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

transposing the idea of the game into that of the mystery of the unknown. In this regard,
this image reminds us of the concept of anchorage, as suggested by Barthes in “Rhetoric of
the Image”, which basically functions as a way to guide the viewer through the several
possible significations of a visual representation. It is normally an adjunct to captions of
photographs or written materials in a film, but the whole objective is indeed to anchor
some (extra) meaning and to “fix the floating chain of signifieds.” In Out of the Past, the
motif of gambling appears rather frequently whether it be at race tracks, Whit playing
poker, or Jeff and Kathie at the roulette table. These games of chance lay bare the
aspirations of these characters that no matter how slim a chance there is, the desire to risk
everything is worth it for a moment of pleasure.
To a great extent, the concepts of polysemy and anchorage lead us to another
signifying practice, that of “reflexivity”, as proposed by Berthold Brecht. As Robert Stam
notes, the concept started to be used in philosophy and then psychology, where it initially
referred to “the mind’s capacity to be both subject and object to itself within the cognitive
process, but was extended metaphorically to the arts to evoke the capacity for selfreflexion
of any medium or language” (Stam 1992:204). The concept draws attention to the
narrative and aesthetic principles underlying the text. From this, a full set of devices can be
identified in visual semiotics: from strategies of fracture and interruption to discontinuity;
in other words, they openly display the codes of its construction. 97
Moreover, the other meta-cinematic devices that arise from this notion of
“reflexivity” such as frame-within-a-frame and the film-within-a-film clearly include the
concept of mise-en-abyme, that is, “the infinite regress of mirror reflections to denote the
literary, painterly or filmic process (...)” (Stam 1992:205). The following scene (fig. 102)
from Out of the Past shows Kathie at Whit’s house lighting up a cigarette. The viewer sees
Jeff who is spying on Kathie. As she walks past the mirror, her image is projected several
times as an infinite sequence.
97 In this spirit, Brechtian theatre is defined as having no sets, no costumes and actors who would come in
and out of their characters as soon as they entered or left the area designated as “stage,” all as a means or a
style that relied on the reflective detachment of the audience rather than the atmosphere or the context of
production and action.
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