'Cinema and ...

/ 1

RAYMOND BELLOUR

Allow me to spend some virtual seconds on friendship. Within a working

context it is all but easy to mark its real place. If only as testimony, the
essential remains here (for me and surely for many others) through, or
rather beyond, the challenges of knowledge.
Some months ago, I made up a title: 'Le per$u et le nomme', words
and images. Thus I assumed I was supported by a text, mainly a text
outside cinema, but not outside the image, attacking the contrary head
on, attacking the relationship between words and images according to
an axle both very wide and delimited. I wished to find a better delimitation
of the preoccupations focused on lately, while I was working on my
approaches to video, around the term writing: on the one hand, the
enunciation approach, on the other, the singular effects of contamination
between words and images, in particular, the figuration of the work in
the image and as image. Since I always use examples, the drawings of
the Vie d'Henry Brulard (Stendhal 1955) indicate the field of self-portrait
in video; to the interventions on the work (which is, in my opinion,
seminal) of the American videographer Gary Hill; or simply, like anyone
else, to the incursion on Godard's work, which lies at the very core of
this question (since it is the only work which exhausts the alliance between
cinema and video).
Dreaming with 'Le per^u et le nomme' I remembered my research
project to join the C.N.R.S. in 1964, which I had rather imprecisely
entitled 'Le mot et l'image', a rather pompous, albeit significant, title. I
thought at the time that I would be able to work at the same time on
cinema and literature, of course, but I was also thinking of something
more secret and essential, the idea of which was not even perceptible to
me then, but which those words approached. This was also the year I
met Christian, the year of 'Le cinema: langue ou langage'. So that,
through that text and those words, 'Le pergu et le nomme', I returned
to the origin of our relationship, to that which brought us together in
spite of our being fundamentally different.

Semiotica 112-1/2 (1996), 207-229 0037-1998/96/0112-0207

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208 Bellour

I will not address that text nor the problems posed in it. I will, however,
tackle it at the end of an itinerary during which I will try to determine
what is that work named Christian Metz. Since Michel Marie has been
kind enough to ask me to open this colloquium, I thought it would be
better to approach the question head on, instead of interrogating the
work according to this or that point of view, instead of developing on
this occasion an aspect of my own work. However, I will also do the
latter since it is really difficult not to worry about oneself, trying to
research what this work is in itself, thanks to the effects it has, to the
gestures it allows. What a work really is and, mainly, what its use is,
becomes less apparent when we try to free the work from certain images
which hide it. I hope that, in this way, the enonce of this colloquium
('Christian Metz et la theorie du cinema') will be better understood:
Christian Metz and the theory of cinema (the essential, you have guessed,
lies in this little word).

'Fondateur de discursivite'

On February 22, 1969, Michel Foucault gave a conference paper for the
French Society of Philosophy entitled 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?' It is an
important but very little known text (Foucault 1990 [1969]).
Attempting to situate the modes of discourse, Foucault wondered, in
fact, rather anxiously, about the nature of his own discourse. We can
expand on Foucault's formula, which he left open when he tried to cover,
in the last part of his text, the problem of what he called the forefathers
or 'founders of discursivity'.2
And since it is not a question of burdening Foucault with the cumber-
some reference to the examples he provides, Marx and Freud, of whom
he says that they are 'ä la fois les premiers et les plus importants' among
the founders of discursivity, it is neither a question of burdening Christian
Metz by inscribing him after Foucault in this same breed. I believe it is
revealing to see Metz's work, to cover its depth, from this angle opened
by Foucault when he proposed this category. Let us remember, however,
that it is surely premature, on a purely historical plane, to really under-
stand what such a statement means; it is an attempt at anticipation which
forces one to twist one's neck trying to see oneself, seeing the other, even
when he is so close to oneself.
What does Foucault tell us, then — with subtle hesitations which show
the difficulties thought encounters when trying to grasp this problem —
about those authors he tries to set apart from others? The distinctive
contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own

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 'Cinema and...' 209

work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts ...
they both established the endless possibility of discourse' (Foucault 1990
[1969]: 145). Thus, contrary to the novelist which makes possible analo-
gies after him, the founders of discursivity, Marx and Freud for example,
'not only made possible a certain number of analogies, but, as impor-
tantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences' (1990
[1969]: 145). But, on the other hand, contrary to the act of foundation
of a science, or a scientificity, which 'can always be rechanneled through
the machinery of transformations it has instituted ... the initiation of a
discursive practice is heterogeneous to its ulterior transformations' (1990
[1969]: 146). He remains behind or above. For this reason, adds Foucault,
one can make these heroes of a new genre 'return' (thus he opposes
'return' and 'rediscovery' and 'reactivation'): 'the lock of forgetfulness'
is incorporated into his work.

In effect, the act of initiation is such, in its essence, that it is inevitably subjected
to its own distortions; that which displays this act and derives from it is, at the
same time, the root of its divergences and travesties. This nonaccidental omission
must be regulated by precise operations that can be situated, analyzed, and
reduced in a return to the act of initiation. The barrier imposed by omission was
not added from the outside; it arises from the discursive practice in question,
which gives it its law. Both the cause of the barrier and the means for its removal,
this omission — also responsible for the obstacles that prevent returning to the
act of initiation — can only be resolved by a return. (1990 [1969]: 146-147)

Hence this return takes place, and it is the last feature which Foucault
attributes to these discourses. Ά last feature of these returns is that they
tend to reinforce the enigmatic link between an author and his works. A
text has an inaugurative value precisely because it is the work of a
particular author, and our returns are conditioned by this knowledge'
(1990 [1969]: 147).
Which would, then, be discursivity established by Metz, the equivalent
of his 'Marxism', his 'psychoanalysis', his 'archeology', and mainly of
what is implied by the rather diabolical force of the singular effect which
Foucault tries to recover? In my opinion, neither the semiology of cinema,
nor the relation postulated between psychoanalysis and cinema, nor the
sum of both, nor the one modified and enriched by the other. Put in a
simpler and more secretive way, a movement which, closer and beyond
the relation it established, appears to consist in the establishing of the
relationship in itself, the and. It is the force, at once simple and unex-
pected, which consists in saying cinema and ...: and thus accepting all
the consequences. Hence the title of this colloquium is, I insist on repeat-

