oriented
population.
As stressed earlier on, scores of books and essays have been written about noir and
yet the questions still remain - nobody seems to be certain if the films in question
constitute a period, a cycle, a style or simply a tone or a mood, not to mention the problem
2 Panorama du film noir américain is indeed still seen as a seminal book within the analysis of American
culture and film, even before Hollywood itself had a name for this type of film. The version used for this
thesis is a recently completed English translation (2002).
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