The semiotics of drive images in the film Black Swan (2010)

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze by the theoretical perspective of Charles Sanders Peirce the constitution of the drive images in the film Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky. To this finality, we understand that the drive image, a type of movement image created and developed by Gilles Deleuze, is formed by the original world and the derived environment, which can be entropic and/or cyclical. It is the drives of the good and evil, embodied in the figures of the white swan and the black swan, that permeate Aronofsky's feature film. Thus, through the analysis of scenes and frames, we approach how the manifestation and functioning of these drive images occurs through the semiotic prism. We conclude, corroborating Deleuze's hypothesis, that the drive image is caught between an affection image and an action image because this cinematographic sign does not necessarily constitute an icon or an index, but occupies a space allocated in the vacuum between both, establishing, in this way, a constant sensation, understood in the threshold between a phenomenon of firstness and another of secondness.