Christian Metz (critic)

Christian Metz (December 12, 1931, Béziers – September 7, 1993, Paris) was a French film theorist, best known for pioneering the application of Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of semiology to film. During the 1970s, his work had a major impact on film theory in France, Britain, Latin America and the United States.

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 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 be both an imperfect reflection of reality and a method to delve into the unconscious dream state.

Select bibliography

• 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)