'Laura' (Otto Preminger, 1944): Film Noir and the Fascinated Gaze

Abstract

In the 1940s and 50s, during Hollywood’s classical period, a series of films were produced that would subsequently be incorporated by critics, scholars and historians into a new category known as film noir, on the basis of a set of features common to all of them. At the top of this canon, regarded as one of the foundational films of the genre in practically every study on the subject, we find Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944). In this paper, we propose to challenge the definition of Laura as a canonical noir film, adopting a discourse analysis approach to determine whether, despite being almost unanimously considered a paradigmatic example of the genre, the film really exhibits the features that studies of film noir assert that films included in this corpus should contain.