Conversaciones Con Metz
Conversaciones Con Metz
DANIEL FAIRFAX
SELECTED INTERVIEWS ON FILM THEORY
(1970–1991)
EDITED BY WARREN BUCKLAND AND DANIEL FAIRFAX
From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, nar
theorist Christian Metz wrote several ratology, and psychoanalysis.
remarkable books on film theory:
Essais sur la signification au cinéma, Within the colloquial language of the
tome 1 et 2; Langage et cinéma; Le sig- interview, we witness Metz’s initial
nifiant imaginaire; and L’Enonciation formation and development of his film
impersonnelle. These books set the theory. The interviewers act as curious
ISBN 978-90-896-4825- 9
AU P. nl
9 789089 648259
Conversations with Christian Metz
Film Theory in Media History
Series editors
Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany), Weihong
Bao (University of California, Berkeley, United States), Dr. Trond Lundemo
(Stockholm University, Sweden).
Edited by
Warren Buckland and Daniel Fairfax
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0)
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of
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Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Publication details 9
Introductions
Interviews
Index 309
Acknowledgements
The reader will find enclosed in square brackets [ ] information added by the
translators, as well as the original French terms that have been translated.
Publication details
Chapter 10. ‘Entretien avec Christian Metz’. Michel Marie and Marc Vernet.
Iris, 10 (1990), pp. 271–296. Translated by Daniel Fairfax.
The editors have made every effort to seek permission from copyright hold-
ers. A few holders could not be traced, and a few others did not respond.
Introductions
The international reputation of the work of Christian Metz, translated into
more than twenty languages, justifies the homage paid here to the founder
of a discipline: film semiology.
(Michel Marie, speaking of the conference ‘Christian Metz and Film Theory’,
held at the Cerisy Cultural Centre in 1989).
doi: 10.5117/9789089648259/introi
Abstract
This first Introduction to Conversations with Christian Metz presents a
brief and basic overview of Metz as writer and researcher, focusing on the
key concepts that influenced him (especially from linguistics, semiology,
and psychoanalysis), and those he generated, supplemented with some
of the issues he raises in the interviews.
Those who know Metz from the three perspectives of writer, teacher,
and friend are always struck by this paradox, which is only apparent: of
a radical demand for precision and clarity, yet born from a free tone, like
a dreamer, and I would almost say, as if intoxicated. (Didn’t Baudelaire
turn H. into the source of an unheard of precision?) There reigns a furious
exactitude. (Roland Barthes)1
From 1968 to 1991, Christian Metz (1931–1993), the pioneering and ac-
claimed f ilm theorist, wrote several influential books on f ilm theory:
Essais sur la signification au cinéma, tome 1 et 2 (volume 1 translated as Film
Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema); Langage et cinéma (Language and
Cinema); Le signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinéma (Psychoanalysis
and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier); and L’enonciation impersonnelle
ou le site du film (Impersonal Enunciation or the Place of Film). 2 These
books set the agenda of academic film theory during its formative period.
Throughout universities around the world, Metz’s ideas were taken up,
14 Conversations with Christian Me tz
conversation with Annie van den Oever that “[a]n almost entire generation
of [French] scholars was either supervised by [Metz] or had him sit as a jury
member for their doctoral defense. […] For several years he was literally at
the center of the field and therefore had a large role in shaping it.” 4
In the following pages, I present a brief and basic overview of Metz as
writer and researcher, focusing on the key concepts that influenced him
and those he generated, supplemented with some of the issues he raises in
the interviews.5
Cultural meanings are inherent in the symbolic orders and these mean-
ings are independent of, and prior to, the external world, on the one hand,
and human subjects, on the other. Thus the world only has an objective
existence in the symbolic orders that represent it.6
Christian Metz’s film semiology forms part of the wider structuralist move-
ment that replaced the phenomenological tradition of philosophy prevalent
in France in the 1950s and early 1960s. Phenomenology studies observable
phenomena, consciousness, experience, and presence. More precisely, it
privileges the infinite or myriad array of experiences of a pre-constituted
world (the given) that are present in consciousness. In contrast, structural-
ism redefines consciousness and experience as outcomes of structures
that are not, in themselves, experiential. Whereas for phenomenology
meaning originates in and is fully present to consciousness, for structur-
alists meaning emerges from underlying structures, which necessarily
infuse experience with the values, beliefs, and meanings embedded in
those structures. A major premise of structuralism, and its fundamental
difference from phenomenology, is its separation of the surface level (the
infinite, conscious, lived experiences of a pre-given world) from an underly-
ing level (the finite, unobservable, abstract structure, which is not pre-given
and not present to consciousness). The two levels are not in opposition to
one another, for structuralism establishes a hierarchy whereby the surface
level, consisting of conscious experience, is dependent on the underlying
level. Structuralism does not simply add an underlying level to the surface
phenomenological level, it also redefines the surface level as the manifesta-
tion of the underlying level. A fundamental premise of structuralism is
that underlying abstract structures underpin and constitute conscious
lived experiences.
