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

Whit Sterling, a moneyed racketeer played by Kirk Douglas. I will talk about their acting
and performances in this film as they seem to build the characterisations that have
developed into the standard for particular types in film noir: the fated man, the duplicitous
femme fatale, and the wealthy and ruthless criminal boss. Simultaneously, the skill of
blacklisted writer Daniel Mainwaring is brought forward to stress the way his screenplay
of the film reads almost like a compilation of one-liners and which marks the verbal
density and concision of noir.
I then discuss how the film uses different narrative and lighting techniques (chiefly
low-key), since these are particularly relevant for analysing the symbols within this limited
“colour spectrum” of greys and blacks and understanding their meaning. I make an attempt
to identify and further explain the specific features of the femme fatale and I suggest that
she be understood not just as a destructively attractive woman, but essentially as a
symptom of male anxieties. I analyse the nature of female “emotional entrapment”
portrayed by and in the women in Out of the Past from a semiotic angle. In the light of
Hjelmslev’s theory, connotation is brought about whenever the relationship between the
signifier and the signified becomes a new signifier for a second signified. In my own
interpretation, this may imply that the represented object as well as what is expressed by
the form of a picture can have a second, connotative meaning.
The flashback technique will be further approached, and this time I point out the
modes and subversive uses of flashbacks in particular in this film, which explain the past
that hovers over Jeff’s current life. Our attention is captured by the action taking place in a
directly observable tangible reality (when Jeff is sitting by the lake with Ann relating his
past to her). I make it clear however that in cinema the past, as such, does not exist, and
that the fact that the viewer feels he or she is being transported back in time through the
use of (extensive) flashbacks is indeed a present process as we know where we stand, and
the events occurring before our eyes are the ones that happen “here and now”, as Jean
Mitry emphasises in terms of the “subjective image”:
[This] is why some psychologists have felt justified in saying that the “vision of the
past in the cinema does not correspond with an act of consciousness relating to
remembered objects.” This is certainly true but a “backwards shift in time” when
the hero has been seen to lapse into a gloomy daydream does not presume to
present the daydream “in its subjective state.” What the character is thinking is not
revealed, merely what he is thinking about. Once again we enclose an “interiority”
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