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

when plots are complex and misleading (a film like Detour packs its twists and turns into
just over sixty minutes). At a straightforward level, most of these screenplays were adapted
from novels or pulp fiction sources, and so there seems to be no better way than to use
these strategies to capture and maintain the tone of the novel which was written in the first
person. Most important of all, they are just like any other “tool” in the art of narrative
filmmaking. In the case of film noir, they constitute a means of “telling” as well as
“showing” (for censorship purposes). They are such a powerful device for the noir
narrative that they can provide the spectator with the presence of the facts. As Turim puts
it, “the flashback introduces a reversed temporal order that creates the past as the site of the
fiction, as a terrain, privileged subjective realm of the imaginary” (Turim 1989:170).
Therefore, flashbacks function as a way for the noir protagonists to retell their story,
making a confession of their motivations, their acts, and through these confessional
flashbacks, seeking expiation or simply a way of gathering sympathy and understanding.
Told in a confessional flashback by the dying insurance agent, Double Indemnity, coming
at the beginning of the cycle, helped establish the flashback and first-person narration as
the calling-card of film noir, and here again, the technique used helps create a tense
counterpoint between the confession itself and the present situation of the confessor.
Rendered as retrospective narratives, flashbacks can be regarded as weakening the
reliability of the narrator, or the apparent objectivity of the images. They try to make sense
of a past that is described as odd and hostile and often unfinished. Some films like Sunset
Boulevard or D.O.A. use the flashback narrative of a man already dead. In both of these
unusual cases, the male protagonist is haunted by past events which still control them, as
opposed to having some power over the retelling of the story - and yet there still seems to
be no way back for the characters to change the whole situation.
In other cases too, the flashback / voiceover technique used in these films can also
be described as a reflection of psychoanalytical models. As a response to postwar trauma,
the flashback helps the viewer to understand the pervading sense of paranoia and the
hallucinations that veterans experienced upon returning from war. The voice plays a major
role in psychoanalysis, as a vehicle to unlock an unstable mental state, and many noir films
that integrate these narrative techniques in their plots, obsessed with the psyche, portray the
widespread popular Freudianism of that time. For example, in films such as Cornered
(1945) or Dead Reckoning, Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart respectively play the roles
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