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

ordering” - appears to match this model, whereas, according to Lacan’s interpretation,
condensation is related to the metaphor and displacement is identified with metonymy.
The master concepts of selection and ordering move us from semiotics to rhetorical
analysis and even to psychoanalysis. In The Spiral Staircase we have many elements that
help us focus on psychoanalytical aspects of the characters, inside their (contorted) minds:
Helen, a young mute girl who suffered a shock when she was still a child; Parry, a doctor
who is in love with Helen and wants to help her; Albert, a quiet professor who shared with
his brother Steve a nasty past marked by his contemptuous father, a strong and strict man, a
womaniser who never allowed any sort of weakness in his children. In addition to the
notion of the aforementioned voyeurism, the film follows psychoanalytic film theory to the
extent that it reflects the power of the cinema over the individual. The spectator, as in the
eyes of the voyeur, is offered particular identifications, but, as Lacan’s theory points out,
the identification with the image is simply an illusion, making the subject feel confused
and split.
In the fourth part of New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, Robert Stam emphasises
that psychoanalytical film theory examines the way that the cinema works as “a specific
kind of spectacle” and bears witness to the influence it has on the individual, both socially
and psychically:
If psychoanalysis examines the relations of the subject in discourse, then
psychoanalytic film theory meant integrating questions of subjectivity into notions
of meaning-production. Moreover, it meant that film-viewing and subject-formation
were reciprocal processes: something about our unconscious identity as subjects is
reinforced in film viewing, and film viewing is effective because of our unconscious
participation. Moving from the interpretation of individual films to a systematic
comprehension of the cinematic institution itself, some film theorists saw psychoanalysis
as a way of accounting for the cinema’s immediate and pervasive social
power. For them the cinema ‘reinscribes’ those very deep and globally structuring
processes which form the human psyche, and it does so in such a way that we
continually yearn to repeat (or re-enact) the experience. (Stam 1992:124)
The “reciprocal processes” Robert Stam mentions highlight our “unconscious
participation” when viewing The Spiral Staircase, for example. The film mirrors our latent
wishes, and it further seems to explain the quality of voyeurism present in the spectator,
but interpreted in various ways, according to our understanding of the world. This explains
why each audience member, although sharing the same space and experience in a certain
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