16 Conversations with Christian Me tz
involves a fundamental shift in thinking: rather than study film ‘in general’,
in all its heterogeneity, Metz instead studied it from the point of view of
one theory, a prerequisite for adopting a semiological perspective according
to Barthes:
I have not applied anything, I have placed the cinema within more all-
encompassing ideas, which fully concern the cinema just as much as they
concern other objects: the general mechanisms of signification (whence
the use of the term ‘denotation’, etc.), or of the imaginary subject, with
ideas that have come from psychoanalysis but that are today, as with
their predecessors, circulating far beyond their place of origin. (Metz,
“Responses to Hors Cadre on The Imaginary Signifier”)
In other words, he argues that he studies film within the conceptual spheres
it already belongs to (including signification); it is therefore incorrect to
think he applies to film concepts foreign to it.17
In addition to theorizing f ilm within the parameters of one set of
theoretical concepts, Metz explicitly def ined his method of analysis,
which he derived from Saussure. Semiological analysis names a process
of segmentation and classification that dismantles all types of messages
(speech, myths, kinship relations, literary texts, f ilms, etc.) to reveal
their ultimate components and rules of combination. These components
and rules constitute the underlying codes that enable these messages
to be produced. Metz therefore attempted to reconceive film according
to the semiological principles presented above – meaning is intrinsic; it
is generated from syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations; and infinite
messages can be reduced to an underlying finite system that generated
them. He aimed to develop a precise, delimited study of one aspect of film,
its level of signification, illuminated and explained from one theoretical
perspective.
indicates that each syntagmatic type gains its meaning in relation to the
other seven types. Metz outlines all eight syntagmas and discusses the
need to refine them in his interview with Raymond Bellour (Chapter 3),
where he emphasizes that the syntagmatic types are primarily manifest
in classical narrative cinema.
Metz extended his semiological analysis of film in his essay ‘The Imaginary
Signifier’ (first published in 1975).24 Although he appears to have abandoned
semiology and replaced it with psychoanalysis, he argues in his opening part
that “the psychoanalytic itinerary is from the outset a semiological one.”25
Later, he argues that linguistic-inspired semiology focuses on secondary
processes of signification (mental activity and logical thinking), while
psychoanalysis focuses on primary processes of signification (unconscious
activities that Freud identified, such as condensation, displacement, sym-
bolization, and secondary revision).26 For Metz, psychoanalysis (especially
Lacan’s structural linguistic reinterpretation of Freud) addresses the same
semiological problematic as linguistics, but on a deeper level, the primary
A Furious Ex ac titude: An Overview of Christian Me tz’s Film Theory 25
subterranean forces that drive language, film, and other symbolic systems.
These forces continually modify, displace, and transform signifiers, ne-
cessitating a reconceptualization of the object of study (verbal language,
film, etc.) as a process or activity, not as a static object. The symbolic order
is thereby expanded to include primary as well as secondary systems of
signification, and is reconceived as a dynamic system.27
The wellspring of subterranean primary forces that drive film is ab-
sence, the absence of referents from the space of the filmic image, and
the psychological consequences of this absence. Absence generates the
spectator’s desire for the absent object, thereby bringing into play the role
of human subjectivity, especially phenomenological accounts of conscious
lived experiences, in the generation of intrinsic filmic meanings. In ‘The
Imaginary Signifier’ and in his response to the editors of the journal Hors
Cadre (Chapter 9), Metz attempted to reveal how the imaginary (in Lacan’s
sense of the term) and desire operate on the level of the filmic signifier. He
argues that the function of the imaginary in the cinema is to fabricate two
structurally related impressions: the impression of reality (the sense of a
coherent filmic universe) and a subject position for the spectator to occupy
(the impression of psychic unity).
