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

Figure 70. Metropolis
The clock motif in Weimar films, notably those of Fritz Lang, is often used as a
strategy to represent the inevitable danger (especially in the time after the war) of
Germany’s capitulation to militaristic systems, or, socially speaking, the sick relations
between exploiter and exploited classes (the image of such domination being depicted at
the conclusion of Metropolis). This “cinematic Angstkomplex regarding subject-power
relations in modern society”, as Munby noted (1999:208), constitutes as much Weimar’s
legacy to American film noir as it contributed to expressionist visions of capitalist urban
modernity.
Watches and clocks are also present in many other noir films, and their
semiological significance – and therefore the relation between signifier and signified –
differ from linguistic signs in (at least) two fundamental respects, namely the arbitrary
relationship between the signifier (the material) and its mediation with the signified. In The
Big Clock, for example, the story starts to unwind (as it is told in flashback) when in fact
the clock placed in the lobby of the publishing company becomes the focal point and is
described as the largest and most sophisticated clock built in the world. Here the iconic
sign connotes the personality of media baron Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton): a
calculating, excessively egocentric man with diverse obsessions, including clocks. The
baron personifies the invisible framework that controls the fate of a man, that of George
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