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

I back up my view that film noir is prominently a visual style and by showing how
its gloomy mood (Stimmung in German) was strongly influenced by German
Expressionism and Weimar cinema as a whole. In noir dramas, the presence of these
symbols and visual motifs (which I explore in the light of semiotics in the fourth part of
this study) suggests the fear and anxiety that prevail in the characters. A reliable trace
element of Expressionism throughout noir is the nightmare sequence or the dream
interlude, such as in Murder, My Sweet, in which the camera seems to penetrate the private
eye’s mind and suggest a completely disordered and intimidating world beyond control.
French Poetic Realism of the late thirties, in particular in its illustrations of Paris
and Marseille, has also had a palpable effect on the American film noir, especially as it is
noticeable in the films of Julien Duvivier, Pierre Chenal, and Marcel Carné, also known as
the “three greats”. I characterise the heightened aestheticism of this film movement which
led up to World War II and helped to bridge German Expressionism and classical
Hollywood cinema, through its stylistic and thematic influences. The major
representational aspects of these films will be specified - the fact that they lay emphasis on
marginalised characters who search out for a last chance at love, but who are in the end let
down and disenchanted – and I demonstrate that the tone of nostalgia and resentment to be
found in these movies impacted on the subsequent film noir generation. I also argue that
films like Pépé le Moko (1937) or Marcel Carné’s Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows,
1938), while creating a certain noir realism, did not predict American film noir, as in the
first instance, the notions of oneirism and strangeness (discussed by Borde and Chaumeton
and which, according to them, categorise film noir) are entirely absent in these films from
the years 1936-1938. Indeed, although also termed “noir”, these French films not only
brought into focus a more fatalistic edge, they also described a more unhinged and morally
reprehensible world with a “hint at revolt, while love was passing by them as a mirage of a
better world” (Chartier 1946:67-70), and their characters, as desperate as they look, simply
“plead for our pity and our sympathy” (ibid.). Although American film noir creates a
different fictional world, cineastes such as Nino Frank in “Un nouveau genre policier:
L’aventure criminelle” or Jean-Pierre Chartier in “Les Américains aussi font des films
noirs”, both articles published in 1946, labelled these morality stories noir because of the
prevailing darkness and the similar trends (in terms of style and content) that converged
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