The Imaginary Signifier

Fülszöveg

The Imaginary Signifier
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
By Christian Metz
Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster,
and Alfred Guzzetti
Christian Metz is one of the most influential contemporary theorists of
semiotic film theory. 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 in linguistics—an account that bril-
liantly disentangles the various analogies that have been proposed be-
tween metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement, and
paradigm and syntagm. This book is an argument with and recasting of
earlier semiotic thinking. Metz... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The Imaginary Signifier
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
By Christian Metz
Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster,
and Alfred Guzzetti
Christian Metz is one of the most influential contemporary theorists of
semiotic film theory. 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 in linguistics—an account that bril-
liantly disentangles the various analogies that have been proposed be-
tween 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 imagi-
nary signifier) and with the movement and effects of meaning (film as
text).
CHRISTIAN METZ teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris. His published works include two volumes of Essais sur
la signification au cinéma, Language et cinéma, and Essais sémiotiques.
CELIA BRITTON and ANNWYL WILLIAMS are with the Department
of French Studies at the University of Reading.
BEN BREWSTER is at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
ALFRED GUZZETTI is at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at
Harvard University.
Also available in a clothbound edition ISBN 0-253-33105-6 Vissza