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

the murderer is in fact a man? Antony Easthope affirms that, in a visual image, this relation
between the arbitrary strings of signifiers and the concepts or meanings assigned to any
organisation of signifieds is “iconic”:
In film, as in language, the relation between the celluloid strip projected onto a
screen, the shaped and patterned visual image, and what the image may represent –
a house, a tree, a person – is the relation between signifier and signified. But unlike
language that relation is iconic (the image resembles what it represents) and
indexical (the image as effect of a photochemical process is caused by what it
represents). There is, then, no equivalent in cinema for the arbitrary relation
between signifier and signified by which a string of purely abstract phonemes
through social conventions becomes able to mean a house, a tree or a person.
(Easthope 1993:7)
It is also for that very reason that film theories often tried to solve this naturalist
fallacy, as what we watch on the screen is never the real itself, or, as Christian Metz puts it,
“the image of a house does not signify “house”, but rather “here is a house (…)” (Metz
1974:116). For now, we only see what the murderer’s eye sees, and as the camera shuts
that particular scene off, almost as the eye blinks, the lame girl is dropped dead on the
floor, strangled. This scene stands as a good example of a processed or constructed
cinematic image, as a signifier that stands for something which is absent. In that lapse of
time, the spectator is capable of building the “unreality” of that cinematic image, and
although the object (the murdering scene) is actually lacking, we turn to all sorts of forms
of (mental) manipulation and construction to provide for the photographic realism we
derive from this scene.
The mind here works by selection and ordering, and this follows the single model
of the mind proposed by Metz, who accounts for the effect a given set of scenes has on the
viewer. Just like the dictionary (the paradigmatic law) that contains our possibilities of
selection, the grammar book (the syntagmatic law) governs the ordering of whatever is
selected. Lacanian psychoanalysis, followed by Metz and most film theorists, explicitly
echoes this same model. The unconscious is structured like a language, or, as Lacan puts it
(Lacan 1977:203), the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, the field of radical alterity
(otherness). It too operates via principles of selection and ordering, and if the self is denied
any point of reference, then Lacan’s “structurally dynamic unconscious” becomes a
confrontation with the ego psychology. At this level, Freud’s concept of condensation -
which functions by means of selection and displacement or by means of a “circuitous
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