The Imaginary Signifier Psychoanalysis and the Cinema [Paperback]

... 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.

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 metalinguistils*