Blackwell Reference Online

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Christian Metz (1931–93) is an important and influential figure in the fields of film theory and film language. Metz is known best for pioneering a scientific approach to film theory, applying both semiotic and psychoanalytic models to the study of film. Born in Beziers, France, Metz received the world's first doctorate in semiology, and taught at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris. Metz's early work was heavily influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure's research into the process by which a language system-a structure of rules and conventions – allows language to produce meaning. This scientific objectivity and precision appealed to Metz, and his early collections of essays, Film Language (1974a[1968]) and Language and Cinema ( 1974b [1971]) were attempts to discover and formalize a cinematic language system. Metz's early attempts to apply Saussure's formula directly to film were frustrated by two problems, which he identifies in Film Language. First, film is a language that lacks phonemes, Saussure's term for the minimum units of language, and, due to its iconic nature, even the smallest unit of film, the shot, contains within it an entire “block of reality” (1974a [1968]: 15). Related to this was the second complication Metz encountered in his application of Saussure to cinema: the seeming lack of arbitrariness (in Saussure's sense) in the signification ... log in or subscribe to read full text