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210 K Bellour

ing, so accurate. Beyond the modesty it preserves, it makes the and of

cinema and ...; it circumscribes the act of instauration characteristic of
Metz's work, defining what that work is and orienting the relationship,
less clear than one may think, which each one may establish with it.
In order to make things clearer, let us try for a moment to think of
Bazin, insofar as his work constitutes the first global and modern corpus
of theorization of cinema (it might also be valid, with solid variations,
for Mitry and some less determining authors). When Bazin (1981), for
example, opens the field: 'le cinema et les autres arts' (that is to say, the
title he later gave to the second volume of Quest-ce que le cinema?), one
can see that he does not fail to situate himself inside cinema, and that
the only purpose of theory is to accompany him, in a fundamental
intimacy. He authorizes himself to speak and to think about cinema,
sure of its strength, of its development as an art. Hence the critical bets
of Bazin's, his choices, developed together with propositions of a more
general, and fundamental, nature, but the very possibility of which is
linked to the moral and critical combat, to the trust it implies (a remark-
able example of this alliance is found in his statements on Rossellini).
On the other hand, Metz's gesture was linked to a crumbling down, even
though it was not perceptible at the time nor was it possible to formulate
it thus. This gesture in itself entails an end of cinema without the 'and'.
This is to say a crumbling down of the sovereignty of the dispositif-
cinema which liberates in itself the possibility of constituting it as such,
as an outlook on and the object of a story.
Consider what has occasionally been called the Objective collusion' (a
most unflattering term) of semiology and psychoanalytical reflection on
cinema, be it dominant, narrative, representative, classical, American,
etc. On the one hand, it was assumed that only theory could be applied
to this object, and on the other, more insidiously, that it ran to assist the
object, that it contributed to comforting it. The first assumption is not
at all exact; but the second is obnoxious, even though it is the kind of
nonsense that can be understood by considering the passions that the
performed gesture engenders. It is quite evident that this gesture in itself
establishes a rupture, characteristic of the execution of the act of a theory
which becomes separated from its object. It is also evident that this
gesture has taken place because the object, cinema, was already prepared
to become detached from itself, threatened by a set of scissions both
internal and external; otherwise such a vision, which I call 'cinema and
...' would have been formulated long before. We find ourselves faced
with a dating which supposes an end of sorts to the dispositif-cinema
(more or less) coincidental with itself. Understood ever since in the reality
of its autonomy, it becomes autonomous from the past, since it has been

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 'Cinema and...' 211

possible to name it and to know it. Just as one could, for example,
qualify historically the enterprise 'cinema and psychoanalysis' in the act
of the distinction it introduces.
All of Metz's enterprise is thus situated, from the beginning, in the
order of a proclaimed distance, at once victorious and painful, somewhat
enigmatic, but always clearly consented to by the corpus of cinema and
the films that constitute it. It ends, in Langage et Cinema, with the
separation of cinema and film (more precisely in the tripartition cinema/
film/cinema). However much this be overseen, it is the inaugural gesture
and the only one that opens other discourse, one in which the discourse
of others finds, will find (but always partially), a place to lodge in. What
I hereby refer to as the crumbling down of cinema with respect to itself,
in a singular, so far almost inconceivable way, tends to remit to cinema.
Some people thought this was monstrous, to the point of allowing them-
selves to believe that Metz did not love cinema — I have to argue this
point often, in the course of dialogues, in front of strangers, insofar as
the idea so charged with affection formulated by Metz at the end of 'Le
signifiant imaginaire' seemed (because it was misunderstood) unaccept-
able: Tai aime le cinema. Je ne 1'aime plus. Je l'aime encore'. Metz adds:
'Ce que j'ai voulu faire en ces pages, c'est tenir ä distance ... ce qui en
moi peut 1'aimer'.3
It is necessary to be able to find other names to this crumbling down,
since, above all, it is manyfold, as is historical reasoning also: for example,
cinema and television, cinema and video. By chance, albeit by the sort of
chance one can believe in (the same kind which makes one say: 1895,
birth of psychoanalysis and birth of the cinema), the publication, in 1964,
of 'Le cinema: langue ou langage' is contemporary of Nam June Paik's
gesture, the invention, that very year, of video art against television, thus
multiplying the series of postures, so that the art of images, as of that
moment, becomes inscribed in the historical space, according to variable
modes. There lies a constellation, the logic of which will one day become
apparent. For example, one can guess how Cahiers du Cinema has been
both premonitory and (happily) timid in one essential point: until its
48th issue, that is, April 1951 to June 1955, its subtitle was 'Revue du
cinema et de la television', although the second term, as well as the and
which announced it, was eliminated in the end. As I remarked apropos
of Bazin, Cahiers has made a point, beyond any ands, through its very
critical perspective, to constitute cinema in its essence, according to a
purely interior vision, in the autonomy of its affirmation, at once affective
and artistic. This will be the magnificent paradox of the Nouvelle Vague:
it will have been the first and the last act of a certain idea of cinema
which still survives because the movement conveyed by the Nouvelle

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212 R. Bellour

Vague has not ceased to reconstruct, with love, its object, cinema, which
it had thus managed to make independent, on the edge of the fissure
which was, thanks to it, glimpsed at. In this sense, Godard is an exception,
penetrating, displacing, almost at the same time, that precious autonomy,
which suddenly seems so precarious.
Then, in fact, the question is that of cinema and ... something else.
Perhaps other duplicating technologies, television and video, open the
way to all those which increasingly unfold it in itself, as happens today.
Perhaps, as in Christian Metz, a theory which cuts into various proposi-
tions, thus opening the way to so many others. It is necessary to
underscore that there, precisely, it had been outlined by the Revue interna-
tionale de filmologie, wtiich has been (at least in France and with the
work of Edgar Morin) the only space which can be considered as really
pre-founder of the position of departure to which later Metz subscribed
(in effect, the collaborators in the magazine are people who speak in the
name of 'Cinema and ...': psychologists, sociologists, etc., all of them
outside the world of cinema itself). Albeit hesitating and fragmentary,
such is the program Metz will carry out, systematically, in his case, both
with regards to the details as devoting himself (at least in appearance) to
this only object. But Metz stands alone, mainly, in meeting two conditions
which had not yet been thought of in their correlation: a passion equally
alive and fundamental for cinema. A passion which represented the
paradox of being both fractured and whole. Thus he maintains his
position of 'instaurateur de la discursivite', and turns his work in the
animator of this movement. This position of assumed exteriority, unique
(and always unique in a sense, since from that moment something has
changes partly thanks to it), determines thus the way by which it has
been possible, it is possible, it will be possible to refer to this work. On
the one hand, it cannot but be forgotten, in its real truth, since such a
position is unsustainable for anyone except the singular subject which
occupies, and this subject cannot sustain any other position (unsustaina-
ble as could have been Freud's self-analysis, the affective and mental
displacement it entails). But also for this reason (and almost at the same
time) that, after having to forget this work, one cannot but return to it,
to use it, each one in his own way, carrying out a part of the mostly
virtual program, implied by its foundational gesture, its original warp.
But before showing how I have been able, for instance, to work with this
work, that is to say, before evaluating this relationship, it is necessary to
ponder about style — indeed, it manifests the deviation which the work
designs — style, in the sense of those words of Buffon's, which Lacan
enjoyed quoting.