Confining himself to the analysis of the imaginary status of the filmic
signifier, Metz discovered that the image on screen and the image in the
mirror have the same status – both are inherently imaginary because
both offer the spectator a dense, visual representation of absent objects
(the objects photographed are absent from the space of the screen and
the objects reflected in the mirror are absent from the mirror’s virtual
space): “In order to understand the film (at all), I must perceive the pho-
tographed object as absent, its photograph as present, and the presence of
this absence as signifying.”28 It is because of the filmic signifier’s lack, its
limitations in representing the absent events, that a theory incorporating
the spectator becomes necessary to explain the production of meaning
in filmic discourse, for the spectator temporarily fills in the lack. That
is, the image, structured upon a lack (the absence of the filmed events),
requires the spectator to fill in meaning and ‘complete’ the image. Here,
we see Metz combining semiology with a psychoanalytically-inflected
phenomenology, for the cinema’s impression of reality attempts to dis
avowal from the consciousness of the spectator the inherent lack in the
filmic signifier. This is only achieved when it transforms the spectator’s
consciousness – that is, displaces his/her consciousness away from the
material surface of the screen and toward the fictive, imaginary elsewhere
of the film’s diegesis.
26 Conversations with Christian Me tz
Beginning from the premise that the filmic signifier represents absent
objects, Metz proceeded to define the spectator’s position in relation to the
filmic signifier in terms of voyeurism and disavowal. The conditions that
constitute the pleasures associated with voyeurism are ‘mirrored’ in the
semiological structure of the filmic signifier. The voyeur, removed from
the space of his object of vision, experiences visual mastery and pleasure
over that object through this secure and superior spatial position. Similarly,
in the spectator’s perception of the filmic signifier: the filmed events ex-
ist in a different space (and time) to the spectator; there is no reciprocal
relation between spectator and filmed events, for these events are absent,
represented in effigy by the filmic signifier. For Metz, the filmic signifier
therefore locates the spectator in a position equivalent to the space of the
voyeur, and confers upon him the same pleasures and resulting illusory,
transcendental psychic unity.
Yet, Metz did not sufficiently take into account the argument that the
function of the imaginary (and the impression of reality) is, primarily, to
act as a defense against the ‘problems’ feminine sexuality poses to the
masculine psyche. It is precisely when the imaginary successfully acts as a
defense against feminine sexuality that it is able to constitute an illusory,
transcendental masculine psychic unity. Any analysis of the imaginary
(and the impression of reality) must therefore begin with the problemat-
ics of sexual difference and identity. But in his attempt to disengage the
cinema object from the imaginary, Metz ended up constructing his own
imaginary discourse, a fetish that elides questions of sexual difference (but
see Chapter 7, where he directly addresses sexual difference). Analysis of
the problematics of sexual difference in the cinema is the primary object
of study of second-wave feminist film theory. Laura Mulvey’s foundational
essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ is representative of this work.29
She shifted film feminism to the study of images as a semiological form of
discourse, rather than a transparent window on to a pre-existing reality.
The image was conferred its own materiality, its own signifying power.
Mulvey also expanded the object of study: not just a critique of the image,
but also the unconscious ideological-patriarchal nature of the cinematic
apparatus – its semiological creation of a male gaze, of gendered (masculine)
subject positions, and patriarchal (Oedipal) narrative forms that regulate
desire, defining it as masculine: “Playing on the tension between film as
controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling
the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes
create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to
the measure of [male] desire.”30
A Furious Ex ac titude: An Overview of Christian Me tz’s Film Theory 27
[In] the long piece on metaphor and metonymy, you see that [Metz is]
not really interested in these terms, “metaphor” and “metonymy,” per se.
What interests him is the deep semantic and logical structure they stand
for, a structure which is independent of their surface manifestation in
rhetoric or verbal language. A deep structure that seems to manifest itself
also in dreams (according to psychoanalysis) and in films. This is why
his isn’t an attempt to “map” linguistics or classical rhetoric onto film.31
Metz’s essay on metaphor and metonymy constitutes the next stage of his
constant investigation of filmic signification.32 In this long essay, he does
not so much search for local metaphors and metonymies (or other figures
and tropes) in the manner of the classification schemes of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but instead seeks the deep semantic and logic
structure of filmic discourse. This parallels his study of film language, which
was not a search for local analogies between film and verbal language, but
an attempt to define the conditions of possibility of filmic signification in
terms of codes and their structural relations.
