THE INVESTIGATOR S IMAGINARY 25 not be surprised that Freud himself did not go further in this direction, although he is its inspiration. His was a different period Freud was a very cultured man in the sense that adjective had for the bourgeoisie at the turn of the century and not a theo retician of art; above all (this is often forgotten because it seems no more than a truism)he was the first to try out a psychoanaly tic approach to literature and art, alone and already with bril liance: a new enterprise cannot be expected to achieve its full precision at the first attempt In insisting on these perhaps rather boring bibliographical divisions, my intention-on the threshold of a period in which I hope to see psychoanalytic studies of the cinema develop- has been to make explicit a state of affairs more familiar to ethnol- gists than to ourselves, but one which concerns us too: we should not be surprised if overall the semiology of the cinema turns out to rely more on those texts of freuds that do not appear to be its special concern (the theoretical and metapsychological studies than on those that would seem more directly related to the under taking in its two aspects, aesthetic and socio-historical VARIOUS KINDS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDY OF THE CINEMA I now return to my question: in what way can psychoanalysis cast light on the cinematic signifier? Its third vital point is the word'signifier':why especially the signifier of films, or in other words, why not their signified? The fact is that psychoanalytic studies of the cinema are of various kinds, already exemplified or clearly conceivable. We should try to avoid confusing them(try to put them into place') in order to be able to designate more precisely the one i have in view myself. First of all there is the nosographic approach. o It would treat films as symptoms or as secondary manifestations that have been partially symptomatised, from which it is possible to work back to the neurosis of the film-maker (or the script-writer, etc. ) An undertaking necessarily in the classificatory spirit of medicine, even if in a less rigid form: there will be obsessional, hysterical or perverse film-makers, and so on. This approach breaks the textual fabric of the film on principle and accords no intrinsic im-
26 THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER portance to its manifest content, which becomes simply a kind of (discontinuous) reservoir of more or less isolated clues whose im mediate purpose is to reveal the latent Here it is not the film that interests the analyst but the film-maker. Hence everything depends on two postulates, that of the biographical and that of the pathological; I use the term 'nosography in order to cover em bot This theme has a variation in which everything remains the same except the sharp distinction between the normal and the pathological (in this the variation is closer to Freud's teachings The concern for classification remains, but it is demedicalised he result is a kind of psychoanalytically inspired characterology which no longer divides up neuroses but rather metapsychologi- cal and economic types which are 'normalor else common to the normal and the pathological (someone's 'character'is his poten tial neurosis: moreover, this neurosis is always capable of being actualised ) The biographism'remains intact, and with it the indifference to the filmic text as such We have not yet had to 'choose' between a study of the signifier and a study of the signified, but rather between a study of the text and a study of the non-text. The two approaches i have just rapidly outlined are not defined by their orientation towards the pure signified, or at least not so immediately as to reveal any naivety, inexperience or blindness about the specific work of the signifier. They are open to such a criticism, but in other direc- tions: they run the risk of freezing and impoverishing the signifi- cation of films insofar as they constantly threaten to relapse into a belief in an ultimate signified (unique, static and definitive),here the typological membership by the film-maker of a category, whether pathological or merely psychical; they also contain another inherent threat of reduction issuing directly from this first one psychologising reduction and the ideology of pure ' creation they tend to neglect everything in a film which escapes the con scious and unconscious psychism of the film-maker as an indi- vidual, everything that is a direct social imprint and ensures that no one is ever the author of his works@: influences and pressures of an ideological kind, the objective state of the cinematic codes and techniques at the moment of shooting, etc. Thus they only have validity(and I think they do have validity)if their purpose
THE INVESTIGATORS IMAGINARY 27 is strictly signalled from the beginning(= principle of pertin- ence)and then checked en route: if they are clearly presented as attempts at diagnosis(nosographic or characterological)applied to persons(film-makers), thus explicitly proclaiming their indif- ference both to the textual and to the social But it would be inaccurate to speak of their indifference to the signifier, although this is sometimes done when their literary equivalents are under discussion. Inaccurate in two ways. not only is it a principle of these investigations to set up certain aspects of the film as so many signifiers(manifest signifiers of a less apparent psychism), but it may turn out that the filmic fea tures thus selected themselves belong within the film to what the semiologist would rank on the ' plane of the signifier,. The habi tual themes of a film-maker, his characters, the period in which he likes to situate his plots, can tell us about his individual nature, but so can the way he moves (or does not move) the camera,or cuts and edits his sequences. These two approaches are thus not exactly 'studies of the signified. What is peculiar to them is the fact that they are interested in persons and not in discursive facts(= filmic texts or cinematic codes): the latter do not concern them in their internal logic but rather as