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 'Cinema and...' 213

'Le style, c'est 1'homme'

If I wish to resort to Barthes's distinction to approach this dimension of

style, this is because Barthes has unwittingly made the most fair and
moving comments on what he calls 'le propre' in the voice of the subject,
the subject Christian Metz. And I believe he has been the only one to
have done so (Barthes 1984 [1975]: 5-7).
Formulated from his first book, the distinction between writing and
style became famous: (1) Writing: 'acte de solidarite historique ... morale
de la forme,... choix de l'aire sociale au sein de laquelle I'ecrivain decide
de situer la nature de son langage', and (2) Style: 'forme sans destination
..., produit d'une poussee ... hypophysique de la parole'. The style comes
from the body, from a biology, from a past. 'Le style est proprement un
phenomene d'ordre germinatif, il est la transmutation d'une humeur'
(Barthes 1954: 19-26). What Barthes describes in his text on Metz is
style appropriating writing — the code of communication and knowledge
on which Metz places his work — and operating a coaction on writing,
a bid to modify the strategy and the point of application, and a bid to
finish by passing, says Barthes, from the ideology of interchange to the
ethics of giving. Notice that, as Barthes comments on the 'precisions
numeriques' which open the second volume of the Essais sur la signifi-
cation au cinema (Metz 1972):
... qui ne sent qu'ici, dans ce melange d'insistence et d'elegance qui en marque
1'enonce, il y a quelque chose en plus! Quoi? precisement la voix meme du sujet.
Face n'importe quel message, Metz, si Γόη peut dire, en rajoute; mais ce qu'il
rajoute n'est ni oiseaux, ni vague, ni digressif, ni verbeux: c'est un supplement
mat, l'entetement de l'idee se dire completement.

Thus he works, by a reverse doxa, a paradox: 'd'une exigence radicale

de precision et de clarte, nait un ton libre, comme reveur, et je dirais
presque: drogue ...: la regne une exactitude enragee*.
Hence Metz, in a greater measure than other authors, is trying and
almost impossible to read superficially, just to grasp 'the great ideas'.
Because all that matters to him is the excess of clarity. For this very
excess gives birth to the work, reality of style, foundational space. In
effect, a great idea is always clear albeit in an excessive way; and it
becomes so only by following its course, multiplying itself in so many
reasons and micro-reasons through which, without losing its statute of
idea, it loses, nevertheless, the typical arrogance of the general idea. Thus
the idea becomes simply a thread, followed, as far as it is possible, to see
where it leads, accepting when necessary the possibility of getting lost,
even though one always feels very solidly supported: Metz's style values

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214 R. Bellour

the very particular way by which the reader can, in his texts, both get
lost and find himself again.
Metz has explained himself in part in this respect, providing, under a
singular angle, arguments for what I call, following Foucault, the constitu-
tive forgetting of the work. He finely evokes the unavoidable loss linked
to the transmission of knowledge: he says that one could summarize in
thirty ideal pages the essential acquisitions of Langage et cinema, but
three hundred pages have been necessary to be able to suggest the idea,
and to build this book he calls 'un objet de desir complet, qui epuise
quelque chose' (1977b: 194-195). Thus he tells us, with his usual discre-
tion, that there are two ways of reading him. It is possible to extract
from his work a few great simple ideas, but they remain falsely simple;
they are ideas to which Metz is attached, as the visible, transmissible
aspect, without which complexity would have no reason to be; ideas he
might even (in this passage) seem to be too attached to — if it were not
for the fact that he anticipates thus that which his reader can cling to
(one must always consider in Metz the capacity of imagination of the
other, which is the only true way of giving). Or else he can be read
adopting a posture which seems to me the only one conceivable, tasting
this complexity for its own sake, to be able to try these ideas, as literally
as possible, in their mental consequences and in their bodies. I remember,
apropos of this, a phrase of Truffaut's — I like the confusion it introduces
here due to the convolution between the work of thought and the work
of fiction, literature and cinema, theory of cinema and film analysis — ;
Truffaut (1954: 51) remarks, apropos of Hitchcock: Thommage tout
naturel qu'on puisse rendre ä un auteur ou ä un cineaste, c'est d'essayer
de connaitre son livre ou son film aussi bien que lui'.
What is, indeed, this object of 'complete desire' (and one should try
to take these words to the letter) of which Metz speaks to us, but what
constitutes as propre corps, able to carry the question of 'cinema and ...'
giving that 'and' its full possibilities, this is to say, the force of a material
obstacle — the book itself — which prevents one from reuniting too
simply with that from which one has wanted or needed to separate
oneself: cinema. One might be able — perhaps someone passionate
enough will take the risk some day — to show in detail the ways in which
Metz passes unceasingly from the simple to the complex, in order to
return to the simple and to open a second complexity (such a study
would have constituted part of the election of Barthes's unfortunately
aborted great object on 'scientific' writings; one can understand why he
showed himself to be so sensitive to this conflict in Metz's work). I would
like here to insist only on the very tension born of this 'enragee' exacti-
tude. It supposes that each enonce attempts to be perfectly transparent

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 'Cinema and...' 215

to itself, devoid of all metaphor, level with denotation. Thus a constitutive

illusion of sorts is created, which should, in my opinion, be conceived as
a bet of sorts, a way of relating to life. The effect is radical. The clarity
of the definition implies, by nature, the distinction which emanates from
it: if this is that, this is so much less that than each one of both terms is
precisely circumscribed and that the definition, continually prescriptive
in its form, cannot be so in the content it covers, which is by nature,
discontinuous, polyvalent, and the very possibility of which depends on
the requirements of the forms which constitute it. This movement, which
so designed runs the risk of seeming abstract, but where each reader, no
matter how little attentive to Metz he may be, will recognize his experi-
ence, which could be called: affolement de la clarte. On the other hand,
he will not be too far from the effect which Barthes, in his own manner,
conveys with his short phrases, elliptically juxtaposed, under an insistent
air of deduction. Martin Melkonian (1989: 41) recently wrote that
'Roland Barthes se contente de moments de verite'; I would willingly say
that Metz is contented with phases de verite, under a contract more
advanced, less fragmentary and less seductive, and committed to his
reader.
It is even more necessary, in this respect, to date this work of theory:
its present. Barthes (one can undoubtedly say very much in a few pages)
underlined thus:

(Metz) manifeste toujours, par la perfection didactique de 1'enonce, qu'//

senseigne a lui-meme ce qu'il est cense comniuniquer aux autres. Son disco urs —
c'est la son propre, sä vertu idiolectale — parvient ä confondre deux temps: celui
de rassimilation et celui de Imposition. On comprend alors comment il se fait
que la transparence de ce discours n'est pas reductrice: la substance (heteroclite)
du savoir s'eclaircit sous nos yeux; ce qui reste n'est ni un schema ni un type,
mais plutöt une 'solution' du probleme, suspendue un instant sous nos yeux ä
seule fin que nous puission la traverser et l'habiter nous-memes. (Barthes 1984
[1975]: 206)

In this sense, we can say that Metz's text produces a supression of

anguish: the reader always knows where he is, this is to say, where Metz
is, trying to find out. One can see here a modest desir de maltrise, or
rather an attempt at 'gouvernement de soi', as Foucault says in his books
on subjective ethics. It is also an attitude of a 'psychoanalytical', curative
nature, allowed by its own manner, a discharge close to humor, even
though nothing of what Metz writes is 'funny' (hence his deep interest
in verbal jokes, a rare capacity to listen which he extends from himself
towards the others, and which would have made him a very good ana-
lyst — I have often heard him say that he would have liked to be a

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216 R. Bellour

doctor, among the multiple lives each one of us attributes to oneself).

