Shades of Iconoclasm in Orson Welles´ Film Noirs

• Thesis title in Czech: Odstíny ikonoklasmu ve filmech noir Orsona Wellese
• Thesis title in English: Shades of Iconoclasm in Orson Welles´ Film Noirs
• Key words: kino|film noir|žánr|Orson Welles|poválečný|filozofický
• English key words: cinema|film noir|genre|Orson Welles|post-war|philosophical
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2022/2023
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 02.11.2022
• Date of assignment: 02.11.2022
• Administrator's approval: approved
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 24.11.2022
• Date and time of defence: 07.09.2023 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 31.07.2023
• Date of proceeded defence: 07.09.2023
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. David Vichnar, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Film Noir, the representative genre of Post-War experience in its form and feel, has been subject to
much scrutiny - psychological, feminist, and historical. In my endeavour of being absorbed in Film Theory, I
couldn’t help but notice a dizzying array of theories that circulate through film-makers, critics, and theorists -
contemporaries and otherwise. Just as different camera angles can unfold different mise-en-scènes in the
same room, I have come across multiple theories that inform my understanding of Film Noir. I had originally
set out to study Orson Welles’ film noirs when I found myself facing multiple approaches with which one
could look at his works — Bazinian Auteur Theory, Lacanian Psychoanalysis which inspired McGowan’s
explication of gaze in cinema, Deleuzian Time and Movement Image, and theory of cinema as a mental
machine by Christian Metz.
Altogether, critique abounds with dissensus about the status of Film Noir as a genre or just a style, an
artistic endeavour or just a repetitive affectation, a definitive style that mirrors its era or a misread absolute in
an equivocal reality. Film noir is a fabric woven out of many threads. Its various styles, themes, motifs, and
forms make it a complex and contested cultural phenomenon. All the related 1 dissensus, in my opinion, is
because different theorists have different perceptions of what cinema is. In his essay “The Gaps of Cinema”,
Jacques Rancière gives a fitting answer to this dilemma,
Actually, cinema is a great many things. It is the material place where we go to be entertained by a
spectacle of shadows, although these shadows induce an emotion in us that is more secret than the
one expressed by the condescending term entertainment. It is also the accumulation and
sedimentation of those presences within us as their reality is erased and altered: the other cinema,
which is recomposed by our memories and our words, and which, in the end, strongly differs from
what was presented when it unspooled during projection. Cinema is also an ideological apparatus
producing images that circulate in society, images in which the latter recognises the present state of
its types, its past legend or its imagined futures. It is also the concept of an art, in other words, a
problematic dividing line which, at the heart of productions of an industrial craft, isolates those
productions that deserve to be considered as inhabitants of the large artistic realm. But cinema is also
an utopia: a writing of movement that was celebrated in the 1920s as the great universal symphony,
the exemplary manifestation of an energy animating art, work, and the collective. Finally, cinema
can be a philosophical concept, a theory of the actual movement of things and thought, as it is for
Gilles Deleuze, who discusses films and their procedures on every page of his two books, which are
neither a theory nor a philosophy of cinema, but strictly speaking a metaphysics of cinema.
2
1 Steven Sanders, “Film Noir and the Meaning of Life” in The Philosophy of Film Noir ed. by Mark T. Conard, (The
University Press of Kentucky: 2006) 91.
2 Jacques, Rancière, The gaps of cinema, European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 1 (2012), Nr. 1, S. 4–13. DOI: https://
doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15031.
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This definition of cinema clearly demarcates the different ways in which one could look at the cinematic
productions of Orson Welles. These are — cinema as an ideological apparatus that can serve as a mirror to
the society, cinema as an artistic undertaking, cinema as subjective reality and creation of its audience, and as
a metaphysical philosophy.
During my initial study, I have been able to demarcate the commonalities and differentiate between
Welles’ noirs and other films that are regarded as classics in the genre. His use of tropes is much more
distinguished; the characters in his film noir have more dimensions in terms of dialogue and mannerisms
(when compared to other film noirs of the day), a depth that one could also attribute to his film-making
process which varied greatly from his contemporaries. I sense a rich scope in delving into this comparative
analysis to shed more light on what sets apart Welles’ film-making and philosophy even though his works
figure in the same genre. Also, in numerous accounts, noir is seen as more than a trend in film production; it
is regarded as emblematic not only of the cinematic culture, but also of the tone of American culture
generally in the period of postwar readjustment - I wish to study this area of historical 3 criticism in detail and
add to the ongoing discourse about film noir’s status and investigate whether it is really a fitting reflection of
the American society in it’s postwar years. For example, film critic Peter Bogdanovich has already noted the
use of satire and political commentary that Welles’ films incorporate and serves a suitable entry point into the
realism in Welles’ oeuvre.
In addition to these concerns, I am also interested in situating Welles within a philosophical
framework, specifically film noir’s philosophical presuppositions with sketches of meaningless existence,
pessimism, the human condition, freedom, and fatalism. This prompts me to think of the moral and social
aspects of Welles’s poetic view of cinema which links him most overtly to Jean Renoir. I will contextualise
Welles’ film-making strategies using the film theories of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. In total, this
thesis will be an amalgam of technical, psychoanalytic, art-historical, philosophical, and ideological critique
of Orson Welles’ film noirs. I propose to divide it into the following provisional chapters —
1. A Dive into Ideology - A genre study of tropes/characters in Welles’ film noirs Touch of Evil, The Lady
from Shanghai, The Stranger, tropes in other film noirs like Dark Passage, Double Indemnity, et al. and
their relevance in Post-War America. I will also keep Femme Fatale in focus with its feminist readings.
3 Mike Chopra-Gant, Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and
Film Noir, (London: I. B. Tauris), 2006, 2.
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Can cinema as a form be regarded as a reflection of society, and can film noir be deemed emblematic of
the condition of Post-War American society, are the main contentions of this chapter.
2. The Philosophical Realm - A study of dialogue in Welles’ film noirs which includes philosophical touchpoints
like perception of a mythic past, morality, and more.
3. Playing with the Gaze - A Lacanian study of Welles’ film noirs through works of Todd McGowan and
Christian Metz whose discourse about film is an imaginary support for the fragmented perception of the
viewing subject and to cinema as a "mental machine" (apparatus)
that allows the spectator to perceive
himself as "self-present" and to experience as whole and unified a succession of seemingly disconnected
shots and sequences.
4. Inspiring New Horizons - A study of how Orson Welles enables a non-dominatory and emancipatory
strategies of viewership with his films. I will engage with film theories of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques
Rancière for this purpose. The focus also will be placed on how Welles’ cinema is performative of
Deleuze’s concept of Crystal Image and how despite functioning in the liminal space between
entertainment and art, Welles emancipates the spectator from the conventional expectations of the day.
5. Spectatorship & Auteurship - I will set out to answer is why did audiences not appreciate Welles’ film
noirs in the way they did Citizen Kane? This chapter undertakes the conditions of production,
circulation, and reception of Orson Welles’ films.

