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

The notion of “text” as a discourse should also be taken into account here when
talking about these concepts of codes and subcodes as they all reflect certain values and
beliefs or even attitudes and assumptions. The use of codes is essential in any organised
society to guarantee that we all understand the meaning of texts and to help us towards a
“preferred reading”, as Daniel Chandler calls it (see previous footnote) and away from
what Umberto Eco calls “aberrant decoding”. I also mention these codes, namely the
textual ones, because they do not necessarily determine what films really mean, in a filmlanguage
context. Moreover, this particular idea will prove beneficial for my discussion of
film noir and genre, considering that most fundamental kinds of textual codes relate to
genre. In fact, particular conventions of content and form are normally regarded as being
part of a genre, and it is that point that I wish to argue as being problematic since genres
overlap, and often texts, in the broad sense of the term, do exhibit the conventions of more
than one genre.
While the analogy between language and film was developed by the Russian
Formalists, it was indeed with the advent of structuralism and semiotics in the sixties that
the film-language concept was explored by theorists such as the ones mentioned already,
Umberto Eco and Christian Metz. As seen earlier, the initial tendency was to contrast the
arbitrary signs of natural language with the motivated, iconic signs of the cinema. This
category of “analogy” was soon adapted by Metz, giving more room to the simple notion
of “motivation” in the relation between signifier and signified. Indeed, his major concern
was to shift his categories from those of discourse theory to those of rhetorical and
especially psychoanalytic theory.
In his Language and Cinema (1974), he suggests that this analogy is more in terms
of our everyday perception and experience in parallel with our cinematic experience. In
other words, Metz was declaring that the arbitrary sign of linguistics is different in the
context of cinema. I presume the semiotician here wishes to express the notion that the
relation might be arbitrary in some cases, but motivated in others. This is obviously not a
problem judging from the fact that film installs a different relationship between signifier
and signified or between shots and words, that is, language and cinema, add an important
difference since film may not be as much coded as a langue. One can speak a language and
produce full utterances as long as one is familiar with a particular language code; in
cinema, we can actually invent and “speak” a certain cinematic language. A noirish film
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