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

cinema does not have the power of “double articulation” (cinema’s signifiers are just too
closely tied to their signifieds), and thus film language works utterly unlike verbal
language.
I consider that the term symbol has many context-dependent meanings, highlighting
the fact that those symbols in film noir can serve as plot elements and that they revolve
around heroes and characters (implicated in scams or con games most of the times) in
visually complex settings. A medium of expression rather than a system of communication,
I interpret how cinema and these films in particular isolate logical mechanisms to convey
specific messages to a spectator. Since semiotics aims at the laws governing the production
and reception of those messages (at the possibility of filmic speech itself), formulating the
rules at work (the codes) in those films, I hope to show that within this spectrum of codes
lies the innumerable non-specific cultural codes which cinema shares with other media,
and which have been transposed to the movies. In the case of film noir, we could point here
to the chiaroscuro lighting, a code specific to painting but one which was employed
incessantly in German Expressionist films. Or the narrative techniques that abound in noir
productions, such as flashbacks, and which can be found in literature as well as in cinema.
Finally, this category of “code”, which after all pertains to all systems of communications,
enables us to identify genres, periods, and auteurs in film. I thus want to demonstrate that
in the case of film noir these codes are not what define noir as such (noirs are not so deeply
coded, for example, as cowboy films with particular codes of dress, landscape, and
behaviour which appear in no other kinds of films, or screwball comedies, a subgenre of
the comedy films genre, featuring farcical circumstances, usually involving courtship and
(re)marriage). They deny film noir, therefore, in my perspective, easy genre categorisation,
and rather take us into the spheres of classification by motif and tone.
In subsection 2 of this Part, entitled “The Universe of Motifs and Symbols in Film
Noir”, I propose to construct a framework around the significance of icons and motifs in
the chosen noir films, illustrating the way they engage the viewer and discussing what
cinematographic resources, image strategies and conventions film directors have used in
their films. Therefore, I am in search of the distinctive patterns that bear out my contention
that visual motifs play a key role in generating meaning and contain a hitherto unexplored
power in film noir as a visual style.
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