PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA The Imaginary Signifier Christian metz Translated by Celia Briton, Annuyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti M MACMILLAN PRESS LONDON
LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY Editors: Stephen Heath and Colin Mac cabe Published titles Norman bryson Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze Jane gallop Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction Paul hirst On Law and Ideology Colin MacCabe James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word Colin MacCabe(editor) The Talking Cure: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language Christian Metz Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier Michel pecheux Language, Semantics and Ideology Jacqueline re The Case of peter Pan or the Impossibility of children's Fiction David trotter The Making of the reader: Language and subjectivity in Modern american, English and Irish Pc Forthcoming titles Beverley Brown and State of Nature: Ethnography and Judith Ennew Origa Elizabeth Cowie To Represent Woman? The Representation of Sexual Diferences in the visual media Alan durant Conditions of music Alan durant Colin MacCabe and Paul Abbott(editors) The Meanings of language Peter Gidal Understanding beckett Stephen Heath Three Essays on Subjectivity Jeffrey Minor The Genealogy of Moral forms Foucault. Nietzsche. Donzelot Jean-Michel Abate Pound's Nomanclatter: language, Sexuality and Ideology in the Cantos Ri Feminisms: A Conceptual History
C Union Generale d'Editions 1977 English translation, Part I C Society for Education in Film and Television 1975 English translation, Part Ii C Celia Britton and Annwyl williams 1982 English translation, Part Ill c Johns Hopkins University Press 1976 English translation, Part IV C Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams 1982 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in'any form or by any means, without permission first edition 1982 Reprinted 1983 Published b THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world IsBN 0 333 27805 4(hardcover) ISBN0333366409(1 Printed in Hong Kong
Contents Acknowledgements PART I THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER I The Imaginary and the Good Object' in the Cinema and in the Theory of the Ci nema Going to the cinema Talking about the cinema Loving the cinema 2 The Investigators Imaginary 369477 Psychoanalysis, linguistics, history Freudian psychoanalysis and other psychoanalyses various kinds of psychoanalytic study of the cinema 25 Psychoanalysis of the film scri 27 Psychoanalysis of the textual system 32 Psychoanalysis of the cinema-signifier 33 The major regimes of the signifier 37 3 Identification, Mirror 42 Perception, imaginary The all-perceiving subject 45 Identification with the camera 49 On the idealistic theory of the cinema 52 On some sub-codes of identification 54 Seeing afl 56 4 The Passion for Perceiving 58 The scopic regime of the cinema 61 Theatre fiction, cinema fiction 66 5 Disavowal. Fetishism 69 Structures of belief 71 The cinema as technique 74 Fetish and frame 77
CONTENTS Theorise, he says .(Provisional Conclusion) 79 Notes and References to Part I 81 PART II STORY/DISCOURSE (A NOTE ON TWO KINDS OF VOYEURISM) Notes and References to Part II PART III THE FICTION FILM AND ITS SPECTATOR: A METAPSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY 99 6 Film and Dream: the Knowledge of the Subject 101 7 Film and Dream: Perception and hallucination 109 8 Film and Dream: Degrees of Secondarisation 120 9 Film and Phantasy 129 10 The Filmic visee 138 Notes and References to part III 143 PART IV METAPHOR/METONYMY OR THE IMAGINARY REFERENT 149 11 Primary'Figure, Secondary? Figure 154 On worn'figures 156 Figural, linguistic: the figure embedded in g 158 On emergent figures 16l The metalinguistic illusion 163 12 Small-scale'Figures, 'Large-scale'Figures 168 Status and list 171 13 Rhetoric and Linguistics: Jakobsons Contribution l74 14 Referential Discursive 183 intersections of the referential and the discursive 186 Figure and the Editing, the superimposition and the close-up 193 15 Metaphor/Metonymy: a Dissymmetrical Symmetry 197 From metonymy to metaphor l99 From metaphor to metonymy? 201 On the distribution of metaphor and metonymy 203