Christian Metz

THE I MAGI NARY SI GNI FI ER

BY HENRIQUE DORES
BIOGRAPHY
• French film theorist known for pioneering the application of Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of
semiology to film

• Lectured at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

• Applied both Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to the cinema
Major Works
Essais sémiotiques. Ed
Essaisur la signification au Essaisur la signification au Klincksieck. Nouvelle édition
cinéma (I). Ed Klincksieck. cinéma (II). Ed Klincksieck. augmentée en 1984.

1971 1977 1991

1968 1973 1977

Langage et cinéma. Ed Le signifiant imaginaire,

L'énonciation impersonnelle, ou
Larousse. Nouvelle édition psychanalyse et cinéma. Ed :
le site du film. Ed Klincksieck.
augmentée en 1977. 10/18.
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas

"…the cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry…., it is also the mental machinery -
another industry - which spectators “accustomed to the cinema” have internalized historically and
which has adapted them to the consumption of films.  The institution is outside us and inside us,
indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and psychoanalytic." 

In The Imaginary Signifier

The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas

Cinematic Institution composed by three features:

•   Cinema Industry
• Mental Machinery: spectators used to cinema, who internalized historically and which has adapted
them to the consumption of films
• Third machine of the institution: the one which praises and values the product. Criticism as another
form of advertising, linguistic appendix of the institution. Institution outside and within us, social
regulation, objective of filmic pleasure/displeasure as failure of the institution
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas 
The Investigator's Imaginary

• How can psychoanalysis elucidate the cinematographic signifier?

• Why significant and not meaning?
• ''Orientation for meaning” – focusing more on people than internal logic
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas 
The Investigator's Imaginary

• Interest in film as discourse: psychoanalytic study of film arguments 

Signifier: 
- Material (or purport) of expression 
- Substance of expression
- Form of expression
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas 
The Investigator's Imaginary

Signified: 
- Material (or purport) of content
- Substance of content
- Form of content
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas
• The function of the signifier in ordering human subjectivity:

"In its deepest foundations . . . signification is no longer just a consequence of social development;
it becomes . . . a party to the constitution of sociality itself, which in its turn defines the human race.
. . . There is always a moment after the obvious observation that it is man who makes the symbol
when it is also clear that the symbol makes man: this is one of the great lessons of psychoanalysis,
anthropology, and linguistics"
 Jacques Lacan: Symbolic and Imaginary
The Imaginary
Signifier: Main Ideas • The Symbolic includes all expressive behaviors: language and art as
well as social structures such as kinship relations (Claude Levi-
Strauss).

The Symbolic and the Oedipus complex: 

• Oedipus complex and language acquisition

• The Law of the Father as the moral and legal prohibitions that
constitute and limit subjectivity • A scenario defining sexual
difference

• The Symbolic includes not only language and expression, but all the
positions of identification and subjectivity that individuals must take
up in order to have a "place" in society.
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas
Jacques Lacan: Symbolic and Imaginary

• The Imaginary is the order of the unconscious and desire.

• Identification and the “mirror phase” 
• Maturation of vision ahead of motor and linguistic skills.
• Joy in identification with a unified image; anxiety in separation from mother’s body and
unconscious acknowledge of falling short of ideal ego.
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas
Jacques Lacan: Symbolic and Imaginary

• An image constituted in the look of an (M)other.

• Misrecognition: desire can never find the expression it seeks in the Symbolic; the Symbolic never
successfully contains or channels the Imaginary.
• For Lacan, the subject is barred from full consciousness of meaning and the satisfaction of desire.
The Imaginary Signifier: Main Ideas
• Desire as a commodity
• Importance of the spectator as the mental support of the fiction. 
• Studying meaning in film on the model of dreams, daydreams, and other forms of fantasy life. 
• Spectator identification and the apparatus 
• Primary identification with the camera;
• Secondary identification with the characters.
 The Imaginary The cinematic signifier is
Signifier: Main Ideas imaginary because:
• It is fictional, that is, the image
is the support of narrative
fictions;
• The cinema trades on the desire
of the spectator;
• The symbolic and technological
forms of cinema produce
unconscious identifications in
the spectator.
Thank you for your attention!