Christian Metz is a famous French film theorist who actually created a new discipline - the semiology of cinema and successfully taught it for a number of years at the Paris Higher School of Social Sciences. Metz is the author of numerous works devoted to the problems of film language, such as “Essay on Meaning in Cinema” (vol. 1, 1968; volume 2, 1972), “Speech and Cinema” (1971), “Imaginary Signifier” (1975), “Impersonal Expression, or The Space of Film" (1991). A methodologically innovative book, The Imaginary Signifier (1975) represents one of the first attempts to apply a psychoanalytic approach and linguistic models to the study of cinema. Exploring the nature of film perception, Metz connects cinema with fetishism and voyeurism, and reveals the identity of “film work” and “dream work.” The second part of the book attempts to describe the specifics of film language by establishing an analogy between the functioning of classical rhetorical figures - metaphor and metonymy and the basic mechanisms of the unconscious - condensation and displacement. The book is of interest both to specialists in cinema and psychoanalysis, and to anyone interested in semiology and modern methods of studying works of art.

Translators: D. Ya. Kalugin, N. S. MovninaSPb.: European University in St. Petersburg, 2010.- 336 pp. ISBN: 978-5-94380- 090-0 Series: Territory of the GazeLanguage: RussianFormat: DjVu, PDF