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24 - Christian Metz

from III - CINEMATIC NATURE

By
Richard Rushton
Edited by
Felicity Colman
Richard Rushton
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Felicity Colman
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

Christian Metz (1931–93) was considered France's leading film theorist in the 1970s. His work on narrative structure, applied semiotics and psychoanalysis for film analysis had a major impact on film theory in France, Britain and the United States. Metz primarily engaged Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of semiotics to film, proposing a syntagmatic analysis as a system for categorizing scenes in films (which he called the Grande Syntagmatique). Metz also brought aspects of Sigmund Freud's and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theories to film theory to explore the nature of the mass appeal of the cinema. His books include Language and Cinema (1971; English trans. 1974), Film Language (1971; English trans. 1974) and The Imaginary Signifier (1977; English trans. 1982).

Christian Metz was a pioneering film scholar. For many, his writings are the first rigorous examples of film studies in an academic sense, and the questions posed by his writings, especially those concerning the language of cinema and cinema spectatorship, are ones that are still central to film studies. Metz's writings on cinema can be separated into two strands, although these strands are closely related. On the one hand, most of his writings are directed towards issues of the semiotics of cinema derived predominantly from Saussurian linguistics (Metz 1968, 1971, 1972, 1974a, 1977a, 1991).

Type
Chapter
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Film, Theory and Philosophy
The Key Thinkers
 , pp. 266 - 275
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2009

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