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

not visually rather than thematically. It is amidst urban settings, night scenes, under the
rain or on wet streets, that the noir romantic narration develops and that the noir hero finds
his own identity. Through the creative and artistic style of cinematographers, such as John
Alton and Nicholas Musuraca, film noir manages to come up with artistic correlatives to
sociological problems.
As for jazz, although it has always seemed to have an image problem (either
considered to be too snobbish or even esoteric), it does have an embodiment that has
demonstrated enduringly popular and attractive to filmmakers and public alike. In the case
of film noir, we often hear the expression “jazz noir”, and this illustrates the prevalence of
this type of music in American cinema of the forties and fifties. There is almost a
symbiotic interaction between jazz, smoke, femmes fatales, rainy nights and cynical
detectives. In this subsection, I seek to understand the perceived association that exists
between jazz and film noir, describing one as the musical complement to the visual icons
of the other or, figuratively speaking, the shadows cast by one were manifestly echoed in
the sounds of the other. I will thus refer to the soundtracks of certain noir productions, such
as Phantom Lady (1944), The Killers (1946) and D.O.A (1950), in order to show that the
“cool jazz” that is played in these films gives them their “atmospheric background” and
their depressing tone. Finally, I will refer to the rhythmic features of jazz and explain the
use that is made of the cadence of the bass and drums in Phantom Lady as being in touch
with “jazz’s primitivism” and sexual component.
As noir films began to combine studio scenes with real locations (when basing their
stories on real sources like newspapers, magazines and public records), their style changed.
By providing on-location documentary shooting, nonprofessional actors, and a dependence
on documentary artefacts, the quasi-documentary realism shows the influence of the Italian
neorealist movement of the forties and is an acknowledged determinant on later film noir
documentary style. In this chapter, it is my intention to discuss how film noir embodies a
political critique (going from street criminality and political corruption to police
procedures), usually observed in the docu-noir, a style which appeared in the second phase
of film noir, and which points the finger at the potentially oppressive instruments of the
capitalist state – the police forces, the F.B.I. (Hathaway’s House on 92 nd Street, 1945), the
Treasury Department, the immigration service (Anthony Mann’s Border Incident, 1949),
and even public health services (Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Street, 1950). The idea of
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