But anguish can also spring from the taxonomic circulation produced by
these 'suspended' solutions, if one tries to situate oneself more on the
side of truth than in the movement of thought, if one is not unprepared
to accept the game of a live production of life by and through the text.
Let us take as an example the notion of code. It is easy to see (albeit
only in the interview to which I have referred) how the use of this notion,
tuned to the point attained in Langage et Cinema, appears disturbing
due to its polyvalence, its precise imprecision, and its capacity of mutation
and circulation, to the point of seeming little 'utilisable' (Metz 1977b:
192-193). In order to grasp the nature of this disturbance about the
notion of code, it should be approached, in my opinion, in a restrictive
and extensive way. Indeed it is a question, according to Metz, of showing
how one can (and not forcefully: one must) be supported by codes in
order to think of writing, but also to be, to live (it is one of the ways in
which style and writing are joined). Thus this experience of relation to
the code affects, in a foolish and previous manner, life in general. The
reader may have noticed the way in which many phrases in Metz's texts
concern very directly life as a field of experience: under its diverse aspects,
psychic, affective, material, moral. In a very narrow sense, this work,
consecrated essentially to the study of cinema, even reduced to a few
great specific effects of 'cinema and ...', also extend, taking as a starting
point focalization itself, to the whole life. This work, so discreet, does
not fear, given the occasion, and increasingly so, to implicate vividly the
subject it writes about (both in the beautiful end of the 'Signifiant
imaginaire', apropos of the desire to write and to know, or in the fragment
of self-analysis, at once surprising and natural, of the 'Referent imagi-
naire* [1993 (1984): 192-193]). This work, which gives itself, more than
others, a 'scientific' statute, is for this reason, more than many others, a
vital work in its true singularity; and in this way it concerns (or should
concern) each one of its readers.
Allow me, apropos of these games of life and the code, a little anecdote
(all who know Christian Metz could tell other analogous ones).
A few weeks ago, I call Christian about a detail related to the organization of
this colloquium. I hear a voice which announces, both by its sound and its sense,
Tm about to eat'. I suggest that he call me back, since only he can know when
he will finish eating. He remarks: Ί shall be 3 to 5 minutes. If I eat an apple, it
will take me 7. When he calls back, a little later, I ask him, laughing, 'Was it 7
minutes?'. And he replies Ί don't know'. To which I can not help concluding:
Anyway, all that matters to you is having said it'.
You will later see why I find it amusing that this scene took place on
the phone. What I wish to read is the displacement, operated in Metz,

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 'Cinema and...' 217

of an enonce (or a mass of enonces) towards an enunciation, of an

appearance of truth towards the mise en jeu of its functioning. This will
be the occasion to point out, lightly, a couple of things. The first one on
semiology — or at least on this semiology. You may recall what Barthes
says at the end of the above quoted text — and I'm impressed by the
fact that he had made use of this evocation of Metz's work to return so
clearly to him:
Metz nous fait entendre que la semiologie n'est pas une science comme les autres
..., et qu'elle ne veut nullement se substituer aux grandes epistemes qui sont
comme la verite historique de notre siecle, mais plutöt qu'elle en est la servante:
servante vigilante qui, par la representation des pieges du Signe, les garde de
tomber dans ce que ces grands savoirs nouveaux pretendent denoncer: le dogmati-
sme, 1'arrogance, la theologie, bref, ce monstre: le Dernier Signifie. (Metz 1993
[1984]: 192-193)

Moreover, in order to rethink his point of application, I find it enriching

to place Metz's work within the circle of a notion recently developed by
Paul Veyne (1983: 126-127) in his beautiful book, Les Grecs ont-ils cm
a leurs mythes? The idea of 'programme de verite, in fact, seems to
correspond very closely to the enforcement exerted by style on writing.
Veyne attempts to substitute an analytics of truth for a vision in which
truth tends to the historical variation of a succession of programs which
allow those who adopt it to argue in their defense in such a way that
they can utter this phrase without contradicting themselves: 'la verite est
que la verite varie'. The programs of truth are conceived, beyond false
antinomies between science and ideology, as elements of Timagination
Constituante', in a perspective where accuracy is opposed to truth, or
rather, where it becomes a relative condition of the latter, absolute in its
relativity (the program is all the more 'truthful' the more exact it is) and
founded, all in all, on the following proposition: 'Entre la culture et la
croyance en une verite, il faut choisir'.4
What one can admire in Metz is his way of sticking to his program
without sticking to other programs, while still allowing them to play on
his own. This program can be enunciated, first, in a simple way. It is a
stereotype: 'le cinema est un langage', which has to shake, says Barthes,
placing it 'dans la lumiere implacable de la Lettre'. However, if one had
to say what this program turns into within the work where it takes shape,
I see it more deeply as a bet on life (and of course his own life), life
conceived as a space of codes. A bet, therefore, centered on cinema as
passion and as possible object of an as yet virgin research, albeit always
returning from cinema towards the spirit as the place of experience of
codes. In its wider sense, Metz's program seems to refer thus to the

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218 R. Bellour

subjective experience as place of passage, of transformation, and of

confrontation of codes (with a sharp, albeit indirect, recognition of its
historical character). This also explains (to me) this excess of clarity,
which can be applied to everything it touches, the important (and to date
unedited) work on the verbal joke, the systematic hesitation kept with
amorous perversion, in all of Metz's work, around the notion-mana:
the code.

Alternating

Hence no one would find it surprising if, wishing now to show how his
work can be used, his program or programs executed in order to conceive
others, I take as a starting point the central formula which appears in a
subheading of this very essay ('Sur mon travail'; see Metz 1977b: 193):
On n'applique jamais rien'.5 In this statement, it is understood that:
—this work is not applied in the elaboration of his own work
—each work, therefore, implies, whether it be aware of the fact or not,
the quest for its own program: it will therefore be singular, irreductible
to comparison, which is what (eventually) defines it as a work;
—Metz himself does not apply linguistics or psychoanalysis, but he makes
them work as reference spaces, 'programmes de verite', historically
determined, in order to elaborate his own program.
In this sense, I agree only partially with Metz's distinction (always in
the same interview) between the global influence which a work may have
(in this case, his own) and the decrease of particular analyses. Of course,
there is always a loss, to a greater or lesser extent; but I believe it is, in
its turn, global, so that the double movement of forgetfulness and return
refers, precisely, to an imbrication between general ideas and local state-
ments. Hence the importance, in this work, of the matrices, which con-
dense group inspirations and visions — catalogs of details. Here is the
first example of matrices: the four cases of figures in the 'Referent
imaginaire' (which ensure the rhetoric reclassification of metonymy and
metaphor on the two axles of paradigm and syntagm) (1977b:
227-229) — which have inspired Marc Vernet (1988), for example, for
his Figures de Γ absence. Here is the second example: 'la grande syntagmat-
ique' (of the band-images) which is perhaps the most beautiful intellectual
object conceived by Metz, the object which proclaims his value as model,
as code, as program, and as suspensive truth, with greatest clarity. His
insufficiency almost proclaims, insofar as it is an object of application,
his diverse versions, realized or otherwise, the comments which accom-
pany and problematize it, all this has helped me to work on a question

