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

in the popular imagination. While the screenwriter and director may conjure up the vision,
it is the noir cinematographer who brings it to life. In the case of Charles Laughton’s noir
The Night of the Hunter (1955), for example, cinematographer Stanley Cortez employs an
expressionistic shooting style that concentrated on heavy symbolism and contrast and
which acts out the vision of terror and eeriness of the plot (see fig. 92 on p. 330). Menacing
lighting and long depth of field along with an array of camera angles all contribute to
enhance the particular vision of opposing forces (good and evil) that are present in the film.
Apart from the way that these films were photographed, there are certain images of
set pieces and objects that are recurrent in noir productions and delivered with such
expertise that their visual prominence in the narrative defines their importance in any
discussion of the noir phenomenon as a style. The recognised settings of lamp-streets in
the night-time city just after rainfall or rays of flashing neon signs streaming through the
venetian blinds of windows in empty offices are just the most repeated visual patterning
that we retain as being common to most noir films.
I have discussed some of these elements here; some other symbols will also be dealt
with in more detail in Part IV. Until now, I have shown images that are just familiar in noir
narratives: bridges and stairs, alleyways and deserted docklands, luxurious apartments. In
them, we often see impeccably dressed women, with their lipstick and furs, watches and
keys, telephones ringing. In almost every single noir film telephones of all sorts – “pay
phones, office phones, bedside phones, restaurant and nightclub phones that are brought to
one’s table” – are symbolic objects that “are often connected in the films to questions of
privacy and secrets; they are emblematic of the mystique of communication in a world
which is clamorous with sound and at the same time, at its deepest level, eerily silent”
(Christopher 1997:92). In Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number, the telephone is used as a vital
device with which Leona (Barbara Stanwyck) is able to remain in control and to connect
with the outside world.
We also see the bent-brimmed hats of men with their trench coats, and indisputably
the scenes enveloped by cigarettes smoked in abundance everywhere. Indeed everybody is
always smoking in film noir; the films are constantly enshrouded in smoke – in The
Shanghai Gesture, for example, Poppy’s descent into corruption is revealed by her
slovenly pose, as she sits over a bar top with a cigarette dangling from her mouth; or in Out
of the Past, in which Jeff Markham and Whit Sterling smoke angrily at each other. At one
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