Articulações entre desejo e proibição no cartaz do filme Lolita

Abstract

This article aims at conducting a semiotic analysis of the theatrical release poster of the film Lolita (USA, England, 1962), directed by Stanley Kubrick, in order to describe the interrelations between verbal and visual
languages in the constitution of the text as a unit of meaning. Adopting the perspective of Discursive Semiotics, the study conducted here draws on the notion of syncretic text so as to investigate the production of meaning through generative course of meaning, as regards the fundamental, narrative and
discursive levels. More specifically, the description and interpretation of Lolita movie poster (1962) intend to identify how the opposition desire vs. prohibition, which operates at the fundamental level and organizes the construction of meaning throughout the text, can also be detected at the narrative level, by
means of a description of the subjects and of the objects in which the values of these subjects are invested, and finally at the discursive level, focusing on the syntactic categories of person, time and space in order to examine how a subject of enunciation converts such narrative structures in discourse. The
interpretation which emerged using the theory adopted here is able to explain how the love triangle focused on in the filmic (and also literary, by the way) narrative is represented in terms of the quantity of figures and the organization of figures and phrases in the planar support.