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 'Cinema and...' 219

which seems fundamental to me: the question of the alternance as a

fundamental form in films and cinema. I have developed it, from The
Birds to North by Northwest and to G/gz, starting from the very possibility
of constitution of the segmental units, in different levels, then through
Griffith's The Lonedale Operator ('Alterner/Raconter'), trying to follow
the modulation through a simple example. Briefly (in 'Cine-Repetitions'),
I have noted the different levels of articulation, in particular the coupling
in the alternance champy'contre> champ and that of the dispositif itself (the
alternance spectator/screen, formalized by Metz in the 'Signifiant
imaginaire').6
The question was clearly solved to support the idea of a textual system,
through the structural schematization of Intolerance proposed in Langage
et Cinema (Metz 1977a) (the four levels of alternance constituted by the
parallel cutting of the different historical moments, placed in their turn
parallel to the single plane of Lillian Gish rocking her baby); but mainly,
it rises in all its contradictory positiveness in the numerous notes of
syntagmatic analysis of Adieu Philippine and, in particular, in Note 9,
apropos of a phone sequence, which obstaculized the rationalization of
the cutting, as do almost all telephone sequences. This is the note,
exemplary for me, of the concern for accuracy in Metz, but mainly, as
well, of his creation of virtuality: this flattening of the problems of volume
allow whoever deals with them to recognize them as such, in their own
volume, working in the film starting from a 'solution', impossible in
theory, that theory which knows how to make them live as 'film in the
mind', producing a visible mental space of problems.

On se souvient que nous avions juge possible, ä un moment donne, de definir un

type syntagmatique (que nous appelions 'syntagme alternant') sur la seule base
de l 'alternance des images par series — et que nous avions ensuite rejete cette
solution pour differentes raisons ... Mais la prise en compte de ces inconve-
nients — et Yisolement qui en est le corollaire, de deux types alternants particuliere-
ment nets (syntagme parallele et syntagme alterne) — ne resout pas pour autant
Tensemble des problemes poses par le fait de l'alternance. Ce dernier subsiste, et
nous en sommes pas arrives pour l'heure ä en rendre compte d'une fagon qui
nous satisfasse. La solution supposerait peut-etre qu'une theorie semiotiquement
rigoureuse soit mise sur pied pur les rendre compte de deux fails qui Tun et
Tautre sont tres 'sensibles' dans les films, mais encore mal elucides: (1) le pheno-
mena de ce qu'on pourrait appeler la transformation de l'insert: un segment
autonome avec un insert unique peut aisement etre 'transforme' en un segment
autonome ä inserts multiples, et de lä en un type alternant', dans Adieu Philippine,
voir par exemple les segments n° 12, 20, 22, 24, 30-31. 2). La distinction entre
les alternances vraies (c'est-a-dire celles qui installent dans le film une bifidation
narrative) et les pseudo-alternances qui se reduisent ä un va-et-vient visuel au sein

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220 R. Bellour

d'un espace unitaire ou bien qui tiennent simplement ä ce que le sujet filme
presente par lui-meme un aspect vaguement 'alternant' sous tel ou tel rapport.
Cette distinction n'est pas encore au point, mais le seul exemple des segments
autonomes n° 2, 3, 16, et 68, $ Adieu Philipine montre qu'il y a lä un probleme
qui se pose.
Ces 'prealables' (et peut-etre d'autres qui nous echappent actuellment) per-
mettront, lorsqu'ils seront resolus, de mieux integrer dans notre 'deuxieme version'
de la grande syntagmatique Theritage de l'ex syntagme alternant, qui pose des
problemes actuellement en suspens. (Metz 1968: 164)

Hence the question, without real evident solution, which I would like
to reflect in a new example to show how it continues, identical even in
the relativization-negation of its terms, but thanks to them and through
them. It is Godard's Puissance de la parole (25', 1988).
Produced by France Telecom, this video tape's first scene is a couple
talking on the phone. Taken literally, and re-elaborated, it is the same
situation of James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (and of its
derived films). An alternance is thus installed, from the very beginning,
between the man and the woman. Immediately a second couple is intro-
duced. The sequences devoted to them alternate (almost until the end of
the film) with those which show the first couple. Thus an articulation is
started between two alternate systems, different in extension and nature:
the one, limited to the first couple, is rather diegetic (alternating in the
strictest sense); the other extends to the whole film and refers to the
relation established between the couple torn by the love scene (the domes-
tic scene which follows through multiple 'scenes') and the second couple
engaged in a dialogue about the workings of the universe (this is the
classical situation of the cutting extension-parallel which designs, in Metz,
in the Grande Syntagmatique, the parallel syntagm).
The whole interest lies here in the bemusement of alternance, in the
confusion (therefore, the overflowing) which takes place starting from
units, which are, however, perfectly differential from a classical perspec-
tive. One thus feels right from the brief prologue which precedes the mise
en place of the telephone exchange. Godard appropriates some images
(a picture by Ernst, clouds, a picture by Bacon, etc.) and he alternates
them, according to several weavings, very quickly. Thus is the separation
between alternance and overimpression of two planes relativized, from
the very beginning (thanks to numeric cutting), since the speed of the
alternance makes the simultaneous viewing of two images possible (it is
enough, in video, to cut at the level of the demi-trame to have physically
both images at the same time during the very brief lapse of confusion
between both frames which make up an image). On the other hand, this
alternance between planes which tend to become confounded usually uses

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 'Cinema and ...' 221

images which are already constituted by two or more overprinted images.

Thus are accumulated the alternance of different levels and variable
intensities. It takes place from the very first call, softly at the beginning,
later with more violence. In this way operate the confusions of images
between both lovers, insofar as the film aims at materializing the trajec-
tory of their voices and lets us grasp the transport of telephone communi-
cation, its intensity as well as its (figurative) trajectory. The fictitiously
travelled distance from one house to the other (and on earth as it is in
heaven), the means of transport (satellites) alternate constantly with the
bodies: they go from the body of the sender to the body of the receiver
(from the man to the woman, from whom the interchange turns to start).
The bodies alternate in this way (also) with one another insofar as they
alternate with the images which their bodies cross and with which they
blend.
This form of complex, stepped matrice, multiplies the alternance func-
tion to the point where the units which distinguish it and turn it sensitive
become dubious. But at the same time the alternance seems sufficiently
constituted as foundation of the cinematographic expression to continue
visibly, almost programmatically, and for Godard this first form is the
one which turns sensitive the conflicts of the couple, which allows the
theoretical confrontation of both couples, and which relates them with
the matters-actions. This overflowing-overcoming of the same thing,
moreover, takes place here as a lieu de passage from cinema to video. It
is announced right from the very first words, almost from the very first
images. 'Dans les entrailles de la planete morte, un antique mecanisme
fatigue, fremif (it goes from the film and comes in the drums of the
cutting table). 'Des tubes emettant une lueur pale et vacillante se reveil-
lerenf (evidently, it is video), 'Lentement, comme a contrecoeur, un
commutateur, au point mort, changea de position' (by the difficult passage
from cinema to video new positions are won).
Furthermore, it is astonishing that this alternance be organically
founded on the difference between the sexes, which forms affection. On
the one hand, a domestic scene — of rupture, of love, by telephone —
constitutes the narrative theme of the film; on the other, this theme is
given a second sense with the dialogue between Ms. O'inos and Mr.
Agathon, the two angels Godard takes (with their dialogue) from the
story by Edgar Alan Poe which gives this band its title). Surprisingly, in
Poe, the two angels are male. Godard reintroduces thus, by a very
beautiful inversion, the sexual difference which founds romantic geneal-
ogy (in Poe, among others), in which he is situated, in his turn, to become
subject to the effects he carries to their limit, to the point of a cosmic
dilation implied by the dialogue between the angels and the images which

