Modal fractures and rhythmic embodiments: a psycho-semiotic analysis of masculine signification in <i>The Macomber Affair</i> (1947)

Abstract The disjuncture between narrative representation and affective embodiment poses a central problematic for film analysis: how cinema articulates subjectivities resistant to stable definition amid historical crises. Zoltan Korda’s The Macomber Affair (1947), set against a charged backdrop of post-war anxiety and colonial ideology, provides a potent case study. Through close analysis of visual composition, modal configurations, and passional trajectories, this article argues the film stages masculine subjectivity not as a coherent, attainable identity, but as a precarious process of corporeal signification. Synthesizing post-Greimasian semiotics (Zilberberg, Greimas, Fontanille) with psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Mulvey), it analyses masculinity as a field of modal fluctuations, recalibrated through desire, knowledge, capacity, and obligation ( vouloir, savoir, pouvoir, devoir ), that gives form to unconscious drives within a triangulated field of gazes. The film’s formal architecture is central: the safari landscape operates as a colonial dispositif where masculine anxiety becomes legible, while its recursive temporality, by presenting death at the outset to inscribe meaning retroactively, destabilizes linear causality, foregrounding subjectivity as re-articulation over teleological attainment. Crucially, the article contends this individual psychodrama is predicated upon the ideological erasure of the “native gaze,” revealing the colonial frame as the narrative’s precondition. Ultimately, this study proposes a methodological shift from reading masculinity as thematic representation to apprehending it as a corporeal, affective process produced by cinema’s formal and colonial operations.