Page 96 - Decoding Culture

SITUATIN G SUBJECTS 89

this quotation is taken, first appeared in English in Screen (Metz,
1975) and was to prove a significant step in the journal's move­
ment toward a theory and method of analysis utilizing
psychoanalytic concepts.
In this essay Metz addresses the question, 'what contribution
can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic
)
signifier?' (Metz, 1982: 17 . Whilst recognizing a number of differ­
ent possibilities (notably films treated as 'symptoms' of the
neuroses of their makers, psychoanalysis of what he calls the 'film
script', and psychoanalysis of specific textual systems) his major
concern is with developing a psychoanalytic approach not to indi­
vidual films but to the cinematic signifier itself: 'a direct
examination, outside any particular film, of the psychoanalytic
implications of the cinematic' (ibid: 36). Once more, then, he
returns to his familiar fascination with the uniquely cinematic fea­
tures of film. To do so he leans on a number of concepts drawn
from Lacan's 'structuralist' revision of Freudian theory, as well as
on Freud's own work, using resemblances and parallels between
the film spectator's situation and that of the psychoanalytic 'subject'
to tease out what he considers to be fundamental features of
cinema.
The major psychoanalytic resources on which he draws in his
examination of cinematic perception are Lacan's account of the
'mirror stage' and the more general emphasis on Oedipal relations
in Freudian and Lacanian theory. But, employing a methodological
strategy which will later become common in psychoanalytically
disposed film theory, he does not apply these ideas directly, using
them, rather, to draw parallels and make metaphoric comparisons.
So, for instance, presupposing the utility of Lacan's mirror stage
concepts (and, indeed, our familiarity with them) he likens film to
a - the - mirror. Thus film is like the mirror. But it differs from the
primordial mirror in one essential point: although, as in the latter,

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