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

directors and cinematographers, different screenwriters with their own stories and plots,
and casting different stars and using different studios, have a common denominator that
binds them together: a unified photographic style. Moreover, style or visual iconography as
I prefer to call it when discussing film noir, reproduces an image which binds the interior
feelings of the protagonists with those of the viewer, enabling the spectator to follow a
given dramatic situation and to form his or her own judgement. As Richard Combs writes
in his article “Anatomy of a Director” about Otto Preminger:
His aim is to present characters, actions and issues clearly without prejudice. This
objectivity is a mark of his respect for his characters and, particularly, for his
audience. He presupposes an intelligence active enough to allow the spectator to
make connections, comparisons and judgements (...). His films are about ways of
reaching decisions – on facts and on courses of action (...). Fluidity (of
development, not indecision) distinguishes Preminger’s visual style as it
distinguishes his narrative methods and his moral attitude. (Sight & Sound, vol.19,
April 2009, pp. 38-41)
The type of fluidity in Preminger is indeed achieved through a specific visual style
which “allow[s] the spectator to make connections”, as the director mentions, with the
necessary “comparisons and judgments”. I would add that the noir photographic style
requires the appropriate mise-en-scène which in these films is designed to disconcert or
disturb the spectator in a parallel manner to the disorientation felt by the noir heroes in
their quest for self-identity. Film noir’s stylistic distinctiveness is essentially recognised
through the way it transformed the conventions of the crime and private eye dramas into
those peculiar to noir. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton understood this back in
1955 when they wrote in their landmark book Panorama du film noir américain:
In its most typical works, the film noir tried to give rise to a ‘new thrill,’ indivisible
and inimitable. It juxtaposed certain themes within the framework of a particular
technique: unusual plots, eroticism, violence, psychological ambivalence within
criminal parties. It is the convergence of these dramatic particulars, some of which
are not new, that created a style. (Borde & Chaumeton 2002:15)
In the heyday of film noir these talented men worked within Hollywood’s studio
system and only rarely received recognition for their achievements outside professional
circles. No one can deny, however, the beauty of some of the finest cinematography in
American cinema; in fact, their generic usage of visual stylistics is what identifies film noir
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