In this approach to sensation, semiotics contributes to an analysis of this type of occurrence in the subject, in the characters of the film “Roma”, in continuation of the analysis in painting done by Gilles Deleuze on the work of Francis Bacon, as well as Merleau-Ponty explored the sensation in Cézanne's work.
For Paul Cézanne, blue was a warmer color than red, which combined with other colors could create an illusion in our eyes and, thus, sensitize us with something initially unknown, but provided with “sensations”, a sensitive object to sensitize the viewer. According to Ponty, Cézanne obtained a “coloring sensation through blue”.
What matters, from the aesthetic point of view, is that the subject now belongs to the world of the sensible, and not the object, the intelligible. We left a "state of affairs for a state of mind" in which the subject is now the sensitive element through his feeling and acting. Of his actions and his emotions framing a work of fiction.
Hermes Leal elevates the semioticist Greimas, in “The Perfection of Imperfection” (1987), to a new dimension of knowledge, only understood now due to its enormous complexity. Greimas realized that the sensation through characters of literature, exploring at least five events in the form of sensations, in texts by five great writers (Ítalo Calvino, Júlio Cortázar, Junichiro Tanizaki, Michel Tournier and Rainer Rilke), where the subject is “sucked ”Of his cognition before an admired“ object ”, which takes the subject by surprise, when the“ expectation of the unexpected ”occurs.
As is the case with the woman character in Rilke's poem, "Exercises at the Piano", which, when surprised and sucked by a strong odor of jasmine, when opening a window in her dark room on a sunny and hot day, retreats and refuses the strange “sensation” that that odor would hurt you. There is a fracture in his soul, the cause of his malaise, which turns the sensation into a perception of what his soul feels.
Like Cézanne and Bacon, who “painted the invisible”, Alfonso Cuarón “films the invisible”, the sensitive, through the sensations of their characters. The fracture of the characters, which causes their suffering, especially the passion of “guilt” in Cleo, is caused by a sensation, and not by their actions. This semiotic allows us to enter the deep layers of the characters and understand how they add the narrative around themselves, and not the themes that surround them.
The character Cleo, in “Roma”, sensitizes the viewer, because she becomes sensitive through what she feels. First, an admiration for a child, then a desire to no longer have the child and, lastly, the feeling of regret and guilt, explicit in the last scenes of the film, when it saves the lives of Sofia's children, for having had feelings previous ones, which we don't see, of desire and not wish that his son, who was stillborn, would not live.
Semiotics allowed us to explore the very structure of sensation, as something disturbing, which removes the characters' cognition, but leaving their sensitive open to the unexpected, to what arrives without warning, and causes a “fracture”, which we call “extraordinary event” , which can result in both an “admiration” and a “perception”. The sensation in semiotics takes the subject to these two sensitive directions.