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

of war veterans who, unfolding their stories in flashback, show signs of mental instability
and of still suffering from war trauma.
In the case of female noir protagonists, flashbacks / voiceovers are also deployed
quite extensively to emphasise the hysteria and other psychological disorders of women.
John Braham’s The Locket (1946) is a melodrama about a woman who tells her story in a
series of flashbacks (within flashbacks) from various angles. The bride-to-be Nancy Patton
(Laraine Day) starts telling her psychological drama as a child when she was wrongly
accused of theft. Her kleptomania has caused her to become a very unhappy adult and
ultimately a murderess. Curtis Bernhard’s Possessed depicts the amnesia of Louise Howell
(Joan Crawford), an emotionally unbalanced woman who is coaxed into unfolding her life
when she is sent to the hospital. Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number portrays paranoid
invalid Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck), who is trapped with only the telephone as
her sole link with the outside world. The film is played out in phone conversations
(separating inside and outside) and many flashbacks that disturb chronology. 57 The voice in
all these films is the mechanism for psychoanalysis, as it represents the psyche,
transporting the protagonists into visions of a past dominated by symbols and objects that
represent thoughts and memories. About this polyphony of voices and interruptions, J. P.
Telotte states that:
(...) in multiplying narrators and viewpoints, a film like Sorry, Wrong Number (...)
unleashes a nightmare of potential that always haunts the noir world - the potential
of ambiguity, of multiple, indeterminate meanings, and of a self that is subject to
unseen , unsensed forces. (Telotte 1989:86)
In conclusion, voiceover / flashbacks, more than in any other film form, were used
in film noir in very imaginative ways. First, the phenomenon of the flashback is essential in
the exploration of film noir especially in the relationship of the individual towards society
(hence the confessional tone of flashbacks in Double indemnity, for example). As they
provoke the distortion of time and space, these narrative devices can place the protagonist
in another temporal dimension in cinematographic terms, undermining the apparent
objectivity of the images. At the same time, through nightmares and hallucinatory
57 The influence of the Gothic romance is particularly evident in the film through the combination of
flashbacks within flashbacks and the fracturing of information that has an impact on time order. As seen
before, the Gothic romance films expressed paranoia and questioned subjectivity by splitting up and
destabilising the narrative structure.
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