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

movement. In harnassing “a particular way of looking at the world”, as quoted above, noir
wants to express an outlook on life and human existence, based on the central concept of
Stimmung (p. 103) - a term very much associated with expressionist filmmaking. Visual
experimentation – especially coming from filmmakers familiar with exterior and low-key
photography or influenced by their heritage of German Expressionism - created this
embracing Stimmung (mood) or texture, dependent on a distinct visual style that used
moving camera, oddly angled shots, high contrast between light and dark shading,
eccentric set designs, dream-like haziness, and a chiaroscuro framing of events.
In his widely influential article, Paul Schrader encouraged viewers and readers to
revisit classic Hollywood crime films. Understanding that the French had had a major role
in identifying film noir, Schrader states that this body of films holds even more interest for
the cinephiles and cineastes of the early 1970s in the United States: “Hollywood’s film noir
has recently become the subject of renewed interest among moviegoers and critics. (...)
American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character”
(Schrader 1972:15). These neo-noir productions from across the Atlantic formed an art
cinema exemplified by a stimulating mixture of cinematic modernism with typically dark
themes, structures, and techniques.
In trying to answer the question of why noir has become so important, James
Naremore also suggests a “cinematic modernism” that facilitated the film industry and
made it even more valuable and lucrative, also for the Hollywood auteurs: “If we could ask
the original French commentators what American film noir represented, they might agree
that it was a kind of modernism in the popular cinema: it used unorthodox narration; it
resisted sentiment and censorship; it revelled in the ‘social fantastic’; it demonstrated the
ambiguity of human motives (...)” (Naremore 1998:38). These directors – from what is
known as the “Hollywood Renaissance” or “The American New Wave” (men such as
Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and Martin Scorsese) – were key
contributors to the marriage of art and commercial cinema that prospered in America in the
early and mid seventies. Their films looked back at classic American crime cinema for
inspiration, and found many models, mainly in film noir, for their re-inventions of movie
violence and motivation. For example, Schrader’s own screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976)
was a key film in the makeover that is neo-noir.
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