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

As Leo Braudy in The World in a Frame puts it, it is beyond these frames that
objects can gain a new life:
Unlike novels and paintings, where the world is totally and obviously created by
the artist, in films (...) we may still feel that the objects are there by chance and
may at any moment vanish or extend themselves into the life beyond the frame.
Thus, (...) films have the capacity to present an enclosed world of total meaning at
the same time that they offer the possibility of another reality outside these
momentary limits. (Braudy 1976:78)
A couple of years later, Welles released Journey into Fear (1943), his third film for
RKO, and which again starred Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles (he was actually the
producer and uncredited director). This noir production offers a persuasive demonstration
of how easily the now twenty-six-year-old Welles could have fitted into the Hollywood
system as the head of a production unit. Although the film’s nominal director was Norman
Foster, a discreetly talented and modest director, it was Welles who was originally
assigned to direct the film himself and ensured that the film bore his stylistic imprint. To
some critics, Journey into Fear reveals some significant aspects of a personality and
sensibility that Welles would further expand in his subsequent films, such as The Stranger
and The Lady from Shanghai. Carl Macek also notes that “the overriding sense of dread
that permeates the film combines with a visual style that uses contrasts between light and
shade as a metaphor for the instability and futility typical of the noir universe” (in Silver
1992:149). Much of the film takes place aboard a dilapidated freighter (a claustrophobic
atmosphere is conferred on the film), and relates a murky study of espionage, realistically
portrayed in all its confusion. The lighting plunges vast areas into darkness and creates a
flickering play of light and shadow on the faces of actors in motion. A visually arresting
film, with extreme camera angles and overhead shots, and scenes of night and rain,
Journey into Fear offers the unusual narration of Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten) as a
shrinking counterpoint to the intimidating noir atmosphere and the ironic characterisation
of Peter Banat (Jack Moss), an assassin hired to kill Graham.
In July 1946, RKO released another Orson Welles film, The Stranger in which
Welles, as usual, tries to impose his personality on the film and interferes with the
screenplay. In it, he plays the role of Franz Kindler alias Charles Rankin, a supposed
college professor in a small New England college community. While waiting for the
emergence of the Fourth Reich, he teaches in the local school and marries Mary Longstreet
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