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

her neck, moves her lips, mimicking the ability to speak, and watches her own image. At
this point, the (almost) subjective eye of the camera goes slightly to the right, and while
focussing on Helen’s attraction to the mirror, it shows an unidentifiable figure hiding in
darkness behind a statue. The camera then provides a close-up of the wide and psychotic
eye of this figure (in the same way as described above) – an eye which, acting in its own
way as a mirror, reflects the mirror image of Helen. The eye reflects a slightly different
image, however: Helen’s mouth is effaced. This particular image of the girl lacking her
mouth seems to come straight from Un Chien Andalou (1929), a seventeen-minute silent
surrealist film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, which
uses dream logic in narrative flow and speculating on the then-popular Freudian free
association. The scenes were extremely provocative (it was designed to deliver a
revolutionary shock to the hated bourgeois society), particularly the first ones in which we
see a woman’s eye being slit open with a razor (fig. 88), while an identical reflection of a
cloud obscures the moon.
Figure 88. Un Chien Andalou
The bars of the railings projected on the walls further accentuate the threatening
dangers that reign in the house, and in the end entrap the young mute girl and isolate her
from the rest of the world. The particulars of mise-en-scène and lighting create here a host
of other implications. The effacement of the mouth is a mark of castration, but a quite
different castration from the one I have described above with Chris Cross in Scarlet Street.
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