In ‘Metaphor/Metonymy,’ Metz characterizes signification in terms of
primary (unconscious) forces or pressures, rather than exclusively second-
ary codes and structures; or, more accurately, codes and structures are
driven by unconscious forces such as desire. This task requires Metz to
tread a fine line between two positions he rejects: (1) positing that the
primary and secondary are separate; and (2) positing that they need to
be merged. With regard to position (1), Metz does not uphold an absolute
opposition between primary and secondary processes. Instead, he argues
that we cannot know these primary forces in themselves, for we only
encounter them once they have been represented on the secondary level.
And inversely, codes and structures are not purely secondary, but are driven
by primary processes. With regard to position (2), Metz develops the ideas
of Jakobson and Lacan in pursuing the parallels between unconscious
processes (condensation and displacement), linguistic processes (paradigm
and syntagm) and rhetorical processes (metaphor and metonymy), without
collapsing the three sets of terms into each other. In his interview with
Jean Paul Simon and Marc Vernet (Chapter 6), Metz acknowledges the
frustration that readers and seminar participants express when he adds
complexity to his model of filmic rhetoric by refusing to collapse the three
levels into each other:
28 Conversations with Christian Me tz
Deep down, I know very well, from the numerous discussions I have
had with very diverse audiences, that what anxious readers expected
was for me to say: ‘On the one side, we have metaphor = paradigm =
condensation = découpage, and on the other side we have metonymy =
syntagm = displacement = montage’. The only thing is that this does not
hold water, it is a caricature of semiology.
The final three interviews published in this volume (Chapters 10, 11, 12) all
took place around the same time, during the seminal conference ‘Chris-
tian Metz and Film Theory’, held at the Cerisy Cultural Centre in 1989.33
Several issues recur: Metz’s absence from research for a number of years
(the first half of the 1980s), his return to research with an essay and book
on impersonal enunciation, and his homage to his teacher and mentor
Roland Barthes. It is only in his interview with André Gaudreault (chapter
11) that Metz directly reveals that Barthes’ death in 1980 had a profound
effect upon Metz.
Before developing his theory of impersonal enunciation in the late 1980s,
Metz discussed enunciation in his short essay ‘Story/Discourse (A Note on
Two Types of Voyeurism).’34 The linguistic concept of enunciation refers to
the activity that results in the production of utterances, or discourse. Emile
Benveniste further distinguished between two types of utterance, histoire
(story) and discours (discourse). For Benveniste, discours in natural language
employs deictic words such as personal pronouns (I, you) that grammatical-
ize within the utterance particular aspects of its spatio-temporal context
(such as the speaker and hearer), whereas histoire is a form of utterance that
excludes pronouns. Discours and histoire therefore represent two different
but complementary planes of utterance: discours is a type of utterance that
displays the traces or marks of its production, its enunciation, whereas
histoire conceal the traces of its production. In his ‘Story/Discourse’ essay,
Metz transferred Benveniste’s two forms of utterance to a psychoanalytical
theory of vision. He identifies exhibitionism with discours and voyeur-
ism with histoire. The exhibitionist knows that she is being looked at and
acknowledges the look of the spectator, just as discours acknowledges the
speaker and hearer of the utterance, whereas the object of the voyeur’s gaze
does not know that she is being watched. The voyeur’s look is secretive,
A Furious Ex ac titude: An Overview of Christian Me tz’s Film Theory 29
concealed, like the marks of the speaker and hearer in histoire. Metz argued
that classical narrative film is primarily voyeuristic, hence histoire, for it
conceals its own discursive markers (the spectator’s look).
