El cebo

Zusammenfassung

In this article we approach the possibility of articulating in a symbolic way the encounter, always painful, with the Real, through the analysis of the film It happened in broad day light (Es geschah am hellichten Tag, 1958) by Ladislao Vajda. The plot is typical of a crime film: a police officer tracks down a girls’ murder from a drawing, in a story form, done by the last of his victims. The suspense that the plot creates constitutes the guide that leads the main character to know about his antagonist and also to get to know himself. The spectator is led to the core of the story –the unfathomable, the unknown– the incandescent nucleous of the primordial scene. This will allow him to traverse the fantasy that inhabits the subject and transform his repetitive compulsion, his jouissance, into desire. We sustain that this is precisely the symbolic function of the cinema.