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222 R. Bellour

follow it. As if he wished both to extend this separation of the sexes and
to break it, and de-symbolize by over-symbolizing, thanks to being sup-
ported by this form which leads to infinite: the alternance, the same on
which classical cinema is built, at the crisscrossing of the games of the
couple and the technologies of speed and vision which prolong, redouble,
metaphorize the dispositif-cinema, from Griffith to Lang, for instance.
(I say: Griffith, Lang, in order to maintain, clearly, the relation between
narrative force and the will of sexualized desire, so essential in Godard
for the very formation of images. But it would also be so with respect to
the weaving of representations, machines and/or bodies, Vertov and The
Man with the Movie Camera, Brakhage and Dog Star Man.).
The sexual difference conveyed by alternance takes place thus in terms
of machinery, the genealogy cinema-video implied by the use of the
telephone-satellite inscribed in a genealogy of machines. If one can be
fascinated to that extent by the alternance of trains which takes to its
maximum intensity the modulation of the filmic text, in The Lonedale
Operator, or in Lang in Spione, this is because the train, metaphor of the
dispositif-cinema, has been so utilized in order to inscribe this dispositif
within the text of the film, and to put the very sexual difference at stake,
as condition and unfolding of the dispositif. (Think of the magnificent
progression of both trains at the end of Spione, of the manner of their
encounter and the accident it provokes, putting an end to the alternance',
all the alternances piled so far consecrate the couple relationship). This
very role of technological mediator is ensured here by the telephone-
satellite between the games of sex and the figuration of the universe, with
two essential separations. The first one consists in that, on moving with
accuracy from one technology of visible speed (the train) to a technology
of invisible speed (the telephone), cinema becomes integrated with video,
which doubles and accompanies it. Thus are outlined a few features of
a techno-social genealogy trapped within cinema, both nearer and beyond
what it is in itself, and the perspective of which is reflected in this remark
by Bill Viola (1986: 37), for example: 'la technologic de la video a
beaucoup emprunte ä celle de la musique electronique, qui vient du
telephone. En fait les medias doivent beaucoup au telophone, qui ramene
tout ä la communication'. The second separation consists in that in this
way cinema also enters the era of the definitely talking pictures, insofar
as image and sound are there technically conceived (at least partly and
virtually) as formed by one and the same matter, starting from one
and the same signal, with the consequences this involves, aesthetically
and philosophically.
Thus this band invites the viewer at the end to grasp the question,
announced, proposed, of the perceived and the named, of words and

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 'Cinema and...' 223

images, and to show how it is possible, how I was able to work with
Metz's work.

Words and images

The central thesis of 'Le pergu et le nomme' can be put in one sentence.
1 y a bien une fonction de la langue (parmi d'autres) qui est de nommer
les unites que decoupe la vue (mais aussi de l'aider ä les decouper), et
une fonction de la vue (parmi d'autres) qui est d'inspirer les configurations
semantiques de la langue (mais aussi de s'en inspirer)' (Metz 1977b: 132).
This relationship between nomination and visualization is articulated
around the notion of 'pertinent features of perceptive identification',
based on the principle of schematism (this is to say, the fact that one
may recognize an object starting from a minimum number of features).
Hence there are two levels of relation between language and perception.
The first one, intercodic, ensures a correspondence of superficies between
global units, through two codes situated on the same plane 'the transit
through signifieds' unites, on the one hand the sememes of linguistic
signified (the sememe is the sense of a word in only one of its meanings),
on the other hand, optically identifiable objects. But there is a second
level, and there lies the whole interest of the hypothesis, the deepest
correspondence between the pertinent features of the visual signifier
(shapes, outlines, etc.) and the pertinent features of the linguistic signified
(or semae: a sema is a recognition feature, like red for blood). This time
we are dealing with a metacodic relationship between language (the
metacode par excellence) and its code-object, since the meaning of a
language accounts both for the signified and the signifier of the object.
(Metz refers to an analysis by Greimas which shows how the pertinent
features of the iconic signifier — features of visual recognition in Eco —
coincide in part with those of linguistic meaning, with the semae of the
sememe). This 'articulation entre les taxinomies de la vision et la partie
visuelle du lexique' is situated, remarks Metz (1977b: 131, 149), 'au plan
de la representation, le seul envisage tout au long de cette etude'.
Personally, I find it difficult to stick to this vision. Intuitively, I find it
hard to believe in schematism, in this idea of an assumed adequation
between forms which arise, for example, from animated cartoons and
others coming from analogic recordings. Undoubtedly this stems from a
difficulty in isolating the plane of representation as such, in consequence,
from an attachment to the phenomenology inherent in objects and to the
logic of the concrete flows linked to this phenomenality. Schematism
seems to me the case of a figure among others, rather than the foundation

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224 R. Bellour

of a unique and privileged relationship, undoubtedly because my program

is not that of recognition and nomination, but that of the expressive
force (of works). I feel, faced with articulation thus delimited, the feeling
of a double fall: on the one hand, all that which, in the iconic signifier,
cannot be reduced to pertinent visual recognition, and, in this sense, is
distinguished from the 'uncodifiable' (which is not, however, the ineffa-
ble); on the other hand, the phonic signifier is left completely out in
connection with its pertinent features, its expressive, musical values.
However, it is not so much my abstract feeling in the face of these
formulations that concerns me, as does its productive value with relation
to this film of Godard's. It is a question of explicitly finding out and
checking that effect of double fall I have just mentioned, unmasking in
advance, by the force of its own logic, the above mentioned possibility
of sticking, faced with that film — or, in a certain sense, faced with any
work — only to the plane of representation.
I have told you not long ago: when Frank and Velma talk on the
phone, images transport their words. Words are uttered which are then
carried by their equivalent images. Through space, which leads virtually
from the man's garage to the woman's flat, those words are associated
to images, passages of images. The amorous transportation, witnessed
by the physics of words, becomes embodied in the physicality of the
image. Moreover, words (at least some of them) are trapped in an effect
of vibration, in an echo — Frank's first 'hello', for example, is repeated
eight times, with a deaf echo which thus comes out from the mixture
human-inhuman machine. In this transportation-echo, upon becoming
inscribed in heaven and in the body of the earth, the images carried
through space become analogous to the words which are prolonged in
sound vibrations. One could say: 'ils s'entretraduisent', but not so much
because of the sense (the senses) of what they say and show, as because
of the relationship established between their respective intensities.
Precisely, this process of embodying of words in images is what makes
Poe's text, in the dialogues between the two angels recreated by Godard,
reaffirm its existence and its force. 'N'avez-vous pas senti votre esprit
traverse par quelques pensees relatives ä la puissance materielle des
paroles? Chaque parole n'est-elle pas un mouvement cree dans air?' This
is to say: also, and at the same time, an image.
Faced with this insistence on 'la puissance de la parole', one will easily
recognize (on the whole) an evolution in Godard. His word, as is well
known, is established upon a divorce (an apparent, at least) between 'les
mot et les choses', words and images; he tries to support himself on a
privilege, almost blind, of the image, which does not cease to be compul-
sively reaffirmed, overtalked, in so many of his films; among innumerable

