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

Before working on The Dark Mirror, Siodmak was loaned out to direct The Spiral
Staircase (1946), a co-production between RKO and David O. Selznick’s
Vanguard Films. Although the story is a standard Gothic noir set in turn-of-thecentury
New England, The Spiral Staircase is the most beautifully crafted of
Siodmak’s films, superbly paced with the suspense steadily accumulating in
intensity aided by the expressive cinematography of Nicholas Musuraca. (Spicer
2002:116)
Both the film director and cinematographer Musuraca provide a combination of
elements present in the Gothic noir: an old dark and gloomy house, rumbles of
thunderstorms, chiaroscuro lighting, and shadowy rooms traversed by a flickering candle,
eerie musical scores, banging shutters from the wind, windows mysteriously opened, a
maniacal killer, and an enormous isolated place filled with ill-omened sounds. Together,
these hoary elements are transformed in this film into an artistic tale of mystery and
suspense. Even the title of the film is redolent of secrecy, creating suspense and
functioning itself as a major metonymic symbol which deciphers disturbed inner worlds
through complex camera effects.
Therefore, the “spirality” found in the film will be discussed in detail, reinforcing
the exploitation of conceptual contiguity through the trope of metonymy. At this level, I
will show, cinematic meta-language deployed in the movie also helps characterise the
inner self of the protagonists. In fact, the cinematographer manages to intensify our
perception of reality by making visible the unconscious life, or to put it another way, the
camera reflects here what one could call the “optical unconscious”. I delve into how the
filmic apparatus of noir (the conceptions built into the film as ideas and filmic axes)
interact with our own perceptions as viewers.
Finally, I will refer to the impact that period films had on film noir, even though
these films were not significantly concerned with the generalised moral decay and
corruption found in the majority of noir productions. Most importantly, with the semiotic
analysis of this film, I hope to prove that film noir embraces a variety of genres (The Spiral
Staircase is an effectively unsettling Gothic noir film) and that noirs do not always have to
happen, for example, in an urban setting or even in a small town, emphasising thus that
setting alone cannot be a generic determinant of film noir.
The third film is Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, aka “Build My Gallows
High”. The film relates the story of Jeff, the ill-fated noir protagonist played by Robert
Mitchum, Kathie Moffett, the erotic femme fatale, vividly portrayed by Jane Greer, and
27