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

2.1.1.3 Paintings, Portraits, Mirrors: the Noir Triptych
Many noir films have recourse to paintings which per se draw forth something
latent or unexpressed, especially in the sense of idealising a particular woman. As seen
before, a good example of this occurs for instance in Laura by Otto Preminger. While
constructing a mental picture of the dead woman from the suspects he is interviewing,
Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) cannot avoid looking firmly at the obtrusive
painting of recently deceased Laura that hangs on her apartment wall (see fig. 60 on p.
245). In Scarlet Street Christopher Cross is attached to painting (and especially to the
portrait of Kitty he paints later which ironically will be named the “Self-Portrait” – fig. 75)
because it symbolises sexual release, and a happier, less compromised life, in other words,
a fantasy of escape from the present and its oppressive reality. Just like in Laura and The
Woman in the Window, the paintings of Kitty (both as a flower first and then a portrait of
her) express a dream in the form of a work of art, a sliding away from reality into dream
fantasy and self-deception.
In the first cycle of film noir, painting was used as a repeated trope. A highly
significant part of noirs have scenes where the femme fatale is a framed painting, in, for
example, I Wake Up Screaming, with Lt Ed Cornell (Laird Cregar) gazing at Vicky (Carole
Landis) in his room (fig. 73); The Woman in the Window, when psychiatrist Richard
Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) meets Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) next to her own portrait
(fig. 74); The Dark Corner when rich art-collector Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb) is
obsessed with a woman in a painting, or The Crimson Kimono (1959), this time with
Christine Downs (Victoria Shaw) playing the role of a Caucasian artist who sketches a
portrait of her Asian lover.
The recurrent thematic element of the painted portrait, occurring at the diegetic
level of the narrative, has been well described in Raymond Durgnat’s seminal article,
“Paint it Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir”. In his sixth thematic category which he
called “Portraits and Doubles”, he notes: “A cycle of grim romantic thrillers focused on
women who, dominant even in their absence, stare haughty enigmas at us from their
portraits over the fireplace” (Durgnat 1970:43). These films oppose the inherent duality of
art – it is unclear if the woman in the portrait is an illusion (frequently oneiric) or real. The
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