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 'Cinema and ...' 225

statements, let us recall, for instance, the famous passage of La Chinoise

which deals with 'the praise of books which confuse words and things',
and the phrases, now less sharp and disturbed, a little after the beginning
of Scenario du film Passion:
J'ai pas voulu ecrire le scenario, j'ai voulu le voir. C'est une histoire, finalement,
assez terrible, parce que ga remonte ä la Bible. Est-ce qu'on peut voir la loi, ou
est-ce que la Loi a d'abord ete vue, et puis ensuite Mo'ise 1'a ecrite sur sa table,
Moi, je pense qu'on voit d'abord le monde et on 1'ecrit ensuite. Et le monde que
decrit Passion, il fallait d'abord le voir, voir s'il existait pour pouvoir le filmer.
Later, not long ago, it was possible to see crystallizing in Godard a
reflection on the mediations of language, in a recognition of the language
as universel de la loi, laying down his law of the presence of the image,
dominating the relationship of the subject with the image (let us think,
for example, in what Alain Bergala (1988) has put so well apropos of
Je vous salue Marie). But very little has been said, it seems to me, about
the extent to which this problem, in fact quite earlier in some cases, had
begun to be formulated, for Godard, as of the moment when the word
can become image, to incarnate visually, in the image itself, the moment
it can be dealt with as image, mainly, since the advent of video, since
1974-1975, with Id et ailleurs and Numero deux. Evidently, this is what
the telephonic transport materializes in Puissance de la parole in a literal
way — material transport of words indissolubly transformed into the
images and passion of the lovers. There is a completely extraordinary
moment in their first exchange. In the movement of alternation which
leads from the man to the woman, it can be perceived, in the garden,
which verisimilarly surrounds Velma's house, a shape at the beginning
indistinguishable (at any rate it was so for me) between a tree and a bird;
and one has the impression that through the throbbing of the alternation
this figure penetrates the woman's body. As if beyond the figuration,
through painting, its repositioning and setting, one found oneself directly
faced to the renovated mystery of an Annunciation, explicitly carried by
the love words and incarnate in the very matter of cinema, according to
the way in which the word-image penetrates the body.
I find it difficult to separate affection from representation because of
a wish to remain aimed at impulse and at strength, as encouraged in this
video tape of Godard's, in the words, as in the images, above all in what
links them. Hence a wish to complicate, on both its edges, what appears
so clearly of 'le pergu et le nomme', and through there reintroduce
together the part of the signifier subtracted from the image because it
would be uncodifiable there, and the phonic signifier, therefore, the whole
signifier of the code object and the signifier of the metacode (the pertinent
features of the words of the language). Both are linked to the energetics

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226 K Bellour

of alternation as throbbing, under the two great forms already recalled.

There lies a vision, or an intuition, destined to remain in its great part
metaphoric; but it is there, however, where, in the very push of Godard's
band, I feel operating those extreme edges of language and image, which
push each other. It is the only way through which one can do that
extraordinary alliance complete justice: at once the scene of desire of the
bodies and setting of the cosmic matter.
Consequently, what I discover and what I would like to accentuate in
Godard's tape is not what Metz speaks about, but it is thanks to him
that I consider it with insistence and mainly with precision. I also remem-
ber that in another text, 'Le referent imaginaire' (see Metz 1993 [1984]:
179-199), from another point of view, in another program, the phen-
omena of strength are placed by Metz in the foreground, among others,
to elaborate the remarkable idea of the 'degrees de secondarisation' (and
thus destroy the too simple opposition between primary and secondary:
'Le dynamique et le symbolique, la poussee et le sens sont bien loin de
s'exclure, ils sont [dans leur fond] identiques').7 I also recall that many
configurations of this tape by Godard could approach (at least for the
image) the terms of the lists, both open and closed, which delimit, in this
same text, 'le referent imaginaire', multiple levels of figure of figurability:
so is completed the list of the four great operations, with which I have
dealt with in regards to matrices (at the crossroads of metaphor and
metonymy, of condensation and displacement); the remarks which ema-
nate from them on the close-up, in its relation with cutting and overim-
pression: the inventory of the modalities of the 'fondu-enchaine'.8 I could
not have, I believe, better instruments to name the alliances of images
operating here than these scrupulous distinctions of operations; like the
Grande Syntagmatique and its environments make them formally visible
to the pressure of alternation. Furthermore, I do not believe, ultimately,
in this conception because a code can never name the text; but it can,
however, help it rise, program a virtual version, ciphered, starting from
its own logic. Hence, what would remain by the way, in the conception
or even in the evaluation of what this work of Godard's — which has
been my pretext — transmits, tends, rather than to differences of thought,
to the separation between two practices, two programs of work: one
remains outside the work, to think according to an order beyond them;
the other tries to penetrate it to gather from it the experience, both as
singular, irreductible objects, and as objects opening up to the intelection
of a history.

Here I am then, almost about to start (again) an analysis of a film, an

analysis of the film which is what most concerns me at the time in which

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 'Cinema and...' 227

I am intervening apropos of Metz's work and trying to witness what it

is. One of those film analyses which both intimidate and appeal to Metz,
or which do not interest him (it is possible, at both ends, to say one and
the other), but those from which, surely, he keeps his distance. And to
do so I support myself, implicitly as well as naturally, marking this
division which has always been ours, on an opposition I have sometimes
felt as too closed, somewhat artificial, even artificious, but without which
I could not, undoubtedly, set out to try to conjure it: this opposition
which constitutes fundamentally the program of Metz's work, which
condenses his wish for a code and subtends the production of its effects:
the opposition film/cinema.
There have been for me (it has been different for others) two ways to
conjure it:
—downstream, remaining directly linked to the body of the film, even
the most abstract execution of the dispositif which operates in it through
the wise en evidence of the dispositif m the film. This is what Marc Vernet
(1980: 226) has aptly named: 'la diegetisation du dispositif, a formula
which has consecrated a whole work carried out, from the beginning, by
film analyses, when they were creative — I am thinking in particular of
irreplaceable examples provided by Thierry Kuntzel;
—upstream, trying to inscribe this enterprise of the dispositif-cinema in a
story. There lies what I assume, on the one hand, when I speak about
cinema as hypnosis, trying to distance myself from the relationship
between cinema and psychoanalysis, in order to understand this relation-
ship all the better, as the product of a history. The other aspect of the
hypothesis, the contrary, going back to the film itself, again a posteriori,
to anchor the hypnosis-cinema in the hypnosis-film, which is but another
way of trying to name the effects more or less delimited by film analyses.
For example, the effects of alternation in both rhythm and rhyme, modu-
lation of the film, hypnosis — is not this one of the possible names to
try to unite affection and representation?
Pausing for a while on the work of Christian Metz, I inevitably find
myself sliding down a natural slope towards my own, without ever
forgetting, in spite of this, what his work suggests to me. Such is, undoubt-
edly, the effect of a work which founds a discursivity, a work which
opens the possibility of a succession of discourses.

