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

specifically in Touch of Evil: “These characters are more dangerous, more anti-social, than
the reasons the films tentatively offer to “explain” their pathological state; the spectacular
and unclassifiable nature of their mania gives the films their strong impact – we feel the
presence of characters whose evil is profound and beyond understanding” (Hirsch
1981:194). I endorse Hirsch’s position regarding the way that The Big Combo embraced a
visual style that is more aggressive when compared to other earlier noirs. From Double
Indemnity in 1944 to The Big Combo in 1955 film noir maintained a critique of mainstream
affirmative film art in which political and social hostility is delivered in arresting aesthetic
terms.
Part V is fused into two different sections and it globally consists of a synthesis of
the overall considerations laid out previously, summing up the main variations and
similarities found throughout the diverse phases or periods of film noir. I entitled section 1
“Genre Revisited” as it is devoted to the analysis of the concept with some thoughts about
the most recent developments in genre study. Since the whole scholarly purpose of this
thesis is to discuss film noir primarily from a stylistic perspective, I seek to provide a
comprehensive overview of applied genre criticism, concentrating on mainstream
American cinema, and explaining the history and social myths that may have helped with
the expansion of film genres, like the Western or the gangster film, as both genres share a
number of elements in common. I establish a relationship between genre and auteur
(previously debated in Part III), concentrating on the origin and position of the term
“genre” itself and the way the concept is applied in the definition of cinema as an
entertainment mode in general.
“Towards an (Elusive) Definition of Film Noir” makes up section 2 and seeks to
bring together the major elements that have given full body to this thesis: the cultural,
literary, social, and political components on which film noir drew. Thus, I intend to show
that noir persists in many forms and above all that it overlaps with many genres.
Simultaneously I hope to be able to expand on the universality of noir, following Raymond
Durgnat’s thesis that noir is potentially everywhere, and stress the pluralistic aspects these
films embody. For that, I will have recourse to the opinions of several critics, notably
Richard Maltby who conceives Hollywood productions (of which noirs are a part) to be
marked as an erratic changeable cycle rather than as a stable arrangement of genres.
Raymond Durgnat says that film noir “describes not genres but dominant cycles or motifs,
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