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

start, alternating, within the fluid movement of this single long take, between full shots,
medium close-ups and close-ups. Globally, Welles expresses a consistently extreme
aesthetics through the cinematography. He basically uses three main technical features,
which are the violent contrasts, disorienting angles and the use of wide-angle lenses. The
majority of the film takes place at night, not only on the streets of Los Robles, but also in
the interiors, where potent lighting enhances the shadows cast by the set and by the actors.
This nocturnal view of the city is a crucial aspect of the film, since it allowed Welles and
Metty to fill it with all the necessary filmic equipment to cast the shadows that give its
walls sinister life and to light its tall arcades whose geometrical shapes created a visual
metaphor of a decomposing maze.
The visual objectifications that I described in the previous chapter are again
specified in Welles’s films, especially in The Lady from Shanghai for using the mirrors and
their reflections as obvious symbols of the protagonists’ duality. These noir productions
and his unique form of film noir show the stages of Welles’s development as a filmmaker
and as an experimenter in his working methods according to the aesthetic results he wanted
to achieve. Renowned for his innate aesthetic sensibilities and for his innovative approach
with the camera, Welles is also often viewed as the director who used the “first person
singular” technique or the “one-man band” approach due to his ability to undertake all the
roles in the filmmaking process (from art director and screenwriter, to costume designer
and even musical arranger). Perhaps because of that, Welles adopted an ambivalent view
of the medium, making many polemical statements that ranged from assigning the art of
filmmaking to a single individual to attacking the cult of the director. Indeed, somewhat
against the auteur theory, Welles concludes his meditation about his own creative art with
the meandering investigation of authorship and authenticity in F for Fake (initially released
in 1974). In it, he condemns the cult of the director and mentions the work of thousands
whose names were never recorded, concluding that “Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter
that much after all”.
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