New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY 145
THE CINEMATIC APPARATUS
Because the psychoanalytic constitution of the film-spectator also suggested
ways of understanding the social impact of the cinema as an institution,
Metz first made his claim for the psychoanalytic approach in terms of the
cinema’s institutional form. In “The Imaginary Signifier” he speaks of the
“dual kinship” between the psychic life of the spectator and the financial
or industrial mechanisms of the cinema in order to show how the reciprocal
relations between the psychological and the technological components of
the cinematic institution work to create in viewers not only a belief in the
impression of reality offered by its fictions, but deep psychic gratification
and a desire to continually return. It is worth citing the whole passage, as
this intersection of the psychic and the social is at the core of the definition
of the CINEMATIC APPARATUS:
The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry (which also
works to fill cinemas, not to empty them). It is also the
mental machinery—another industry—which spectators “accustomed
to the cinema” have internalised historically, and which has adapted
them to the consumption of films. (The institution is outside us and
inside us, indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and
psychoanalytic, just as the general prohibition of incest has as its
individual corollary the Oedipus complex…or perhaps…different
psychical configurations which…imprint the institution in us in their
own way.) The second machine, ie, the social regulation of the
spectator’s metapsychology, like the first, has as its function to set up
good object relations with films…. The cinema is attended out of
desire, not reluctance, in the hope that the film will please, not that it
will displease…. [T]he institution as a whole has filmic pleasure alone
as its aim.
(Metz 1975:18–19)
Broadly speaking, the term cinematic apparatus refers to the totality of
interdependent operations that make up the cinema-viewing situation,
including (1) the technical base (specific effects produced by the various
components of the film equipment, including camera, lights, film and
projector); (2) the conditions of film projection (the darkened theater, the
immobility implied by the seating, the illuminated screen in front, and the
light beam projected from behind the spectator’s head); (3) the film itself,
as a “text” (involving various devices to represent visual continuity, the
illusion of real space, and the creation of a believable impression of
reality); and (4) that “mental machinery” of the spectator (including
conscious perceptual as well as unconscious and preconscious processes)
that constitutes the viewer as subject of desire. Thus both technological and