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

a political point of view, the defeat of the Axis powers did not contribute to an enhanced
worldwide security as the Cold War erupted almost straight away creating disquiet about
Communist infiltration. These sets of social, political and historical events will underpin
how much censorship was largely responsible for the “art of omission” applied by
producers to films in the 1940-58 period, and at the same time they might help us
understand why noir style evokes such an intimidating environment, the perfect setting for
crime, alienation and paranoia.
While film noir explores key social issues, namely those related to the criminal
underworld, its roots go deep into Existentialism and Freudianism. The first was much
entwined with surrealist values displayed in the works of French intellectuals, such as
Jacques Prévert and André Breton, as a means of challenging bourgeois art and of
embracing socialism. The interpretation of existentialism or “existential motifs”, as Robert
Porfirio has put it, present in many noirs are revealed through the entrapped noir nonheroic
character who, often by unfortunate mishap, enters a world of chaos and dramatic
isolation, usually in the night-time city.
The stress on perverse psychology in noir films (also evidenced in the work of the
above French writers) emerged with the broadly fashionable dissemination of Freudian
psychoanalysis in the America of the forties. The abundance of Freudian motifs will be
discussed, placing in the foreground the psychology of crime and the psychological
upshots of the criminal act. The darker, inner impulses of the noir protagonists, sometimes
beyond their own control, lead them to be enmeshed in the commission of crime. I thus
elaborate that Freudianism is key to noir’s visual style and narrative strategies, which root
themselves in the characters’ emotions. The meaning of subjective drama, for example, is
intensified by these narrational strategies (flashbacks and voiceover narration) found in
many noir films, like Boris Ingster’s Germanic direction of Stranger on the Third Floor
(1940), a film which stresses paranoia and claustrophobia, and which contains a highly
artificial mise-en-scène, notably through an extended oneiristic dream / reality sequence.
While it is true that these models and/or emotions frequently suggest some abstractions,
such as estrangement in noirs of the forties, I invoke them to reinforce the argument of this
thesis: a) to show that film noir deploys more than consistent visual style and recurrent
narrative patterns; b) to suggest that it is open to “external constructions” (as I will show
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