Psychoanalysis and cinema
Subtitle: The Imaginary Signifier
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 1983
Place of publication: Hong Kong
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 334
Description: ... 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.

Le signifiant imaginaire (the imaginary signifier) is an expression that instantly calls to mind a host of issues connected with the second, psychoanalytic phase in the development of a semiotics of the cinema. The term was first used as the title of an essay by Metz in the 1975 issue of Communications devoted entirely to the subject of psychoanalysis and the cinema. That year, the article was translated into English for Screen magazine. In 1977, Metz grouped it and three other essays under the collective title Le signifiant imaginaire as a book that became the touchstone for most further critical inquiry into the psychoanalytical function of cinema. . . It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of Metz's Le signifiant imaginaire to the evolution of psychoanalytical consideration of the cinema. It is his work, for example, that opened the doors to the study of hypnosis and the filmic spectator.