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

Figure 102. Out of the Past
In this regard, this scene stresses the meaning of mise-en-abyme as the
reduplication of images, terms, or concepts referring to the textual whole. This particular
passage, for example, plays out in miniature the processes of the filmic text as a whole, or,
to put it slightly differently, it is a play of signifiers within a filmic text, of sub-texts
mirroring each other. This French expression describes the visual experience of having an
image reflected infinitely to the extent of rendering the meaning almost impossible or at
least making it very unbalanced. As already noted with the female protagonist of The
Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street (p. 290), many noirs use mirrors as foregrounded
objects to reflect the dual personalities of the protagonists or to emphasise their own
destructive sides.
Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai is for me one of the most emblematic
examples of mirroring the diegesis in mise-en-abyme. The scene below (fig. 103) is taken
from the Funhouse in an amusement park, in a room composed of mirrors, in which Elsa
Banister (Rita Hayworth) tries to convince O’Hara (Orson Welles) of her innocence.
357