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

to us and the picture depicted in the film the people are watching at the hotel) are no longer
semantically separable. In fact, the “optical unconscious” invariably comes with a
perspective attached to it, which makes us take part in the subjective gaze of the camera.
For many linguists, meta-language as seen in this context is conceived as reflexivity, and
both are critical qualities of natural language. From a cinematic point of view, this is also
the case: they both are forms of enunciation. Metz too believes that they can be applied to
film:
All figures of enunciation consist in a metadiscursive folds of cinematic instances
piled on top of each other. (…) In subjective framing, the gazing and at the same
time showing character duplicates, that is, “reflects” both the spectator and the
camera. (Metz 1982:55)
This symbiosis of human being and the film-machine, or this idea of “film-eye” 89
was a method used by many noir directors, such as Fritz Lang, who was himself a user of
such projections within a picture. In his Metropolis, the workers are dehumanised, and this
dualism has its decisive expression in the female robot referred to as the
“Maschinenmensch” or the “Machine Human”. The tension between these two dimensions
that is present in the film is a key force in destabilising the viewer’s interpretation.
Finally, the implication of the new signified obtained from the “cine-eye” in The
Spiral Staircase conceals a hidden meaning which can be revealed if, as Roland Barthes
puts it (see p. 261), the image is analysed in terms of signifier and signified. In this case,
the hidden “symbolic” and ideological is obtained at the level of meaning with a signified:
the eye of the murderer becomes the eye of the camera, then the audience’s downstairs in
the hotel theatre, and ultimately, the spectator’s eye, who acts as a silent voyeur. The
camera holds on the intruder’s eyes in extreme close-up as “he” watches the woman get
undressed.
In turn, the camera-eye in fig. 86 below seems to be separate, detached from what is
depicted. It becomes a way of looking at the object-in-picture, and in this case the spectator
adopts the point of view of the camera. In cinematic terms, this is often referred to as
“subjectivisation” by the camera as a causal effect. Here the subjective viewpoint of the
89 This technique reached its peak with the Russian Constructivists, notably in the work of Dziga Vertov with
his “Kino-Eye” (“Cine-Eye”) method. Vertov believed that by being a “mechanical eye” (as he would refer
to it himself), the camera could complement the faculty of human sight.
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