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

elationship to the way a director thinks and feels” (in Wartenberg & Curran 2005:105),
has gradually given way to a new debate from the point of view of genre theory originating
in André Bazin. In April 1957, Bazin wrote an essay entitled “On the Politique des
Auteurs” published in Cahiers where he raises a number of arguments against auteurism,
mainly about the fact that the theory refused to recognise the role of the so-called popular
culture and, more explicitly, genre. Referring to comedy, the Western, and the gangster
film genres, Bazin states, they were built up “in wonderfully close harmony with the
public” which is exactly what gives films their “vigour and richness”. It was the centrality
of genre, in Bazin’s opinion, that made it possible for directors in Hollywood to produce
masterpieces. More specifically, he adds, it is because of the relationship that genre
maintains with the audience that reveals “the genius of the system” which is more
admirable than the talent of a particular director. It is not my intention here to engage in an
exhaustive textual analysis of the auteur theory. In any case, the theory, I think, is less a
matter of comprehensiveness than of strategy – the recognition, for example, that a detail
which might at first appear irrelevant provides a perspective from which other apparently
irrelevant details suddenly emerge in another kind of coherence. After all, as Sarris so well
put it, “The task of validating the auteur theory is an enormous one, and the end will never
be in sight” (in Wartenberg & Curran 2005:106).
Although the list of directors that have some claim to auteur status is extensive
(from Jules Dassin, Samuel Fuller to Anthony Mann, Robert Siodmak, etc), I have decided
to concentrate here on three related to film noir, as many of the other possible choices are
discussed in other parts of this thesis. The filmmakers that I chose are Billy Wilder, Orson
Welles, and Otto Preminger, as each produced a substantial body of interesting films and
all three were intimately connected with the emergence of film noir. And although the
auteur theory highlights the body of a director’s work rather than isolated masterpieces, I
have decided to look at the above directors’ films that are related to the world of noir. This
analysis, therefore, intends to show the greatness of some of these auteurs based on the
aesthetics of their productions, concentrating on what is original and how they managed,
with intelligence and intuition, to resist to artistic control within the producer-oriented
studio systems. I want to stress that their acknowledged pre-eminence is to be found in
their ability to establish their own personal expression and style.
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