A Care for the Claims of Theory

Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema: Film Semiology and Beyond (eds. Margrit Tröhler & Guido Kirsten), Amsterdam University Press, 2018

This chapter discusses how Christian Metz was inspired by the French filmology movement. Filmology, having been founded in the years after WWII, endeavoured to study cinema in its psychological, sociological, and philosophical complexity. Metz was impressed by the distance filmology took from the institutions of film production and criticism. Also, several important terms introduced by filmology found their way into Metz's writings. Furthermore, the essay speculates about the more subcutaneous influence of two essays by Roland Barthes from the "Revue international de filmologie". Although Metz never discusses these texts in detail, they may have played an important role in formulating his own project. By sketching this possible line, this essay contributes to the genealogy of Metz's thinking.

From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film theorist Christian Metz wrote several remarkable books on film theory: Essais sur la signifi cation au cinéma, tome1 et 2; Langage et cinéma; Le signifiant imaginaire; and L’Enonciation impersonnelle. These books set the agenda of academic film studies during its formative period. Metz’s ideas were taken up, digested, refined,reinterpreted, criticized and sometimes dismissed, but rarely ignored. This volume collects and translates into English for the first time a series of interviews with Metz, who offers readable summaries,elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film. He speaks informally of the most fundamental concepts that constitute the heart of film theory as an academic discipline — concepts borrowed from linguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, narratology, and psychoanalysis. Within the colloquial language of the interview, we witness Metz’s initial formation and development of his film theory. The interviewers act as curious readers who pose probing questions to Metz about his books, and seek clarification and elaboration of his key concepts. We also discover the contents of his unpublished manuscript on jokes, his relation to Roland Barthes, and the social networks operative in the French intellectual community during the 1970s and 1980s. http://en.aup.nl/books/9789089648259-conversations-with-christian-metz.html

Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema, 2018

In three essays written in 1966-1967, Christian Metz retraces the debate on 'modern cinema' and foregrounds his own interpretation: 'new cinemas' are characterized on the one hand by unprecedented linguistic procedures -among them what Metz calls potential sequence -and on the other hand by an extension of the possibilities of 'saying' something -an extension of the 'sayable' or of the 'representable'. Such a novelty implies a greater role of the 'possible' and the 'potential', both in a discourse and in the linguistic system, as well as requiring a reconsideration of some of the axioms of structuralism. What emerges is a more flexible and comprehensive theoretical framework, which Metz and film semiotics would develop in the following years.

Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema, 2018

This chapter is a synthesizing account of the conference that took place in Zurich in June 2013. The conference is briefly situated with respect to that of 1989 in Cerisy-la-Salle, which took place in the presence of Metz himself. The author then identifies three successive generations of scholars and highlights some of the Zurich conference's core themes: research on the theories of enunciation; changes within the cinematic institution between the period of classic cinephilia, which was based on film viewing in the cinema, and the contemporary period, with its variety of modes of consuming moving images. These developments are tied back to Metz's hypotheses proposed in The Imaginary Signifier, which contains a theory of the cinematic apparatus.

Critics of semiology, and of Christian Metz's work in particular, often alleged that he was not a cinephile, that he had no interest in films (since he hardly ever analyzed a film), and that semiologists like Metz were putting aside everything that made cinema an art and a source of aesthetic pleasure. In short, Metz was frequently attacked for being indifferent to film as an aesthetic artefact. This chapter seeks to develop a more nuanced view by examining the place that the aesthetic occupies in Metz's intellectual trajectory as well as its links with semiology. This place can be divided, broadly speaking at least, into three 'sites' between which the aesthetic moves: expressiveness, stylistics, and poetics.

French Forum, 2009

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

(1931-1993) is French film theoretician. His film research and analysis contributed to placing film studies amongst academic disciplines. Metz's writings influenced and inspired generations of film researchers. Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema is a compilation of contributions and discussions at the conference held by the Department of Film Studies of the University of Zurich in 2013, intended as a tribute to 'the father of modern film theory' (p. 17). This book offers an extensive, encompassing reflection and analysis of Metz's oeuvre in English. Contributors place Metz's ideas and concepts in the context of twentiethcentury film research and investigate the genesis of his ideas.

Forthcoming in: Technē/Technology. Researching Cinema and Media Technologies, Their Development, Use and Impact, (Annie van den Œver, Ed.) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013

Substance, 2010

There is a well-worn narrative, perhaps even a "mythology," according to which Roland Barthes undergoes two distinct phases as a theorist. In the first phase, he is the mythologist-semiologist who crusades against the "pseudo-physis" of culture, unmasking its myths and decoding its signs. In the second phase, he retreats to the immediacy of his moods and passions, more interested in desire than demystification, in pleasure than politics. At first glance, these opposing tendencies play out nowhere more emphatically than in Barthes's writings on cinematic and photographic images. While his early semiological texts strive to demystify the apparent immediacy of images by showing how they operate as signs, his later writings celebrate precisely those elements of the image that elude signification-the punctum of the photograph, the "obtuse meaning" of the film-dimensions of the image that can be seen but not described, sensed but not linguistically signified.

Writing the image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean Michele Rabate, 1995