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

John Alton’s highly stylised photography provides a visual confirmation of the debt
film noir owed to Expressionism. In the first of several films he made with director
Anthony Mann, T-Men (1948), Alton managed to establish his reputation. His photography
in this film is a primary dramatic force, with its use of deep focus on a diagonal plane,
helping the director to express the mutual alienation of the characters. One good example
from the film is the scene that takes place in the nightclub in which O’Brien (Dennis
O’Keefe) watches Schemer (Wallace Ford); or the scene in the market in which Genaro
(Alfred Ryder) and Schemer are reflected in one window and again reflected from another
window at a double remove. The depth of these shots with very clear backgrounds and
low-key lighting foregrounds allows us to follow the visual narrative of the film, as the
sequence of images below show (fig. 40):
Figure 40. Some major scenes from T-Men
Low-key lighting, or also known as chiaroscuro lighting, is another important mark
of most noirs from the classic period. This dramatic use of light and shade consists of an
angular alternation of dark shadows and stark fields of light “not only in night exteriors but
also in dim interiors shielded from daylight by curtains or Venetian blinds” (Silver
2004b:16). Alain Silver also notes that this lighting technique helps create a dramatic
tension all by itself, and serves the purpose of noir productions with their stories of
recessive motives and psychological imprisonment.
Historically, chiaroscuro can be traced from the street paintings of prominent realist
painter Edward Hopper or the grotesque and shocking crime photos of Weegee, an
Austrian-born American photographer, whose black-and-white shots documented street
life in New York. It also comes from the works of painters like Caravaggio and Rembrandt
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