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

2.2.1.2 The “Optical Unconscious” Camera­Eye
The way cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca prowls with his camera – especially
in the scenes in the basement – and uses depth of field to reveal the terror that haunts the
characters’ mind (especially Helen’s who simply does not know what to do next) is
remarkable. At this level, the cinematic meta-language deployed in the movie also helps
characterise the inner self of the protagonists. The cinematographer manages to deepen our
perception of the characters’ subjectivity by making visible the unconscious life, or in
other words, the camera reflects here what one could call the “optical unconscious”. An apt
illustration of this dimension is the already-mentioned early scene that takes place at the
hotel where we, as spectators, see the audience watching the projections of a silent film
called The Kiss (fig. 85). The function of this particular scene is twofold:
Figure 85. The Spiral Staircase
via the meta-language of the cinema (through the eye of the camera, we see the audience
that watches a film), we watch a film within a film, which happens to be just as silent as
the main protagonist. This provides a different level of content constituted by a signifying
system. The second function is that this scene is again played by the legitimising eye of the
camera: the two images (the one that the “optical unconscious” eye of the camera reveals
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