References

Preliminary Bibliography
Bazin, André. Orson Welles: A Critical View. (Acrobat Books, 1991).
_____. What is Cinema? Volume 1, essays selected and trans. Hugh Gray, foreword Jean Renoir, new
foreword Dudley Andrew (California, 2005).
_____ . What is Cinema? Volume 2, essays selected and trans. Hugh Gray, foreword François Truffaut, new
foreword Dudley Andrew (California, 2005).
Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. (Harvard, 1993).
_____ . Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. (BFI, 2004).
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
(Minnesota, 1986).
_____. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minnesota, 1989).
_____. “The Brain Is the Screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on ‘The Time-Image.’” Interview by Melissa
McMuhan. Discourse 20, no. 3 (1998): 47-55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389498 .
McGowan, Todd. “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes.” Cinema
Journal 42, no. 3 (2003): 27–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225903.
_____. The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (SUNY, 2007).
Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. (MacMillan, 1982).
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso, 2009.
_____. Film Fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista (Berg, 2006).
_____. The Intervals of Cinema, trans. John Howe (Verso, 2014).
Roraback, Erik S. “Circulating within Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report for a Newly Armed
Eye”. Theory and Practice in English Studies, Volume 4: Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of
English, American and Canadian Studies. Brno: Masaryk University, 2005. 227–33.
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_____. “Cosmic Auto-Poetic Self-Reference, Participation & Actuality: Citizen Kane (1941)”. Parallax:
Journal of International Perspectives, Volume V, Number 1 (Fall 2008) (Boston) 109–25.
_____.“Pondering Along with Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents.”
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 20, no. 2 (2018): 151–68. https://doi.org/10.5325/
intelitestud.20.2.0151.
Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” Film Comment 8, no. 1 (1972): 8–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/
43752885.