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

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abstract
Film Noir, genre, iconography, narrative patterns (flashback; voiceover),
semiotics, symbolism, visual style.
Film noir is a notoriously complex concept to define. Since a complete
study of the stylistics of film noir has not yet appeared, this thesis, integrated in
the area of film studies, is an endeavour to come to terms with film noir and film
genre in a number of ways, and is essentially an earnest attempt at reexamining
through a process of iconographic analysis this descriptive term
applied to American films of the early forties to the late fifties.
This project concentrates on the following research question: can film
noir be regarded as a cinematic genre as such? The cinematic and social
backgrounds to film noir are outlined so as to understand this cinematographic
phenomenon as an extension of the literary hard-boiled movement, a
subversive worldview that blatantly set itself in opposition to the self-promoting
American myths that had marked many Depression-era Hollywood films.
Specific cultural movements and socio-political events, psychoanalysis,
structuralism and auteurism will be explored, as they all have helped
contextualise noir patterns, and enabled the term film noir to gradually gain
authority in American film criticism.
The films to be analysed focus on specific visual symbols and
cinematographic elements (like lighting techniques and photography), and their
iconographic signification will be examined from a semiotic perspective.
Through the notions of the Saussurian “sign” and the Peircean “icon”, it is
intended to demonstrate how the film symbols in noirs give rise to signifiers
which are emphatically indexical, that is, how they crosscut from one symbol
(or event) to another, directing and constraining the spectator’s attention.
The thesis then concludes that film noir, for reasons of its complexity
and indefinition, cannot be considered and understood as a film genre, and that
its visual style (the dominant aspect of noir) spans a number of genres serving
the purpose of stressing the disenchanted aftermath of the war, represents the
underside of American urban life, and most especially emphasises uncertainty,
anxiety, and the dark side of human existence.