Metz, Christian: The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema Metz, Christian: The Imaginary Signifier
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
Metz, Christian; Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti.
Indiana University Press [1982]
340 p.; notes, refs., index, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2

Translation of: Le Signifiant imaginaire.

The Imaginary Signifier focuses on the spectator's relation to the film rather than on the film alone. In the first half of the book, employing Freudian psychoanalysis, Metz explores the nature of cinematic spectatorship, the relation of cinema and voyeurism, fetishism, and so on. In the second half, he looks at the operations of meaning in the film text, at the figures of image and sound concatenation. This leads him to consider metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement, and paradigm and syntagm. This book is an argument with and recasting of earlier semiotic thinking. Metz offers something of a "second semiotics," concerned with the institution of modes of subjectivity (cinema as imaginary signifier) and with the movement and effects of meaning (film as text).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

SUBJECTS:
Motion pictures, Psychological aspects

LC: 81047551 //r88 Class: PN1995
ISBN: 0-253-33105-6 Cloth in US: $27.95
ISBN: 0-253-20380-5 Paper in US: $13.95

To place an order for this title, please retrieve the order form.

If you have any questions on this title, send e-mail to iupress@indiana.edu.

Select this to return to the main AAUP page.