The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema

"...less about film than about the psychology of the viewing experience." -American Film Employing Freudian psychoanalysis, Christian Metz explores the nature of cinematic spectatorship and looks at the operations of meaning in the film text.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Part I The Imaginary Signifier 1 The Imaginary and the 'Good Object' in the Cinema and in the Theory of the Cinema 'Going to the cinema' 'Talking about the cinema' 'Loving the cinema' 2 The Investigators' Imaginary Psychoanalysis, Linguistics, history Freudian psychoanalysis and other psychoanalyses Various kinds of psychoanalytic study of the cinema Psychoanalysis of the film script Psychoanalysis of the textual system Psychoanalysis of the cinema-signifier The major regimes of the signifer 3 Identification, Mirro Perception, imaginary The all-perceiving subject Identification with the camera On the idealistic theory of the cinema On some sub-codes of identification 'Seeing a film' 4 The Passion for Perceiving The Scopic regime of the cinema Theatre fiction, cinema fiction 5 Disavowal, Fetishism Structures of belief The cinema as technique Fetish and frame 'Theorise', he says...(Provisional Conclusion) Notes and References to Part I Part II Story/Discourse (A Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism) Notes and References to Part II Part III The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study 6 Film and Dream: the Knowledge of the Subject 7 Film and Dream: Perception and Hallucination 8 Film and Dream: Degrees of Secondarisation 9 Film and Phantasy 10 The Filmic Visee Notes and References to Part III Part IV Metaphor/Metonymy, or the Imaginary Referent 11 'Primary' Figure, 'Secondary' Figure On 'Worn' figures Figural, linguistic: the figure embedded in the 'literal meaning' On emergent figures The metalinguistic illusion 12 'Small-scale' Figures, 'Large-scale' Figures Status and List 13 Rhetoric and Linguistics: Jakobson's Contribution 14 Referential, Discursive Intersections of the referential and the discursive Figure and theme Editing, the superimposition and the close-up 15 Metaphor/Metonymy: a Dissymmetrical Symmetry From metonymy to metaphor From metaphor to metonymy? On the 'distribution' of metaphor and metonymy 16 Figure and Substitution 17 The Problem of the Word Figure/trope The rhetorical and the iconic The 'isolating' nature of the word 18 Force and Meaning 19 Condensation Condensation in the language system Short-circuit, short circuit Condensation-metonymy 20 From the 'Dream-work' to the 'Primary Process' 21 'Censorship": Barrier or Deviation? Uncensored marks of censorship Getting past or not getting past: the gap between the conscious and the unconscious Primary/secondary: refraction Conflict, compromise, degrees 22 Displacement Meaning as transit, meaning as encounter Displacement-metaphor 23 Crossings and Interweavings in Film: the Lap-dissolve as an Example of a Figuration 24 Condensations and Displacements of the Signifier On the notion of the 'operation of the signifier' Condensation/metaphor, displacement/metonymy: overspill The spilling over of the image 25 Paradigm/Syntagm in the Text of the Cure Notes and References to Part IV Index