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

In conclusion, Otto Preminger’s American career can be divided into two different
phases: a first period during which he worked for Twentieth-Century Fox, and a second,
when he became a prominent independent producer-director trying to take on the studio
system in various ways. For many years, Preminger marked his position and went against
institutional censorship by releasing some films without the usual Motion Picture
Association seal (for instance, The Moon is Blue released in 1953). Moreover, he tackled
various contentious subjects that studios might not approve of, such as criticism of the War
Department in The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955) or homosexuality in Advise and
Consent (1962). For the purposes of this chapter, I have obviously concentrated on the first
period of his career which is the one that was notable for his noir productions and for his
well-publicised conflicts with his studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck. The two individuals were
odds on the subject of casting, and Preminger found it difficult to conform to his demands
or to work without retaining overall artistic control. The first prominent claim made for
Preminger as an auteur artist was published by Jacques Rivette from Cahiers du Cinéma
back in 1954, during the seedbed years of the auteur theory. Rivette believed that Otto
Preminger, along with film directors such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Fritz
Lang would:
(...) first believe in their themes and then build the strength of their art upon this
conviction. Preminger believes first in mise en scène, the creation of a precise
complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of
connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space. (Rivette
1985:132)
In contrast to the other two directors described earlier, Preminger used a different
formula in a period when American cinema appeared to be subjugated by mainstream
genre works. With a penchant for a certain thematic line, his dramatic motifs showed
ambitious and provocative connections. Then, his fluidity, as I have stressed here, is
achieved through a visual style that is characterised by long takes, with extensive camera
movements holding two or more characters in a primary, objective shot at all times,
avoiding cutting down a scene into shots or counter-shots. As the Movie introduction
states, “Hence the vital importance which Preminger attached to his scripts. All that he has
to say or show is in the development of his narrative and the moral evolution of his
characters” (Wood 1962:18) or, as Preminger once said in an interview, “I always like to
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