The Dark Side of the Screen—A Resistance to Changing Times

This essay argues that black and white cinema spawned a resistance to changing times that is still very present in the new generation of directors who follow classic film traditions while subverting them with consistent narrative inventions.The Artist,the best picture Oscar award winner in 2012,is an example of this resistance as it pays homage to some of the greatest silent films of the first two or three decades of cinema history.“The Dark Side of the Screen”aims to underline that there is an unchanging power of the phantasmagoria so present in black and white movies,produced not only in the silent era but also in film noir through lighting effects and camera angles which characterize the work of major noir directors like Fritz Lang,Billy Wilder,and Orson Welles,who knew everything about the unutterable mysteries hidden on the dark side of the screen.

Art and Terror in Daniel Silva’s Spy Novel The Kill Artist

The importance of Daniel Silva’s past,close to a Portuguese cultural environment,will be relevant to understand the psychological profile of his popular protagonist and central character,Gabriel Allon,a melancholic man haunted by his past,but also someone who is a gifted art restorer,very sensitive to the values of loyalty and fidelity,which the author assumed to have inherited from his Portuguese family.Being a spy and an art expert,Allon seems to conciliate two contradictory sides of the human personality.The connection between Portuguese and American culture,in this writer’s background,could have been responsible for the creation of a character who can be,at the same time,very sensitive and very violent;an assassin who is an Israeli secret agent and the world’s finest restorer of the Old Masters’paintings.A perfect double who does justice to his creator’s double origin,which contributed to the success of The Kill Artist(2000),where terror is practiced as one of the fine arts by a hero very loyal and faithful to his complex cultural origins,living in a diaspora as the eternal wandering Jew.

Domestic noir in Anglo-American Literature

In order to highlight the contribution of Literature to the study of Domestic Violence,this essay will reflect on the relevance of some Anglo-American literary works,integrated in the Domestic Gothic or Domestic Noir,a subgenre of the psychological thriller,distinguished by the peculiarity of representing a woman in danger as its main character.The family can be the most commonly considered luminous space of harmony,affection and quiet domesticity,but everything can turn upside down whenever this stereotype is reversed drastically.The so-called domestic noir,a new genre popularized in 2013,deals with these dualities,demonstrating that gothic fiction has always been interested in family conflicts and domestic violence in its most varied forms,turning them into sources of terror so relevant to our time.