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

level of the extra-pictorial text, music plays here an important role, adding new meanings
to the whole mise-en-scène, and emphasising itself instead of the event that is visualised.
2.2.1.3 The Noir Staircase: Looking through the Lens of
Metonymy
While the credit sequence unfolds at the very beginning of the film, a grand spiral
staircase is presented to us, shot from the very top in a snake-like way, so effectively that
the image at first may seem like a tunnel with no end or with just a wall of bricks at its
extremity (fig. 87). The claustrophobic feeling is then further accentuated with the poor
lighting and shadows reflected on the walls, from one single fluttering candle flame. Only
a few moments later do we get to see a silhouette of a young woman (the main actress)
coming downstairs from the very top of the staircase. We associate our initial
claustrophobic feeling now with the girl’s engagement in this spinning movement. This
gets to be our first contact with the “staircase” and the “spirality” the young girl is to be
found in.
The important concepts of selection and ordering (similarity and sequence) seem
here to have a relevant interaction with those of condensation and displacement, paradigm
and syntagm (analysed on p. 264), metaphor and metonymy. In fact, they all orchestrate
the interactions of signifiers and signifieds. These sets are so closely related that they have
commonly been combined. I have already mentioned above that the connections between
them have been remarked on by Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier (1982), but also
in the articles by Roman Jakobson “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles” (1956), and
Jacques Lacan’s “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud”
(1977).
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