In this book, Christian Metz analyzes cinema using the tools of psychoanalysis, which he combines with the achievements of modern linguistics, without disregarding the soci historical reality in which cinema as an institution is rooted.
Recognizing the significance that psychoanalytic studies of the plot, characters, or creators of a film can have, the author proceeds to study phenomena that govern the ritual of watching a movie: identification, exhibitionism, and voyeurism, predisposition to belief and credulity towards the story that the film tells, the relationship of the viewer's condition with dreams, daydreaming, and hallucination.
Furthermore, starting from the theories of Lacan and Jakobson, Metz combines metonymy and metaphor as essential elements of the distinctive, gradually structured cinematic language, with condensation and displacement as fundamental forms of the language of dreams.
Through this fruitful meeting, he proposes a new, dynamic perception of censorship between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as for the concept of rhetorical figure in cinematic language. Now a classic work in its field, "The Imaginary Signifier" has opened new directions in film studies and has inspired numerous studies worldwide.
"The unique position of cinema is due to the dual character of its signifier: an unusual perceptual richness, which is however inherently affected to an unusual degree by the absence of reality. More than other arts, or in a more particular way, cinema engages us in the imaginary: it strongly mobilizes perception, but to push it directly into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only present signifier" (Christian Metz)
Manufacturer
- Author
- Christian Metz
- Publisher
- Plethron
- Original Title
- Le signifant imaginaire
- Language
- Greek
- Subtitle
- The imaginary signifier
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 327
- Release Date
- 9/2007
- Publication Date
- 2007
- Dimensions
- 17x24 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9789603481706
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