The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema

by Christian Metz

" . . . less about film than about the psychology of the viewing experience." ―American Film

Employing Freudian psychoanalysis, Christian Metz explores the nature of cinematic spectatorship and looks at the operations of meaning in the film text.

Genres: Film, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Academic, Theory

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Natalia Hernández Moreno · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only have detached oneself from it by taking it up again from the other end, taking it as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it. Have broken with it, as certain relationships are broken, not in order to move on to something else, but in order to return to it at the next bend in the spiral. Carry the institution inside one still so that it is in a place accessible to self-analysis, but carry it there as a distinct instance which does not over-infiltrate the rest of the ego with the thousand paralysing bonds of a tender unconditionality. Not have forgotten what the cinephile one used to be was like, in all the details of his affective inflections, in the three dimensions of his living being, and yet no longer be invaded by him: not have lost sight of him, but be keeping an eye on him. Finally, be him and not be him, since all in all these are the two conditions on which one can speak of him.”

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts I-III are brilliant and essential; Part IV made me want to throw myself out of a window

[Alex Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a problematic book. He attempts to use psychoanalysis as a model for meaning making in film, and so brings with the apparatus of film viewing a whole slew of baggage from psychoanalysis.

Metz attempts partway to stabilize his meandering through some structural concepts like metaphor and metonymy or syntagm and paradigm as modalities of how to (place) displacement of meaning. These are rightly rhetorical and linguistic concepts, by which the basic "moves" of filmic experience can be classified and then within discourse utilized to support or analyze a film for a psychoanalytic process. In a sense, while the signifier in cinema is imaginary because it is a form of melding together, a unifying of the cinematic experience into coherency, so what Metz is doing is also largely imaginary as he struggles as many structuralists have struggled, to find a unity in experience. What is largely missing is the coherency itself, as various theories, concepts, metaphoric borrowings and so on have been suggested, utilized and then brought to light about what it is we are doing with this. So Metz continually digs a hole, so that eventually the cinematic experience itself is lost in a theorezation that has forgotten its own bounds. Like his ending on the analysand as a bound on discourse itself, so the psychoanalytic process has become overcoded onto cinema -- Metz has lost his way because there is no clear endgoal. While cinema and psychoanalysis seemed it should work, he ultimately ended up in the arms of semiotics and linguistics instead -- because the way cinema presents information is like the way psychoanalysis sought to examine patents. Needing clearer degrees to note deviation, Metz, like psychoanalysis turned to rhetoric and then somehow got lost in the mix.

There are some nice ideas here, but they are jumbled, mixed into the exploration so that the exploration becomes more about refining the theory than it is about how to explore film itself. I bet Metz teaches some brilliant classes, but as a theorist this book shows he has far to go because he isn't able to stand on the coherency of any particular grounding.

Instead like many who went into the arms of post-structuralism, Metz loses himself in the possibility of analysis, finding small bits of presentation which he then was unable to place, because at this resolution of his theory, they are empty concepts, only needing a film to activate them. I think Metz would have done better if he was able to focus on a genre or a even a single film, and use that to dive into what cinema means as a whole, instead of dissolving the entire field into another kind of semiotic/linguistic inquiry.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure how helpful this will actually be for my thesis, but it was really interesting and helpful in clarifying some parts in Freud that I found murky.

[Malena Zambrani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Metz abrió una puerta bastante difícil de cerrar.

Atribuyó importancia a la lectura del significante del texto fílmico desde una perspectiva psicoanalítica. Es así como diferentes procedimientos psíquicos introducidos por Freud, (en su mayoría en la Interpretación de los Sueños) son homologables a la hora de analizar un film. De modo que la condensación, el desplazamiento, (y así también la metáfora y la metonimia) se convierten en herramientas de interpretación del texto fílmico, abriendo nuevos horizontes tanto a la crítica cinematográfica como a un nuevo análisis de las tendencias estéticas no solo del cine, sino también del arte en general.

El vínculo entre el inconsciente y la producción artística se hace más estrecho, y nos posibilita indagar en un universo infinito de posibilidades: combinaciones, rebasamientos de significados, yuxtaposición y exclusión simultánea.

Así como la mente, el cine nos sorprende. La producción humana es también, producción psíquica, materializada en tanto significante. El universo psíquico y el cinematográfico son aproximables, a través de mecanismos que se replican y expanden no solo nuestro conocimiento, sino también, nuestros modos de aproximación a las diferentes expresiones artísticas y psíquicas.

[Anna Biller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was completely fascinated by this book, but I'll be damned if I could tell you what it was about. I don't know if it was the translation, or if Metz's thought processes are really that tortured, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that his book is brilliant, just from the fragments I was able to decipher. I read this in my twenties though when I was arguably less tenacious at dissecting long, circuitous sentences, so I plan to give it another try. And it might actually be easier in French.

[Justine Cheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of crude in its reconciliation of Baudry and Psychoanalysis (especially lacan). It's an early effort and it shows. Metz also can't help but be kind of a dry categorizer of things. Quite often slips into an equation of both the cinematic referent and the industrial apparatus as 'real' without much regard for the Lacanian definition of the real.

[Jean Bourgeois · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential work in film theory

[Miguel Fernandez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess we have to start somewhere

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really cool stuff Christian.

[Raúl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christian Metz es una autor exigente, aunque tal vez demasiado cauteloso. Este libro es tanto una introducción al psicoanálisis como método de aplicación al análisis fílmico, así como una discusión acerca de los ejes sintagma/paradigma, metáfora/metonimia, condensación/desplazamiento, elaboración primaria/elaboración secundaria, que intentan desenredar las relaciones que se establecen de una forma superficial entre retórica, semiología y psicoanálisis y que intentan acercarse al problema de la constitución del significante y su relación con el referente.

[Jonathan Dickstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contemporary film theory at its most descriptive.

[Tom Coates · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the books I still find myself quoting from, over a decade since I left my doctoral work incomplete.

[Klay Kubiak · Rating 5 out of 5]

psychology of cinema and audience reaction theory--a seminal text

[raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]