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

these films was to confer on them an authenticity and to stress the social awareness behind
such productions. By the end of the film, the spectator would feel that no matter what kind
of (social) danger existed, it would be defeated by the strength and integrity of these
democratic institutions. Despite offering screen realism, the semi-documentary noirs
maintained their noir mood which was produced principally by the choice of setting,
lighting design, and characters portrayed.
Part III is concluded with an exploration of the noir auteur and my personal choice
of three noir film directors. The term auteur originated in film criticism of the recent past,
whereas the concept of genre dates back to literary critical practices, appearing long before
the advent of the cinema. The two concepts are often regarded as being antithetical, as
auteurism and its theory focus on the unique “signature” of a certain artist, and the
expression of an individual sensibility would seem to transcend the restrictive limits of
“genre”.
“Auteur theory” aimed to be provocative at the time of its appearance (and still
provokes much stir today). Both sides of the Atlantic expressed divergences but not so
much in the arena of practical filmmaking as in critical attitudes to pre-existing canons of
film art. Influenced by those of the Cahiers du Cinéma, the British opened their first issue
of Movie with a list of American and British directors and assessed their performances
under a ranking system of “great” (where the names of Howard Hawks and Alfred
Hitchcock were included) and “brilliant” (Joseph Losey and Orson Welles, for example).
Andrew Sarris, from the American side, coined the term “auteur theory” in his “Notes on
the Auteur Theory” where he lists the fourteen top directors who had worked in the US and
who are worth a place in his pantheon. For this film critic, it is vital to establish the
“evaluative distinction” between an auteur and a metteur-en-scène, as the former, he
argues, is capable of keeping uniformity of style and theme by pushing the limits of the
modes of cinematic production. The director, Sarris writes,
(…) is both the least necessary and most important component of filmmaking. He
is the most modern of all artists in his relative passivity toward everything that
passes before him. He would not be worth bothering with if he were not capable
now and then of sublimity of expression almost miraculously extracted from his
money-oriented environment. (Sarris 1996:37)
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