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

This kind of temporal manipulation creates a curious durational effect on the
viewer. In an overlapping of the present by the past, the emphasis is placed on the
subjective sphere of the main protagonist, and, in this particular case, by a shift in mise-enscène.
In fact, this confessional flashback marks off the past as separate and of a very
different social order. The crosscutting change of scenario not only provides a different
durational span to the line of action, it also accentuates the hiatus and Bailey’s muted
denunciation that is observed in the subsequent scenes.
Siodmak’s film The Killers is a representative example of this complex treatment of
time in film noir. In fact, about half of the film is unfolded through eleven fragmented and
disconnected flashbacks, following a technique perfected in Citizen Kane, back in 1941 (a
structure adapted from the “rosebud” enigma in that film) . However, they are different in
form as they attempt to disentangle the intriguing mystery of the character’s submission, of
his almost indifferent acceptance of death which amounts to a consenting to its
appropriacy, when he is hunted down by two hired gunmen in a small-town rooming
house. In this way, the pressure that the past exerts on the present reveals the story in a
disjointed fashion, with only pieces of the puzzle and clues, rather than concentrating on
the personal perspectives of the main protagonist as most flashbacks do. A close adaptation
of Hemingway’s short story, the search into the dead character’s past (which is not evoked
in the short story) is thus used as a form of narrative expansion.
The fact that the flashbacks are all scattered throughout the narrative, with
flashbacks within flashbacks, has a crucial impact on both the mood and the meaning of
the story. As the insurance company officer uncovers bits and pieces of Swede’s death (the
only clue he has is an insurance policy that the victim left benefitting a cleaning lady in an
Atlantic City motel), the narrative begins to move into the noir world as the investigator
tries to reconstruct the story of the dead man’s enigmatic and troubled past, and to
understand the reasons for the Swede’s passive acceptance of his death. The last flashback
is narrated by Kitty Collin, the femme fatale who sets Swede up as the decoy in a double
double-cross. By skipping over some vital elements related to her own part in the
treacherous scheme, she emphasises her duplicity in the film, and this in conjunction with
the many different conflicting points of view all delay the revelation of the truth until the
very end of the film maintaining for the longest possible time the enigma around the two
main characters.
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