Christian Metz (critic)

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Christian Metz (1931-1993) is a French film critic, best known for pioneering the application of Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of Semiotics to film.

His most well-known contribution to film criticism lies in applying both Sigmund Freud's psychology 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 both be an imperfect reflection of reality and as a method to delve into the unconscious dream state.

The Grand Syntagmatique

[edit] Works

• Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (ISBN 0-226-52130-3)
• The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (ISBN 0-253-20380-5)
• Language and Cinema (ISBN 90-279-2682-4)