PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA The Imaginary Signifier Christian Metz Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Wilkams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti MACMILLAN PRESS LONDONLANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY Editors: Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe 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 Pécheux Language, Semantics and Ideology Jacqueline Rose 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 Poetry Forthcoming titles Beverley Brown and _State of Nature: Ethnography and Judith Ennew Origins Elizabeth Cowie To Represent Woman? The Representation of Sexual Differences 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 Step! Heath Three Essays on Subjectivity jeffrey Minson The Genealogy of Moral Forms: Foucault, Nietzsche, Donzelot Jean-Michel Rabaté Pound’s Nomanclatter: Language, oo Sexuality and Ideology in the ‘Cantos’ Denise Riley Feminisms: A Conceptual History© Union Générale d’Editions 1977 English translation, Part I © Society for Education in Film and Television 1975 English translation, Part II © Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams 1982 English translation, Part III © Johns Hopkins University Press 1976 English translation, Part IV © Celia Britton and Annwy! 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 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 0 333 27805 4 (hardcover) ISBN 0 333 36640 9 (paperback) Printed in Hong KongContents nN Acknowledgements PARTI THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER The Imaginary and the ‘Good Object’ in the-Cinema and in the Theory of the Cinema ‘Going to the cinema’ ‘Talking about the cinema’ ‘Loving the cinema’ The Investigator’s Imaginary Psychoanalysis, linguistics, history Freudian psychoanalysis and other psychoanalyses Various kinds of psychoanalytic study of the cinema Psychoanalysis of the film script Psychoanalysis of the textual system Psychoanalysis of the cinema-signifier The major regimes of the signifier Identification, Mirror Perception, imaginary The all-perceiving subject Identification with the camera On the idealistic theory of the cinema On some sub-codes of identification ‘Seeing a film’ The Passion for Perceiving The scopic regime of the cinema Theatre fiction, cinema fiction Disavowal, Fetishism Structures of belief The cinema as technique Fetish and frame6 7 8 9 10 1 CONTENTS ‘Theorise’, he says... (Provisional Conclusion) Notes and References to Part I PART II STORY/DISCOURSE (A NOTE ON TWOKINDS OF VOYEURISM) Notes and References to Part IT PART III THE FICTION FILM AND ITS SPECTATOR: A METAPSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY Film and Dream: the Knowledge of the Subject Film and Dream: Perception and Hallucination Film and Dream: Degrees of Secondarisation Film and Phantasy The Filmic Visée Notes and References to Part III PART IV METAPHOR/METONYMY, OR THE IMAGINARY REFERENT ‘Primary’ Figure, ‘Secondary’ Figure On ‘wor’ figures Figural, linguistic: the figure embedded in the ‘literal meaning’ On emergent figures The metalinguistic illusion ‘Small-scale’ Figures, ‘Large-scale’ Figures Status and List Rhetoric and Linguistics: Jakobson’s Contribution Referential, Discursive Intersections of the referential and the discursive Figure and theme Editing, the superimposition and the close-up Metaphor/Metonymy: a Dissymmetrical Symmetry From metonymy to metaphor From metaphor to metonymy? On the ‘distribution’ of metaphor and metonymy 81 89 98 99 101 109 120 129 138 143 149 154 156 158 161 163 168 171 174 183 186 191 193 197 199 201 203CONTENTS 16 Figure and Substitution 17 The Problem of the Word Figure/trope The rhetorical and the iconic The ‘isolating’ nature of the word 18 Force and Meaning 19 Condensation Condensation in the language system Short-circuit, short circuit Condensation-metonymy 20 From the ‘Dream-work’ to the ‘Primary Process’ 21 ‘Censorship’: Barrier or Deviation? Uncensored marks of censorship Getting past or not getting past: the gap between the conscious and the unconscious Primary/secondary: refraction Conflict, compromise, degrees 22 Displacement Meaning as transit, meaning as encounter Displacement-metaphor 23 Crossings and Interweavings in Film: the Lap-dissolve as an Example of a Figuration 24 Condensations and Displacements of the Signifier On the notion of the ‘operation of the signifier’ Condensation/ metaphor, displacement/metonymy: overspill The spilling over of the image 25 Paradigm/Syntagm in the Text of the Cure Notes and References to Part IV Index vii 207 212 213 217 222 229 235 236 240 242 245 253 254 256 263 266 267 270 274 281 282 286 289 293 298 315Acknowledgements The four texts which make up this book were written between 1973 and 1976, the first in 1974, the second and third in 1973 and the fourth in 1975-6. They first appeared in book form under the title Le Signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 10/18) in 1977. Part I, ‘Le signifiant imaginaire’, and Part III, ‘Le film de fiction et son spectateur’, were first published in Communications, 23 (1975), pp. 3-55 and pp. 108-35. Part II, ‘Histoire/discours’, was first published in Langue, Discours, Société - Pour Emile Benve- niste (Paris: Editions du Seuil) 1975, pp. 301-6. ‘Métaphose/ Métonymie ou le référent imaginaire’ appeared for the first time in Le Signifiant imaginaire. Part I, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, is translated by Ben Brewster; Part II, ‘Story/Discourse (A Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism)’, by Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams; Part ITI, ‘The Fiction Film and its Spectator: a Metapsychological Study’, by Alfred Guzzetti; and Part IV, ‘Metaphor/Metonymy, or the Imaginary Referent’, by Celia Britton and Annwy! Williams. The index was compiled by Ben Brewster. Part I, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, was first published in Screen, vol. 16, no. 2 (1975) pp. 14-76; Part III, ‘The Fiction Film and its Spectator: a Metapsychological Study’, in New Literary History, vol. VIII, no. 1 (1976) pp. 75-105. Both of these translations appear here in a marginally revised form.mm re Bw fms d 6 um»1 The Imaginary and the ‘Good Object’ in the Cinema and in the Theory of the Cinema Reduced to its most fundamental procedures, any psychoana- lytic reflection on the cinema might be defined in Lacanian terms as an attempt to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and to win it for the symbolic, in the hope of extending the latter by a new province:' an enterprise of displacement, a territorial enterprise, a symbolising advance; that is to say, in the field of films as in other fields, the psychoanalytic itinerary is from the outset a semiological one, even (above all) if in comparison with the discourse of a more classical semiology it shifts its point of focus from the statement [the énoncé] to the enunciation [the énonciation].” Those who look superficially or who share the ritual eagerness to detect ‘changes’ as often as possible will perhaps think that I have abandoned certain positions or turned away from them when in fact, more simply — less simply, of course — I am accept- ing the temptation (the attempt) to drive a little deeper into the very procedures of knowledge, which constantly symbolises new fragments of the ‘real’ in order to annex them to ‘reality’, ‘There are formulae that are not imagined. For a time, at least, they range themselves with the real.”* For a time, at least: let us there- fore attempt to imagine some of them. It has very often, and rightly, been said that the cinema is a tech- nique of the imaginary. A technique, on the other hand, which is peculiar to a historical epoch (that of capitalism) and a state of society, so-called industrial civilisation. A technique of the imaginary, but in two senses. In the ordi- nary sense of the word, as a whole critical tendency culminating 3