a neutral milieu in which they seek the sporadic indications that improve their un- derstanding of the former PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THE FILM SCRIPT This leads me to a third orientation which this time attains the film as discourse It is not so easy to delineate as the first two, and am not yet sure that I am very clear about it in my own mind therefore, as a somewhat simplifying first step, I shall call it the psychoanalytic study of film scripts. Of course, it does not always confine itself to the script in the narrowest sense of the term(the written sheets followed in shooting the film); it also extends to a large number of features that do not appear in that written skele ton(which is more or less absent in the making of certain films anyway) and yet form part of the script in the broad sense-in the true sense: a script if need be implicit, a definitive script after editing- insofar as it is still a question of elements with some ching to do with the plot, 'situations,, characters, landscapes possibly ' period details,, etc; in short, the manifest thematic
THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER complex of the film envisaged if necessary in extreme detail. so defined, the script represents a rather ambiguous, feeting instance and an all the more interesting one for that In certain respects it is on the side of the signified this is clear if we set opposite it, by a kind of commutation, the various codes via which it is grasped by the spectator, cinematic codes(i. e visual and auditory analogy, editing, etc ) or non-cinematic codes such as that of verbal language in talking films: so many systems which serve to communicate the script, which should not be con fused with it and with respect to which it becomes a signified. a signified that is defined as the set of apparent themes of the film as its most literal purport(= circumstantial denotation). Obvi ously it is not the most important signification of the film, but it remains indispensable if one wishes to go further, as psycho analytic studies of the script do. so the first effect of such studies is to transform the script into a signifer and from it to disengage some less immediately visible significations. To disengage them or rather to open on to them(I should almost say: engage them). For there can be no claim to unveil a hidden meaning, a kind of second script, armed from head to toe as clear and peremptory as the first, distinguished from it only by its hidden status; this would turn into a preposterous and childish 'hide-and-seek with the hidden having the same texture the same facture as the unhidden(hence it would have to have been hidden deliberately! Dreams themselves have no latent meaning in this sense: there is no second dream beneath the dream there is only one dream which is manifest and opens on to a never ending series of non apparent significations). Nor is it a question of wishing to endow the film (to swell it, to make it big) with three or four more and more 'profound' levels of meaning retaining the notion of a fixed and finite number and the conception of each as an instance with the same order of relationship to explicitness(with differences of degree)as the true script(the script as such: there is only one) this would still be to believe at a lower gear, in a closure of the signified and so to block the infinite pursuit of the symbolic whicl in a sense(like the imaginary from which it is spun), lies entirely in its fight On this point i have partly changed my mind -or if you prefer this is something I regard as a contribution of psychoanalysis to
THE INVESTIGATORS IMAGINARY linguistics: I refer to the corresponding passages in my book Language and Cinema [Langage et cinema], and especially to the motion of a textual systemas I presented it there. There certain- ly is textual system, meaning thereby something always of a structural and relational (but not necessarily exhaustible)order, and peculiar to a given film, not to the cinema, distinct from every code and combining several of them. But I no longer believe that each film has a textual system (the one I suggested in Language and Cinema(pp. 107-11) for a film of Griffith,s, Intol crance, is only one of the systems possible, a stage in the work of interpretation, a stage inadequately presented as such at the time, nor even, a possibility I foresaw in a special chapter (Chapter VI. 4), a fixed number of quite distinct textual systems (several readings of the same film). In this(or these) system(s) now see working conveniences- that is precisely why they impressed themselves upon me in the first place: one needs to examine one's tools at each and every stage - sorts of blocs of in- terpretation already foreseen or established by the analysis sectors of signification(or in some cases a single vast sector)that the analysis has already selected at different moments in its in fact interminable movement from the indefinite thickness of the textual system as I now see it, that is, as this perpetual possibility a finer, or else less apparent structuration, of a grouping of the elements into a new configuration, of the registration of a new sig nificatory pressure which does not annul the preceding ones(as in the unconscious, where everything is accumulated), but comple- ments or in other cases distorts and complicates them, at any rate points in a slightly different direction, a little to one side(a little or more than a little). In Language and Cinema, i already attached great importance to the dynamic aspect of the textual system-a production rather than a product-which distinguishes it from the static character proper to the codes; at present i feel that this pressure this 'activity,, comes into play not only inside a textual system but for any one film between each and the next one to be discovered; or, if it is thought that there is only one such system in all, then the analyst will never complete his exploration of it and should not seek any end Thus analyses of scripts -the script is one aspect among others in the textual system- wish to go further than the script itself, than