Page 95 - Decoding Culture

88 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

guise, appearing, as Heath (1973: 25) puts it in a contemporary
commentary in Screen, 'to be the point of a certain, potentially
damaging, fixation, to acquire even a certain mythical quality, to
appeal to something like an "essence" of film'. Y e t cinematic codes
are always bound up with more general cultural codes, so while
cinema clearly cannot be reduced to non-cinematic cultural codes,
neither should the study of film signification restrict itself to those
aspects unique to cinema itself. To do so is likely to obstruct our
understanding, since it is in the continuing interaction between
more general codes and the specifically cinematic that we can
begin to uncover the mechanisms by which audiences are able to
arrive at their empirically variable 'readings' of specific film texts.
But in focusing as much as he does on 'cinematic specificity' - and
notwithstanding his constructive emphasis on the pluricodic char­
acter of texts - Metz develops a fundamentally unsocial conception
of cinematic language, one from which the 'reader' and the reader's
social world are peculiarly absent.
As we saw in the last chapter, that kind of formalism was typical
of structuralism more generally at this stage in its development. As
the 1970s progressed, however, there was a growing recognition
that additional concepts were required if semiology was to be ade­
quate to the task of understanding diverse systems of signification,
concepts which would relocate the enterprise in the social context
which had been so important to Saussure himself. Accordingly, in
the third phase of his work, Metz (1982: 7) begins to address this
requirement, albeit somewhat tangentially. The cinematic institu­
tion is not just the cinema industry . . . it is also the mental
machinery - another industry - which spectators "accustomed to
the cinema" have internalised historically and which has adapted
them to the consumption of films. (The institution is outside us and
inside us, indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and psy­
)
choanalytic . . . . ' The Imaginary Signifier', the essay from which

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