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

Figure 89. Affair in Trinidad
Other examples can be found throughout the work of Hitchcock. In the last
sequence of the noirish Vertigo (1958), we see the stairwell of a church bell tower coils up
around Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), almost like a monster escaped from his
unconscious. The same happens with the way L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart) manages to
encapsulate the whole world through his Rear Window (1954). He does not really observe
the exterior from his window, but rather “constructs” other lives through various windows,
which give him back the “split screen” projection of his anguishes and rejections. 92 The
numerous fire escape staircases and the one that adorns his own apartment appear to be
important coiling structures to help the spectator follow Stewart’s gaze out of his window.
In the early noir Shadow of a Doubt, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) attempts to murder his
niece by rigging a staircase for her to collapse.
92 This again brings us back to the particular concept that cinema builds in studios spaces things that are
ephemeral and creates in our imaginary solid constructions or fictions. So “in the mode of absence”, as Metz
says, the signifier, that is the cinematic image, is thought of as something that stands for something which is
absent. The more intensely present the cinematic image appears to make its object, the more it insists that the
object existed; or, in other words, the more real cinema seems, the more it reminds us of its unreality.
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