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

Sarris’s eleven categories in which he places various directors (according to their
“sublimity of expression”) may now sound a bit idiosyncratic. In fact, this kind of
disagreement was further enhanced when British Sight and Sound, influenced by the
French nouvelle vague, started to fiercely condemn the “critical excesses” of Cahiers. In
America, film critic Pauline Kael reacted vehemently in her article “Circles and Squares”
to the appraisal of Hollywood directors made by Sarris. It outraged her that Sarris would
consider the “artistic signature” to represent the real value of the art itself. She then gives
the example that Hollywood directors were unavoidably operating within very tight
budgets and sometimes using source material of low artistic value. More central than this
discussion between an auteur and metteur-en-scène is the legitimate question of whether
the director should be regarded as the primary creator of a film (with a reference to those
aspects of mise-en-scène in film noir that determine the manner in which everything is
visualised on screen). R. Barton Palmer argues that “Auteurism became a way of
explaining and dealing with film noir, even as that critical concept was passed over in
silence” (Palmer 1994:15). At the same time, these directors could be regarded and valued
as authors (auteurs) because their films reflected their own ideas and would incorporate
their own style. Their productions would thus be a manner of showing a refusal to conform
or to make films that would be rigorously commercial, at least from an ideological and
aesthetical point of view. I describe then how this critical and evaluative approach was
made problematic, especially after the political and cultural events that followed in the late
fifties and sixties (May 1968 in France, for example).
From amongst the great variety of “masters of chiaroscuro” who arrived from
Europe, particularly from Germany and Austria - John Alton, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang,
Joseph H. Lewis, Jacques Tourneur, Douglas Sirk, Fred Zinnemann, Anthony Mann, Jules
Dassin – and who have subsequently attained auteur status, I have selected two for whom
film noir was, so to speak, like a drum in their heads, and whose dominant styles and
themes I therefore analyse in depth: Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger. Both émigrés from
Vienna, they have been selected for the “revolutionary techniques” they developed and
honed in their country of origin (particularly the “moving cameras, severely angled shots,
low-key photography, and innovative uses of light and shadow” (Christopher 1997:14)).
The third, Orson Welles, was selected for using many of the same characteristics
(especially the flashbacks) but at the same time for being so multifaceted as an actor,
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