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

about which films themselves constitute the noir “canon” or which of the many elements
cited are needed to define film noir. As I have already pointed out, my immediate objective
is to review and evaluate some of these assertions and demonstrate how misleading it can
be to treat film noir as a genre. Genre is a porous thing with no predetermined boundaries,
and I justify my position in the light of the abovementioned work by Paul Schrader, where
it is emphatically stated that “A film of urban nightlife is not necessarily a film noir, and a
film noir need not necessarily concern crime and corruption” (1972:10-11). Above all, I
hope to situate film noir within a set of films that have a variety of common characteristics
(visually and narratively, as well as in terms of subject matters and character types), but at
the same time I try to question its place within the various frames mentioned.
Throughout this project, I will put the emphasis on the notion of “style”, especially
visual style, as the key element in understanding film noir. Those visual traits or styles
might not be the exclusive originators of the noir cycle, but they appear to be, as Place and
Peterson conclude, “the consistent thread that unites the very diverse films that together
comprise this phenomenon” (in Silver 1996:65). After the classic period of the cycle had
already ended, the issue of style was secondary to the search for the defining
characteristics of the movement. This does not mean critics did not recognise that film noir
deviates from the conventional methods of Hollywood in regard to its individual schemes
of lighting, chiaroscuro, staging, framing, cutting, etc. Rather, it seems that the recognition
of a distinctive style only emerges after it is consistently imposed on a body of work over
time and thus it required the passing of time to truly identify and solidify it as a paramount
element in the perception of noir. Along with this penchant for a certain visual style, I
maintain that, aside from its definite narrative prerequisites, noir has a distinctive
iconography with which the filmmaker’s personal vision of the world commingles and
which is thoroughly consistent with a hard-headed if not actually cynical approach towards
American life.
Arguably, finding out when or where “style” emerged or who possibly created it is
not my purpose. What I try to do is to defend Paul Schrader’s view that “film noir was first
of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically, because
it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological
problems” (Schrader 1972:9). I here seek to affirm that those (sociological) moods of
paranoia, despair and claustrophobia constitute a world-view that was expressed ultimately
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