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

are “as often nihilistic, cynical or stoic as reformatory; there are Fascist and apathetic
denunciations of the bourgeois order, as well as Marxist ones” (Durgnat 1970:49).
Therefore, Durgnat accentuates the differentiation between denunciations of bourgeois
society and a fairly confused and contradictory spirit of political protest found in dark
cinema. Yet his approach remains very formalistic: “film noir is not a genre, as the
Western or gangster film is, and takes us into the realms of classification by motif and
tone” (in Silver & Ursini 1996:49). At this stage it is important to reiterate that the term
noir did not originate in the United States either at the level of film criticism or
contemporary industry jargon. Durgnat clearly stated that noir is potentially everywhere:
Black is as ubiquitous as shadow, and if the term film noir has a slightly exotic ring
it’s no doubt because it appears as figure against the rosy ground of Anglo-Saxon
middle-class, and especially Hollywoodian, optimism and Puritanism. (Durgnat
1970:49)
Durgnat’s metaphor of the tree (“Paint It Black: A family tree of film noir”) is very
apropos in expressing the several branches that co-exist in this film categorisation. When
encountering his sub-categories, the antecedents for film noir are indeed listed in their
entirety – the influx of German émigrés and the influence of Expressionism; the arrival of
French émigrés and the influence of existentialism; the hard-boiled school of writing; or
even those American directors who were exposed to the French Poetic Realism, as seen in
Section 1 of Part II.
Many other critics, including Paul Schrader, believe that it is difficult to tell film
noir just from period of creation / production as the noir phenomenon became influential
even after the fifties (in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with its progeny, neo-noir). In popular
culture in general, noir became a presence in other domains, from a continuing interest and
fascination among painters and documentarists, in photography and television. It could be
referred to as a “sensibility”, from the radical and subversive mystique it acquired as an
alternative to mainstream Hollywood conservatism. In fact, it arguably served as a public
conscience, documenting the darker moments in the history of American politics and
society, a reflection of the production policies of its time.
My position in this thesis, especially throughout Parts IV (the semiotic analysis of
key noir films) and V (troubles with genre analysis), has been to suggest that film noir is
not a distinct genre or series but rather a “transgeneric” influence on films which addresses
407