New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

154 PSYCHOANALYSIS
This type of identification is considered primary because it is what makes
all secondary cinematic identifications with characters and events on the
screen possible. This process, both perceptual (the viewer sees the object)
and unconscious (the viewer participates in a fantasmatic or imaginary
way), is at once constructed and directed by the look of the camera and its
stand-in, the projector. From a look that proceeds from the back of the
head, then, “precisely where fantasy locates the ‘focus’ of all vision” (Metz
1975:49), the spectator is given that illusory capacity to be everywhere at
once, that power of vision for which the cinema is famous. In “Ideological
Effects,” Baudry describes this arrangement in a slightly more
technological way: “[T]he spectator identifies less with what is represented,
the spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle, makes it seen,
obliging him to see what it sees; this is exactly the function taken over by
the camera as a sort of relay” (Baudry, in Cha 1980:34).
Metz relates this type of identification to the mirror phase by saying that
primary cinematic identification is only possible because the viewer has
already undergone the formative psychic process of this initial constitution
of the ego. The film viewer’s fictional participation in the unfolding of events
is made possible by this first experience of the subject, that early moment in
the formation of the ego when the small infant begins to distinguish objects
as different from itself, and in so doing, begins to distinguish a self. What
links this process to the cinema for Metz is the fact that it occurs in terms of
visual images—what the child sees at this point (a unified image that is
distanced and objectified) forms how he or she will interact with others at
later stages in life. The fictive aspect is also crucial here—the perception of
that “other” as a more perfect self is also a misperception, a
misrecognition.
Part of film theory’s correspondence between primary cinematic
identification and the mirror phase, then, comes from the similarities
between the infant in front of the “mirror” and the spectator in front of the
screen, both being fascinated by and identifying with an imaged ideal,
viewed from a distance. This early process of ego construction, in which
the viewing subject finds an identity by absorbing an image in a mirror, is
one of the founding concepts in the psychoanalytic theory of cinema
spectatorship and the basis for its discussion of primary identification.
According to this description, part of the cinema’s fascination comes from
the fact that while it allows for the temporary loss of ego (the film
spectator “becomes” someone else), it simultaneously reinforces the ego
(through invocation of the mirror phase). In a sense, the film viewer both
loses him/herself, and refinds him/herself—over and over—by continually
reenacting the first fictive moment of identification and establishment of
identity.
Another aspect of the mirror phase analogy that is a point of debate in
psychoanalytic film theory has to do with the illusion of coherence and