The obvious and the code

Having seen The Big Sleep before I was excited to watch this film for class as well as read this article that used the film as a main focus. I also was interested in the scene that was chosen by Bellour, I love the onscreen chemistry between Bogart and Bacall so I was interested to look deeper into this scene. The first things that really popped out to me in this reading were the definitions of scene and segment that were presented early in the reading. I thought that it was interesting that these definitions brought in the communication model of the signifier and the signified. Scene in this reading is an autonomous segment that is characterized by the deployment on screen and the time of the fiction. While segment is a moment in the film that has unity, and realness. While I thought that this reading was interesting, the more I read it the more confused I found myself. Based on my understanding of the text, I found that there was that which can be deemed obvious in the scene, perhaps in this instance the dialogue, and that which is code. The code in this scene must be understood through many aspects of the scene. These include dialogue (or lack of), as well as the number of shots, the variation of the shots, the repetition of the scene, and the symmetry and dissymmetry of the scene. I believe that all of these aspects of the scene come together to create meaning.