Christian Metz (theorist)
Christian Metz (; December 12, 1931 – September 7, 1993) was a French film theorist, best known for pioneering film semiotics, the application of theories of signification to the cinema. During the 1970s, his work had a major impact on film theory in France, Britain, Latin America, and the United States. As Constance Penley flatly stated in Camera Obscura, "Modern film theory begins with Metz." Biography Metz was born in Béziers. He lectured at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). In 1964, he published the article "Le cinéma : langue ou langage?" ("Cinema: language or language-system?") in the journal Communications, and the following books over the next 25 years: Essays on the Signification of Cinema (1968 and 1973), Language and Cinema (1971), Semiotic Essays (1977), The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1977). In Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema, Metz focuses on narrative structure — proposing the "Grand Syntagmatique", a system for categorizing scenes (known as "syntagms") in films. Metz applied both Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to the cinema, proposing that the reason film is popular as an art form lies in its ability to be both an imperfect reflection of