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

Such factors have been scrutinised in this study, from the memories of the
Depression, the alienation of returning veterans, the resultant tensions and insecurities of
the time or the anxiety about the failure to produce generalised prosperity created by
continuing economic instability, to the uncertainty about gender roles after the dislocation
caused by the war, to the morbid fascination with abnormal psychology and the threat of
nuclear annihilation. The reason for this methodical analysis was to make it possible to
understand how these dark subtexts served the moral ambiguity and despair of their noir
narratives and how they were metaphorical symptoms of the evils in society. All these
features were also present in the way that film noir’s construction of gender was
established, through its subversive questioning of the American society. When observing
the profusion of frail, tormented male protagonists overwhelmed with psychosexual
problems that existed in noir, one must posit the possible crisis in masculine identity that
set in after the war. Film noir managed to look at this issue in a richly complex manner, as
such films depicted uncharacteristic males and were not at all portrayed in the less
expressionist social problem film. It presented male roles which endorsed a critical stance
on American manhood. Various actors, notably Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, as
analysed in Out of the Past, gave their finest performances in noir productions. While film
noir offered more space for women, its main emphasis was to demonise women’s sexuality
and to challenge the entire notion of the independent woman with an increased access to
power and influence in the postwar world.
I have provided an analysis of cinematic trends that I estimate embodied a profound
challenge to the dominant realist aesthetic. I have argued that within such a complex filmic
arena as film noir, these cinematic trends of the forties expressed a new ontology of the
cinematic image and text. Noir films comprised more experimental attempts with new
techniques which challenged the limited agendas of mainstream film forms. At the same
level, these traditions contributed to an alteration in the sphere of the spectator. The
performance of the aesthetic spectacle is unavoidably discursive in its point of origin and
summation. I have traced the formation of a classical realist noir aesthetic in the early
studio era, drawing on the films and theorists I regard as having influenced the
development of filmic traditions. Some of these new experiments took up a more personal
and dramatic perspective at many different levels. From the narrative point of view, the
voiceover narration is perhaps the production technique that created most impact on film
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