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

theatre, will go through and discover different decisive moments in their cinematographic
experience.
This theoretical analysis can be used to reinterpret the opening sequences once
again. The “unconscious participation” starts in Siodmak’s production with the scene
portraying a small audience watching a silent movie. This operates at a metalinguistic
level, like a text within a text, in that case, a film within a film, and it sutures together the
same means of communication but using two types of audiences, the one in the film
(watching a film), and another outside, ultimately the lone individual. In this particularly
dynamic opening sequence, Helen, appropriately watching a silent film (a first hint of her
own muteness) 90 on her day-off, immediately becomes the target of attention. In this
context, Metz’s dynamic conception of textuality as a natural flow and order is reinforced
in these opening scenes: the figures appear here as marks of an irrational discourse which
becomes progressively ordered. Therefore, The Spiral Staircase is yet further evidence that
film operates at three levels: semiotically (the invariant relation of signifier to signified),
rhetorically (where figures extend – or in this case, replace – the domain of the signified
thus developing an unstable relation between it and its signifier), and psychoanalytically
(where a free play of signifiers responds to dynamic instinctual forces and organises itself
through the processes associated with the dream work).
To conclude this line of argument, the two plans of action in the first scenes of the
film (the hotel room downstairs and the room upstairs) use two different levels of depiction
of what is happening. At this level, effectively, Vertov’s primacy of the camera (the
abovementioned “Kino-Eye”) over the human eye seems to be potentially out of place in
The Spiral Staircase (figuratively so, at least). In the film, it is the eye of the strangler (fig.
83) that stands in for the verbal mimesis: it reinforces the concept of voyeurism, yet from a
psychic perspective, that of the murderer’s, whose eye reveals apprehension and evil
intentions.
The photography of Musuraca is extremely powerful here. With Expressionist
concentration, the shadow effect on the left makes us concentrate on the eyeball of the
character. The director then literally lunges into the murderer’s eyeball and, the image of
the girl being strangled, is reflected only through his iris. The complicity that is built
around the spectator is heightened to an extreme, as the viewer is now not only an
90 Interestingly, the working title of The Spiral Staircase was “The Silence of Helen McCord”.
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