10 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER literature, taken as a whole, is not sparing in passages where a film, a film-maker, a genre, some general aspect of the cinema itself, are taken briskly to task. Settling accounts is as frequent probably more so and certainly rougher, in cinema criticism than in literary criticism, for example It might be enough, and it would not be false, to say that the very violence of these reactions confirms the broadly projective character of the relation the cinema writer often maintains to his object(very aptly named here). But it is essential to go further. What I should like to emphasise is the fact that despite these hostilities which come to be 'imprintedin cinematic writings and are neither uncommon nor simulated there is a more funda mental and opposite tendency in cinema writers, an intention to establish, maintain or re-establish the cinema (or films) in the position of good object. Thus cinema criticism is imaginary in both its two main movements, linked together by the bond of a true reaction-formation: in the persecutory aspects of blind polemic, in the great depressive plunge in which the cinema object is restored, repaired, protected It is very often for the purpose of exalting one kind of cinema that another has been violently attacked the oscillation between good' and ' bad, the immediacy of the restoration mechanism then appear in all their clarity Another case, and just as frequent a one, is that of conceptions of the cinema which aim to be theoretical and general but in fact consist of justifying a given type of film that one has first liked and rationalising this liking after the event. These theories'are often author aesthetics (aesthetics of taste); they may contain insights of considerable theoretical importance but the writers posture is not theoretical: the statement is sometimes scientific, the enunciation never a rather similar but more ingenuous henomenon, varying in the extent to which it is caricatural, can often be observed in certain young cinephiles who substantially change their basic opinion of the cinema, sometimes in an exuberant or dramatic way after each film they have seen which has strongly attracted them: the new theorisation is tailored each time to the precise measure of this unique and delicious film, and yet it is indispensable that it be sincerely experienced as ' general to prolong and amplify to sanction the vivid momentary pleasure
THE IMAGINARY AND THE GOOD OBJECT IN THE CINEMA I1 they obtained on seeing the film: the id does not bring its own super-ego with it, it is not enough to be happy, or rather one cannot be perfectly happy, unless one is sure one has a right to be happy. (In the same way some men can only fully live their present love by projecting it into a mental temporality and per- suading themselves that it will last throughout their lives: the contradiction of experience the precise renewal of the same in fation vis-a-vis the next love are incapable of shaking the dispo sition they carry with them: for its real mechanism is almost the diametrical opposite of its apparent result: far from the strength of their love guaranteeing it a real future, the psychical represen- tation of that future is the prior condition for the establishment of their full amorous potency in the present; the institution of marriage answers to this need and reinforces it. To return to the cinema, the rationalisation of a taste into a theory in its numerous and commonplace forms obeys an objective law which hardly varies in its broad lines. It could be described in Lacanian terms as a slight wavering between the functions of the imagin- ary, the symbolic and the real; in Kleinian terms as a slight over How of the unconscious phantasies; in Freudian terms as a slight inadequacy of secondarisation. The real object(here the film which has pleased )and the truly theoretical discourse by which it might have been symbolised have been more or less confused with the imaginary object(= the film such as it has pleased, i.e something which owes a great deal to its spectator's own phan tasy), and the virtues of the latter have been conferred on the former by projection. Thus a simultaneously internal and exter nal love object is constituted at once comforted by a justificatory theory which only goes beyond it (occasionally even silently ignoring it) the better to surround and protect it, according to the cocoon principle. The general discourse is a kind of advanced structure of the phobic(and also counter-phobic) type, a prole- tic reparation of any harm which might come to the film,a depressive procedure occasionally breached by persecutory returns, an unconscious protection against a possible change in the taste of the lover himself, a defence more or less intermingled with pre-emptive counter-attack. To adopt the outward marks of theoretical discourse is to occupy a strip of territory around the adored film, all that really counts, in order to bar all the roads by which it might be attacked The cinematic rationaliser, locking himself up in his system, is gripped by a kind of siege psychosis
12 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER he protects the film, but also, within the shelter of the ramparts of theory, organises his dual relationship with it for a more integral leasure [jouissance]. The traits of the symbolic are convoked pl ince the texture of the discourse is often sufficiently close, but they are taken over by the imaginary and work to its advantage alone. The question never posed is precisely the one which would overthrow the whole construction: Why did I like this film(I rather than another this film rather than another)? 