“Danger of Death.” A sign suddenly opens up from the crotch of the hermaphrodite whose separated limbs appear one by one to the accompaniment of a drum roll against the black canvas of the Hotel of Dramatic Folies. In Le sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930), Jean Cocteau invents graphic creatures that cannot be defined based on criteria of fullness or conservation but instead, criteria of dispersion, heteromorphism and redundancy contrary to any classical economy: He returns figures to their concrete state of corporeal sketches. Still, Cocteau does not renounce anything: In cinema, “[t]he two-dimensionality of film produces the illusion of the physical world without any need for supplementation,” in cinema, the slightest trace of a silhouette creates hope for a body full of its powers and faculties.

Horror, sci-fi and fantasy films use formal dynamics that deform or blur appearances; in some films, figurative syntax itself becomes the subject to the point of sometimes hindering effects of “corporal supplementation” and freeing up possibilities that allow the human silhouette to refer to other figurative forms. The ability of a figural movement to avoid crystallizing in order to continue on its own and proclaim itself an autonomous force is described in Cat People ( Jacques Tourneur, 1942) with a rigor that Charles Tesson has described. Tourneur's film is not only concerned with invisibility and irrepresentability, but also with the principles of cinematic figuration: How does a constellation of visual and sonic signs dispersed across the discontinuity of time and space form a figure? By sketching its incarnation, Cat People deals with the question in its formal purity.

“Pictures—Get Rid of Them”: Cat People, the Latticework

The swimming pool sequence quickly appears like a metaphor for cinema’s power of fascination: a play of shadows and sounds, silhouettes and light. But it is the strangest and most suspect being, Irena (Simone Simon), who turns the light back on so that all of reality finds itself infected by monstrosity: Anxiety leaves behind the plastic register to address the proliferation of motifs, their capacity to multiply, reproduce, contaminate each other. In the absence of an origin that draws together the traces that pretend to point it out, the sign acquires its full importance.