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

odies, or as killers and crooks, but they often show signs of a redeeming personality (or a
capacity for redemption). With this new vision of the detective and his world, film noir
showed itself not to be bound by conventional rules of morality, by offering for example a
sui generis treatment of homosexuality, like that of Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in the role of
an insinuating criminal in The Maltese Falcon. I also seek to analyse the male counterpart
to the deadly female and the opposite of the male victim - the homme fatal - with his
thrilling combination of manipulative charm and deep-rooted sexual sadism and perversity.
I will also make a parallel analysis to that of female archetypes specifically that of the
homme attrapé, a figure who happens to be a mixture of both submission and confrontation
to social demands. I therefore propose to look at the male archetypes in film noir, offering
a close reading of masculinity in film noir.
The next subsection (“Dazed and Confused: the Voiceover / Flashback Narration”)
focuses on the narrative strategies that film noir employs and again how they significantly
differ from the classical Hollywood mode of storytelling. Whilst Hollywoodian filmmakers
favoured a style that would contain straightforward narratives, or a cause-and-effect chain
of events with a given continuity in the arrangement of shots to provide a consistent story
in which no questions or ambiguities remain, the essential paradigm of film noir resides in
a kind of restrictive narration so as to keep the spectator intentionally in the dark about the
hints or enigmas that make up the secrecy that the text unravels. Voiceovers and flashbacks
are then the two major techniques explored by noir directors, as they both give the viewer
insight into the character’s motivations and they contribute to the confessional tone of
these films. The non-diegetic voices used in film noir were also an attempt to replicate the
first person narration of the pulp fiction novels from which, as I said above, many noirs
were adapted, and they emphasised the elliptical and twisting nature of noir storylines.
The purpose of the next two subsections (on noir visual style and the role of jazz) is
to support my point that style is paramount in noir features and that it plays a more
important function than theme (whereas American critics, as Paul Schrader argues (1972:
15), have been traditionally more interested in theme than style). The “dark, hard-edged
look” and the strong feeling of alienation from the noir protagonists are often a more
graphic illustration of noir’s stylistic outlook which is nearly always found in the noirs of
the forties and fifties. These films share visual motifs and, for that reason, I maintain that
the conflicts that their characters experience are represented and resolved more often than
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