The imagination, the conscious, and the unconscious in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête
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Rebecca Dalvesco
Abstract
Charles S. Peirce’s and Sigmund Freud’s theories may be used to interpret Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bête (1946). This film has a specific set of codes which connote its filmic language. Cocteau uses fetishistic objects as symbols and icons to reflect the psychological meaning of the film’s narrative. Peirce’s icons and symbols include the connection a person may make through the conventions and expressions of language a person links with the object or idea being observed. Peirce’s semiotic theory functions as a theory of communication. His theory refocuses on culture. Freud’s theories can be linked with ideas produced by Peirce in forming sign relations with the interpretation of the film and the role of imagination in the film. Especially important are Freud’s ideas of repression, conscious and unconscious as they relate to Cocteau’s filmic narrative and the film’s main character Belle.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The word revisited: Introducing the CogSens Model to integrate semiotic, linguistic, and psychological perspectives
- The symbolic usage of stone beyond its function as a construction material: Example of residential architecture in Iraqi Kurdistan
- Between interpretation and the subject: Revisiting Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony
- Indexicality, meaning, use
- Modèles logiques de la structure élémentaire de la signification: Templum, prisme sémiotique, carré sémiotique, cube sémiotique et autres
- The soundscape as the transformatrice in some Dene songs and stories
- Epistemic logic: All knowledge is based on our experience, and epistemic logic is the cognitive representation of our experiential confrontation in reality
- Saussure’s “anagrams”: A case of acousmatic mistaken identity?
- The imagination, the conscious, and the unconscious in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête
- How actions and words come to make sense in a continuously changing world of work: A case study from software development
- Wendt versus Pollock: Toward visual semiotics in the discipline of IR theory
- RoboDoc: Semiotic resources for achieving face-to-screenface formation with a telepresence robot
- Book Review
- Review of Umberto Eco in his own words
