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

only agree that these disciplines share a similar method of organising a text combining
elements, selecting them and placing them in a certain structurally organised way
following a legitimate linguistic system. In cinema, the rules seem to be applied with a
specific concern for selecting and ordering images and ordering makes up the very
processes of language (dictionary and grammar).
To summarise this point, the shift from how Christian Metz sees film has indeed
reversed our conventional order in handling cinematic meaning. From a psychological
perspective (in which signifiers organise themselves and respond to dynamic processes
associated with the dream work presented by Freud) and a rhetorical point of view (the
domain of signified being replaced by figures, unbalancing the relationship between
signified and its signifier), Metz feels that film operates essentially from a semiotic realm.
Therefore, metonymy becomes the paramount figure as it establishes the association by
which one is able to move from one aspect or image to a related one in search of a
satisfying final picture. When this process is complete, elaborated in a logical (that is,
semiotic) way, a filmed narrative is then achieved.
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, combining his phenomenological description
with “hermeneutic interpretation”, opposes this method of analysis through separation by
dealing with the figural process dialectically. Metaphor, he claims, stands above all figures
(“metaphor has the extraordinary power of redescribing reality”), and adds “the
impossibility of reaching a social reality prior to symbolization” (Ricoeur 1981:237).
Perhaps we can now see why Ricoeur privileges metaphor above all figures while Metz
relegates it to a special form of association.
This issue is posed quite interestingly in the collection of essays mentioned above
entitled Le Signifiant Imaginaire (1977), in which Metz attempts to state that the division
line that between the orders of discourse and of figuration simply averts any likely link
with semiotics and psychoanalysis. The point I am trying to make here is that in a film
category such as the one discussed in this thesis, one can easily understand that film
images in film noir trace not only the inner speech in the visual, that is, located under the
sign of the ego, but at the same time they create a broader range of expectations that filter
how a spectator reads any scene through its assembled physical characteristics.
This film category might be, therefore, just as heavily coded and stereotyped as any
other in the cinema movement (like the Western films), and might mistakenly lead us to
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