'a true theory is recognisable among other things by the fact that it would see a problem here, whereas many cinematic conceptions depend on the contrary, on the redoubtable effectivity of the fact itself, and hence on a silence established with respect to it: these are deproblematisation techniques and to that extent the exact opposite of the procedures of knowledge, even when they contain some authentically scientifc break-throughs This 'sanctioning construction'built on to a film and a taste is not the only manifestation of the powers of the imaginary in cine- matic writings. There are several others, some of which are so striking that I am amazed not to have thought of them sooner, at least in this light (it would be better were I less amazed I am myself a victim of what I am criticising). Consider cinematic historians: they very often act- and this is not to be regretted for without this cast of mind we should have no cinematic documen tation-as real cinema archivists, the keepers of an imaginary archive, in the sense in which Malraux's Museum was imaginar Their wish is to save as many films as possible; not qua copies, qua celluloid but the social memory of those films and hence a by no means unfavourable image of them. The history of the cinema often presents the appearance of an easy-going theodicy, a vast Last Judgement in which indulgence will be the rule. Its real aim is to annex to the category of the interesting(a subtly valorising variant of that of the notable' as defined by roland Barthes) the maximum number of tracks. To this end various and some- times contradictory criteria are called on. in a disparate and gossipy gathering: one film is retained' for its aesthetic value, another as a sociological document, a third as a typical example f the bad films of a period, a fourth is the minor work of a major film-maker, a fifth the maj or work of a minor film-maker, a further one owes its inscription in the catalogue to its place in a
THE IMAGINARY AND THE GOOD OBJECT IN THE CINEMA 13 particular chronology(it is the first film shot with a certain type of lens, or else the last film made in Tsarist Russia one is reminded of the similarly heteroclite justifications unfailingly offered by Proust's Francoise for her choice of each day's menus for the meals at Combray 'a brill, because the fishwoman had guaranteed its freshness; a turkey because she had seen a beaut in the market at Roussainville-le-Pin: cardoons with marrow because she had never done them for us in that way before; a roast leg of mutton, because the fresh air made one hungry and there would be plenty of time for it to" settle down "in the seven hours before dinner; spinach by way of a change; apricots because they were still hard to get. . etc. 5 The true function of this accumulation of criteria practised by many historians of the cinema is to mention as many films as possible(hence the useful ness of their works), and to this end to multiply as often as can be the number of points of view from which a film may be felt to be good in one respect or another. Like critics, like historians, but in slightly different ways, theor- eticians often help to maintain the cinema in the imaginary en- closure of a pure love. Thus it is rather rare for the properties of cinematic language to be presented as such, i.e. precisely as properties, which would be to appeal before all else to an existen tial judgement(='there is a type of montage called accelerated montage)and to an inclusive judgement (='the sequence shot is one of the possibilities of the cinema): to those two forms of judgement whose inaugural importance for all thought of a rational and logical kind was demonstrated by freud along with their affective roots. Much more frequently, the properties are offered to us straightaway as resources,riches, 'means of expression, and this vocabulary insinuates into the apparently analytic account the invisible and permanent thread of a very dif- ferent procedure which is really a plea, a claim for legitimacy and an appeal for recognition(even before cognition), a declaration of rivalry or candidature with respect to the older, more accepted arts. These movements were more clearly apparent in the theore- ticians of the earliest days of the cinema, sometimes quite expli City So
THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER ' LOVING THE CINEMA What is it in the end that i want to say about these writings hose approach is that of a love? Certainly not that their authors are 'wrong'all the time, or that what they say is always false That is not the point. Wishing to get rid of the affective gets one nowhere, nor would it get this article anywhere. Even less is it my purpose to forget that these assertive afects are the reversed conse- quence of the opposite cultural prejudice, still alive today, that sees in the cinema a low-level distraction (and which thus starts by thinking in levels). In a history of contemporary culture the concern for the good object which i have tried to bring out can only be understood in relation to the bad-object status that society initially conferred on the cinema and to which it still con fines it to some extent. In doing so it has considerably set back the possibility of a knowledge of the cinematic fact directly ( by neglect or disdain), but also by reaction (which concerns me here), by exacerbating in those concerned with the cinema the persistent drama of an adherence that sometimes becomes a kind of entanglement-the revolt against an enforced marginalisation Discourse a bout the cinema is too often part of the institution whereas it should be studying it and believes or pretends that it is doing So. It is, as I have said, its third machine: after the one that manufactures the films, and the one that consumes them the one that vaunts them, that valorises the product. Often, by unexpec- ted paths, unperceived by those who have quite unintentionally taken them, paths which manifest the radical exteriority of effects to conscious intentions, writings on film become another form of cinema advertising and at the same time a linguistic appendage of the institution itself. like those alienated sociologists who un- knowingly repeat the pronouncements of their society, it extends the object, it idealises it instead of turning back on to it, it makes explicit the film's inaudible murmuring to us of 'love me':a mirror reduplication of the films own ideological inspiration already based on the mirror identification of the spectator with the camera(or secondarily with the characters, if any) Discourse about the cinema then becomes a dream an uninter preted dream. This is what constitutes its symptomatic value; it has already said everything But it is also what makes it obliga- tory to turn it inside out like a glove, to return it like the gauntlet on accepting a challenge; it does not know what it is saying