Notes

1 A different version of this article was published in Christian Metz et la theorie du cinema
(Marie et Vernet 1990). The original paper was presented at a conference of the same

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228 R. Bellour

name. The present article is hereby included with the authorization of the author and
the editors. The translation is by Cecilia Rennie.
2. See Foucault (1990 [1969]), 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?' I have rescued this point about
Foucault himself at the end of my paper, 'Vers la fiction' (see Bellour 1989 [1988]).
3. He still adds: 'Les objets perdus sont les seuls qu'on ait peur de perdre' (Metz 1975: 55).
4. It should be added to this what Veyne's reading allows us to understand better, and
which, I think, answers with ingenuity the more or less sharp variations in Metz's
strategy of focus; 'each person carries several problems within himself and the same
one is not always applied. II n'a pas de verites contradictoires en un meme cerveau,
mais seulement des programmes differents, qui enserrent chacun des verites et des
interets, meme si ces verites portent le meme nom' (Veyne 1983: 96). One could under-
stand better, for instance, how texts complementary in appearance are so only if one
also admits that they correspond to two programs (or to two sub-programs, since in
Metz the relationship between codes and sub-codes never ceases to change). Thus, the
(deep) breach which exists between both texts which have allowed Metz to introduce
the program 'Psychanalyse et cinema': 'Le signifiant imaginaire', for example, 'Le film
de fiction et son spectateur.' If those texts are badly superimposed in a set of configura-
tion which would account for them and which was their 'verite', this is because they
correspond to two (conceptual an empirical) sub-programs of the set program
'Psychanalyse et cinema'.
5. It is also reinforced by the sentence which follows 'Je crois qu'on ne peut jamais
appliquer quoi que ce soit' (Metz 1977b: 193-194).
6. The first article in LAnalyse du film (Paris: Albatros, 1979; see Bellour 1995: 104-105);
'Alterner/Raconter', in Le cinema americain, 1 (Bellour 1980: 69-88); finally 'Cine-
Repetitions' in Creation et repetition (Passeron 1982).
7. There, in a sense, one is faced with a widely noted problem. Let us think of the classic
Discours/Figures of Jean-Francois Lyotard (1971), of several clarifying texts of Julia
Kristeva's in Polylogue (1977, in particular 'Ellipse sur la frayeur et la seduction specu-
laire') or, recently, Reda Bensmaia in Iris 8 (1988). It does not fail to constitute a great
difficulty, for example, starting from this band of Godard's images and words together,
at once of a different nature and, however, with the same push.
8. Respectively, Metz 1993 [1984]): 227-229, 232-235, 341-342.

References

Barthes, Roland (1954). Le degre zero de I'ecriture. Paris: Seuil.

— (1984 [1975]). Apprendre, enseigner. Ca-cinema. (Special issue on Christian Metz, under
the direction of Marc Vernet.) [Reprinted in Le bruissement de la langue, Roland Barthes,
206. Paris: Seuil, 1984.]
Bazin, Andre (1981). Qu'est-ce que le cinema? Paris: Editions du Cerf.
Bellour, Raymond (1980). Le cinema americain, 2 tome. Paris: Flammarion.
— (1989 [1988]). Vers la fiction. Paper presented at the colloquium 'Michel Foucault, philo-
sophe', Paris, January 1988. [Published in Michel Foucault, philosophe. Paris: Seuil, 1989.]
— (1995). L'Analyse du film. Paris: Calmann-Levy.
Bensmaia, Reda (1988). La Jetee de Chris Marker's 'Du photogramme au pictogramme'.
Iris 8, 8-31.
Bergala, Alain (1988). La passion du plan selon Godard. In Jean-Luc Godard, k cinema
(= Revue beige du cinema 22/23), 137-147.

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 'Cinema and...' 229

Foucault, Michel (1990 [1969]). What is an author? In Critical Theory Since 1965, Hazard
Adams and Leroy Searle (eds.), 138-148. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press.
[First published as 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?' in Bulletin de la societe franqaise de
Philosophie 64, 1969.]
Kristeva, Julia (1977). Polylogue. Paris: Seuil.
Lyotard, Jean-Frangois (1971). Discours/Figures. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.
Marie, Michel et Vernet, Marc (eds.) (1990). Christian Metz et la theorie du cinema. Paris:
Meridiens Klincksieck.
Melkonian, Martin (1989). Le corps couche de Roland Barthes. Paris: Librairie Seguier.
Metz, Christian (1964). Le cinema: langue ou langage? Communications 4, 52-90.
— (1968). Essais sur la signification au cinema, I. Paris: Klincksieck.
— (1972). Essais sur la signification au cinema, II. Paris: Klincksieck.
— (1975). Le signifiant imaginaire. En Psychanalyse et cinema (= Communications 23), 3-55.
— (1977a). Langage et Cinema. Paris: Albatros.
— (1977b). Sur mon travail. Interview with Marc Vernet and Daniel Percheron. In Essais
semiotiques, 163-205. Paris: Klincksieck. [First published in fa-Cinema 7/8, 18-51.]
— (1993 [1984]). Metaphore/metonymie, ou le referent imaginaire. In Le Signifiant
imaginaire: Psychanalyse et Cinema, 177-371. Paris: Christian Bourgois.
Passeron, Rene (ed.) (1982). Creation et repetition (=Recherches poietiques 3). Paris:
Clancier-Guenad, 1982.
Stendhal (1955). Vie de Henry Brulard: Oeuvres intimes (=Bibliotheque de la Pleiade 109).
Paris: Gallimard.
Truffaut, Frangois (1954). Un trousseau de fausses clefs. Cahiers du Cinema 39, 45-52.
Vernet, Marc (1980). Clignotements du noir et blanc. In Theorie du cinema, 226. Paris:
Editions Albatros.
— (1988). Figures de ['absence. Paris: Editions de l'Etoile.
Veyne, Paul (1983). Les Grecs ont-ils cru a leurs mythes? Paris: Seuil.
Viola, Bill (1986). La sculpture du temps, entretien avec Bill Viola par Raymond Bellour.
Cahiers du Cinema 379, 37.

Raymond Bellour (ne en 1939) est directeur de recherches au C.N.R.S. Ses interets
principaux sont la theorie du cinema et la litterature moderne et contemporaire. II a public
L'entre-images (1990), Mademoiselle Guillotine (1989), LAnalyse du film (1979, 1995), et
Henri Michaux (1965, 1986).

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