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

the prominent journal Cahiers du Cinéma, dominated French understanding of Hollywood
for more than a decade, from the early fifties until political events and cultural changes
began to make auteurism problematic in 1968 and after.
In their Panorama du film noir américain, French commentators Raymond Borde
and Étienne Chaumeton discussed the six major sources of American film noir. They
emphasise three sociological ones, namely a new realism about violence brought about by
World War II, an increase in the crime rate within American society and the extensive use
of psychoanalysis. For the rest, they are to be found in the artistic context within the hardboiled
crime novel, European cinema, and certain Hollywood genres of the thirties –
especially horror films, gangster movies and classic detective pictures. One particularity
about this group of men from Cahiers and Positif is that they affectionately evoked the
years of the mid-twenties by watching American gangster films that were “curious, nonconformist,
and as noir as one could desire” (Borde & Chaumeton 2002:2). The
representation of such behaviour, that is, by questioning the dominant order, would lead
the surrealists to value the apparent content of such film genres (from silent and sound
comedies to horror movies, for example). Film noir was not excluded either. In fact, when
Panorama appeared Borde and Chaumeton had little to say about visual style; they rather
referred to it as a Zeitgeist (see p. 146), and as James Naremore points out, they gave much
importance to the topics of death and to the emotional qualities of the films, which they
described with the five adjectives related to surrealism, mentioned above on p. 163.
Unlike the Cahiers circle, however, other leading (mainly British) film critics,
writing for influential film journals and magazines (such as the British Movie), eventually
moved from a purely auteurist view of American cinema to investigations of genre. Yet,
film noir as such never became a major critical concern for such magazines, specifically
Movie, for a long while; they rather concentrated on the characteristic entertainment genres
of that time, notably the Hollywood Western. In fact, it was a critic outside the Movie
group who published in August 1970, for the British journal Cinema, the first complete
essay on film noir in English.
In his article echoing the Rolling Stones song of the time “Paint It Black”,
Raymond Durgnat deviates from the thematic position assumed by Borde and Chaumeton
regarding film noir, as for him these “dark” productions do not aim at presenting a
significant and tendentiously political account of American culture. For him, noir movies
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