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

a factor in the evolution of his style. “Other directors, such as Fred Zinnemann and
William Wyler, who began their careers in film studios from the start, have always tended
to shoot a scene from every possible angle and then assemble the whole thing in the cutting
room”, he explained in an interview published in 1979. “But I started my career in the
theatre and therefore I see the whole finished production before me” (in Pratley 1971:89).
Otto Preminger manages thus to assume a directorial attitude of detachment and neutrality
that was interpreted as his personal hallmark, as well as a certain fluidity achieved through
a visual style that insists on expanded compositions, with little cutting of a scene into shots
and counter-shots.
Part IV sets out to be a semiotic analysis of key noir features and thus focuses on
iconographic signification in film noir in general. Through this part of the thesis and with
the help of semiotics, I try to chart the ways in which (cinematographic and artistic)
meanings are produced in film noir through (recurrent) representations of objects, and
hence to further understand film noir from its artistic and historical angles. In the first
subsection, called “From a Semiotic Perspective”, I first discuss the notion of film symbol
from a cine-semiotic perspective. I refer to the Saussurian notions of “signifier” and
“signified”, and how together they form a sign. With his book Mythologies, Roland
Barthes carried Saussure’s linguistic notions into other domains of cultural theory, creating
a new theoretical system known as “Structuralism”. I explain how these two disciplines –
structuralism and film semiotics – aligned themselves in relation to genre films, and the
manner they contributed to a symptomatic reading of American culture through a study of
the elements and rules structuring its cinema-reality.
I then compare the concept of “symbol” as used in the theories of Christian Metz
and Robert Stam. For Saussure there seems to be a conventionalisation between the
signifier and the signified, rather than a similarity (for this reason, Saussure considered that
non-symbolic signifying systems make a more appropriate object for semiotics). For Metz
the arbitrary sign of linguistics is different in the context of cinema, and therefore he
discards a theoretical model for film based on verbal language (for filmic signification, he
argues, does not at all look like verbal language). As his goal is to describe the processes of
signification in the cinema, I will contrast his forensic attitude towards film theory, with
the work of other semioticians as well. I describe how Metz cleaves the field in two parts,
the filmic and the cinematographic, and show why, in contrast to certain other languages,
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