Christian Metz

Abstract

The film theory of Christian Metz (b. 1931–d. 1993) forms part of the structuralist revolution of ideas that challenged the phenomenology prevalent in France in the 1950s. Metz developed a structuralist (or its derivative, semiological) theory of film in the 1960s and inaugurated a groundbreaking theory and method of analysis that transformed film into a semiological object, in which film’s specificity was no longer perceived in terms of surface sensory properties or a conscious aesthetic experience. Instead, Metz reconceived filmic specificity, this most sensory of objects, as a type of signification—as the manifestation of a more fundamental, nonobservable, underlying finite abstract system of codes. To conceive film as signification involves a shift in perspective, from the study of film as a consciously experienced, continuous sensory object to the study of the abstract underlying system of discrete (or discontinuous) codes that generates and organizes those experiences. In terms of the history of ideas, semiology parallels the epistemology of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who argued that an underlying transcendental system of conceptual categories in the mind structures and makes possible human experience. Semiology’s innovation was to replace this underlying transcendental system with a historically and culturally contingent system of underlying codes. In the 1970s Metz addressed the limitations of structuralism and semiology by adopting a post-structuralist framework premised on theories of enunciation, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. For Metz, enunciation (which emphasizes signs of the speaker and receiver in a text) and psychoanalysis (which emphasizes traces of the unconscious in a text) enabled him to rethink his study of codes as secondary systems of signification, which are underpinned and driven by more-fundamental primary processes of signification (unconscious drives, fantasy, and dream logic). In his final work in the early 1990s, Metz developed a theory of filmic enunciation focused on the impersonal traces of a film’s production; that is, enunciative markers that are reflexive, that refer back only to the film itself.