Returning to filmic enunciation in Impersonal Enunciation or the Place of
Film, Metz emphasized its impersonal status. That is, he acknowledged that
film bears the traces of its production-enunciation, but that those traces
are not analogous to personal pronouns. Instead, the traces of the process
of enunciation are reflexive – they refer back to the film itself. In interview
10, Metz identifies two variants of reflexivity – reflection and commentary:
“Reflection: the film mimes itself (screens within the screen, films within
the film, showing the device, etc.). Commentary: the film speaks about
itself, as is the case with certain ‘pedagogical’ voiceovers about the image
[…] or in non-dialogue intertitles, explicatory camera movements, etc.” One
consequence of defining enunciation impersonally is that it can become
a general concept close to narration, a point Metz makes at length in the
same interview. It is with the concept of impersonal enunciation that Metz
returns to the roots of semiology and its theory of signification, where
meaning is defined as an internal value generated by the film itself.
Notes
1. Roland Barthes, quoted in D.N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 168.
2. Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma, tome 1et 2 (Paris:
Klincksieck 1968; 1972); volume 1 translated as Film Language: A Semiotics
of the Cinema, trans. by Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press,
1974). Langage et cinéma (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1971); Language and
Cinema, trans. by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague/Paris: Mouton,
1974). Le signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: Union générale
d’éditions, 1977). Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans.
by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti
(London: Macmillan, 1982); also published as The Imaginary Signifier: Psy-
choanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).
L’enonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck
1991); Impersonal Enunciation or the Place of Film, trans. by Cormac Deane
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
3. Maureen Turim, ‘Film Study in Paris’, Sub-Stance 9 (1974), pp. 195–196.
4. Martin Lefebvre and Annie van den Oever, ‘Revisiting Christian Metz’s ‘Ap-
paratus Theory’ – A Dialogue’, in Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema
and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact, ed. by Annie
van den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), p. 243.
30 Conversations with Christian Me tz
17. Metz briefly takes up this issue of ‘application’ in his interview with Daniel
Percheron and Marc Vernet, under the subheading ‘You never ‘apply’ any-
thing’ (see Chapter 4). Raymond Bellour has commented:
In this statement [you never apply anything], 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, irreducible to
comparison, which is what (eventually) defines it as a work;
– Metz himself does not apply linguistics or psychoanalysis, but makes
them work as reference spaces, ‘programmes de vérite’, historically deter-
mined, in order to elaborate his own program. (Bellour, ‘Cinema and …,’
Semiotica 112, 1/2 [1996], p. 218).
In his response to Hors Cadre, Metz is developing the third meaning of ‘ap-
plication’.
18. Metz, ‘Cinema: Language or Language System?’, in Film Language, pp. 31–91.
19. Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, trans. by Francesca Chiostri and
Elizabeth Bartolini-Salimbeni, with Thomas Kelso (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press), p. 91 (emphasis in the original).
20. Metz, ‘Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film’, Film Language, pp. 108–
146.
21. Metz discusses Hjelmslev’s six-fold distinction in Language and Cinema,
pp. 208–212.
22. Ibid., p. 253.
23. Emilio Garroni, Semiotica ed estetica. L’eterogeneità del linguaggio e il
linguaggio cinematografico (Bari: Laterza, 1968).
24. Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen 16, 2 (1975), pp. 14–76; reprinted in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema, pp. 1–87.
25. Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 3; emphasis in the original.
26. Ibid., p. 18.
27. Metz briefly considered film as a dynamic textual system in the Conclu-
sion to Language and Cinema via the concept of ‘filmic writing’: “writing is
neither a code nor a set of codes, but a working of these codes, by means
of them and against them, a work whose temporarily ‘arrested’ result is the
text, i.e., the film” (Language and Cinema, p. 285). But this dynamic account
of meaning remains on the secondary level of signification.
28. Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 57.
29. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, 3 (1975),
pp. 6–18.
30. Ibid., p. 17.
31. Martin Lefebvre and Annie van den Oever, ‘Revisiting Christian Metz’s ‘Ap-
paratus Theory’ – A Dialogue’, p. 255.
32. Metz, ‘Metaphor/Metonymy, or The Imaginary Referent’, in Psychoanalysis
and Cinema, pp.149–314.
32 Conversations with Christian Me tz
33. The conference proceedings were published under the title ‘Christian Metz
et la théorie du cinéma’, ed. by Michel Marie and Marc Vernet, Iris 10 (Paris:
Meridiens Klincksieck, 1990).
34. Metz, ‘Story/Discourse (A Note on Two Types of Voyeurism)’, in Psycho
analysis and Cinema, pp. 89–98.