Textuality of the Subject in Belle de Jour

One of the elusive problems in current film theory lies at the juncture of esthetics and textual semiotics: how to conceive of and analyze the textuality of the in film. Text, in its Latin antecedent, textus, means fabric. To analyze a film textually is thus to consider it as a structure of interwoven elements. Semiotics is the study of signifying systems that organize the construction, the fabrication, of texts as objects of meaning. For any act of communication, two definitions of the word subject may be distinguished immediately from what may be called, for convenience, matter or topic: as agent of enunciation (giver of meaning) and as consciousness (receiver of meaning). Cinema's esthetic status as a means of visual and auditory representation renders the textual analysis of the in cinema problematic, for, as we shall see, it would seem to place both the above definitions outside the film in a relation of specularity. The classical narrative film is hypostasized esthetically as an optical-geometrical transposition of scenes offered to the gaze of a viewing subject. The unfolding spectacle of film is proffered from the optical perspective of the camera, the point from which images are constituted according to the laws of optics, and from which their identities are read, reconstituted, in the act of visual recognition. The viewing must, in a sense, share the camera's optical center for images to become recognizable; yet the camera and the optical system it mobilizes are not represented in the screen image of classical cinema. The camera and the viewing that shares its perspective are excluded, held apart from the field of representation. Representation, as Roland Barthes notes, has its foundation in geometry rather than imitation: Even if one gets rid of the notion of the 'real,' of the 'vraisemblable,' of the 'copy,' there will still be representation for so long as a (author, reader, spectator, or voyeur casts his gaze toward a horizon on which he cuts out the base of a triangle, his eye (or his mind) forming the apex.1 Barthes' model for the structure of representation, imagined as a triangle, defines a fetishistic space in which the viewing is held at distance from the object of attention (the object of desire), positioned as observer rather than

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