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

1.5 Dazed and Confused: The Voiceover / Flashback Narration
Two key stylistic and narrative devices that are constant in film noir are the
flashback and the voiceover narration. The two techniques are sometimes used more
ambiguously than at others depending on the amount of information required for the viewer
to follow the diegesis. Although the voiceover / flashback practice was used prior to noir’s
heyday, with films like The Power and the Glory (1933) or The Judge Priest (1934), it is
during the noir cycle that this strategy began to be used insistently.
As the film noir canon shows, the voiceover / flashback approach was applied for
many different purposes. Most commonly, flashback emerges out of a protagonist’s
encounter with a scene from the past (an event, a person, an object). The spectator normally
knows that a flashback is about to happen when the camera zooms up into the noir
character’s face, showing a pensive look, and then the voiceover narration starts. The
viewer, consequently, begins seeing as if staring into the narrator’s mind’s eye and the
narrative builds with significant information from the past and/or sets up the context to
make filmicly present events clearer. The protagonist may or (less frequently) may not be
seen in the flashback segment, but the whole process is used as a way of entering the
narrator’s consciousness and memory, and this visibly has a much greater impact than any
mere linguistic utterance.
Citizen Kane is a fundamental reference for this strategy, especially for its use of
multiple voices and vantage points on the life of its subject, Charles Foster Kane. Orson
Welles’s approach stresses the relativity of perspective that characterises cinematic seeing,
that is, in the film the viewer is often compelled to identify with the protagonist’s
disturbing sense of dislocation, thus disrupting the normal diegetic path. For instance, when
Thatcher gets a white page from his memoir book, the camera focuses very intensely on its
whiteness, and an immediate flashback starts, “sending” us back into the hero’s joyful
years of his childhood. At the same time, through the use of other flashbacks, a series of
images are displayed showing a mixture of happy moments of freedom and impressions of
desolation, all reconciled by the originating page.
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