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

noir as the presence of an omniscient (non-diegetic) voice (often by a character reflecting
back on their past) managed to generate ironic counterpoint, as is the case in Sunset
Boulevard, for example.
As seen in section 1 of Part II, the emergence of popular literature in the thirties and
forties, namely pulp magazines, contributed to the noir movement. These novels and
stories presented exciting and lurid episodes, and ambiguously endorsed a thrilling desire
to break laws and taboos, evoking all in all a (politically radical) view of the American
society of that time. The hard-edged style used in these stories, closer to popular speech,
was often expressed in a first-person narration, and was strongly based on the
characteristics of the classic detective story. This fiction exhibited a multiplicity of styles
(detective fiction, the thriller, and crime melodrama) which were very similar to the
cinematic ones constituent of the noir style. Therefore, the hard-boiled school of American
detective and crime fiction, led in its early years by such writers as Dashiell Hammett and
James M. Cain, constituted what Raymond Chandler called “The Simple Art of Murder”
and is thus considered as one of the primary influences on film noir.
The opportunities that the Hollywood film industry was offering at that time, and
later the menace of rising Nazi power, meant that many original film artists working in
Germany, and other central European countries (particularly those of Jewish origin, like
Otto Preminger, Edgar G. Ulmer, etc), found it difficult to survive and fled to the United
States and ultimately to Hollywood. These were directors who had been in close contact
with the Expressionist movement or studied with its followers. Several influential auteurs,
such as Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak or Michael Curtiz, brought their creative lighting
techniques and their technical expertise with them to Hollywood. This made them a very
attractive commercial advantage for Hollywood, where they would make some of the most
celebrated classic noirs. Some of these techniques were, for instance, the atypical
camerawork, such as the high-angular tilted camera (for effective shots), or the eye-view
(when the narrative is brought down to the first person, thus denying objectivity of vision),
and the chiaroscuro contrastive lighting (for dense, atmospheric results). The high
technical and aesthetical value brought to this body of films could therefore be perceived
as a way of unsettling viewers, “forming a disruptive component of an American cinema
that had habitually sought to reassure and comfort its audience” (Spicer 2002:2).
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