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

criminal and libidinous behaviour, commonly found (but not exclusively) in the gangster
and thriller genres. My critical approach throughout has been to consider film noir not so
much from its (undeniable) sociological aspects (discussed in Part II), but rather for its
artistic / formalist features, from an iconographic and visual point of view. From most
contemporary linguistics and semiotics perspectives, the common assumption is that
language, or any other system of transmitted signals (of which cinema is a part), is an
instrument, a tool: “Language serves for the expression of ‘content’: that is, of the
speaker’s expression of the real world, including the inner world of his own consciousness.
We may call this the ideational function (…)” (Simpson 2004:61). Clearly this model of
language rests on Peirce’s tripartite system (p. 260) for the study of signs, with its
categories of meaning, which provide a much richer field for visual analysis, or on
Christian Metz’s notion of visual representation (cinesemiotics, p. 264) leaning heavily on
linguistic models.
I therefore conclude that film noir’s difference does not lay so much in the
inversion of Hollywood conventions and the development of different themes (as
suggested in Part III) but rather in the slight but perceptible modification of the social and
emotional atmosphere, the tone in dominant cinema forms. In this regard, film noir
operates as a matter of mood, manner and, as Durgnat states, of tone. The semiotic analysis
of the films in Part IV has enabled me to understand that tone or, more broadly, that style.
Through the many recurrent symbols analysed in these films, I discovered that it is the
application of a distinctive style with a consistent intentionality that best characterises the
entire noir movement. The manipulation of all the elements – angle, framing, mise-enscène,
camera movement, duration of shot, optical effects, and montage – made film noir a
tight compendium of visual styles. From the use of staircases and handrails or banisters
with their spokes (as metaphors of entrapment) to the prison bars (sometimes just reflected
from the dark shadows of objects that enclose the noir protagonists), the bar motif and cage
wire (both literal and metaphorical) are perhaps the most recurrent elements in many noir
films. Even a relatively natural open-air environment such as the one found for example in
Gun Crazy, with its enmeshment of the two characters by reeds and narrow paths, has the
connotation of fatality, entrapment and isolation from each other (see fig. 116 on p. 388).
Moreover, film noir is not defined in terms of its content, setting or plot, and one should
not forget the ambiguity that exists in noir characters and iconography, a characteristic
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