Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film

Christian Metz is best known for applying Saussurean theories of semiology to film analysis. In this book, he uses the concept of enunciation to articulate how films "speak" and explore where this communication occurs. If a film frame contains another frame, which frame do we emphasize? And should we consider this staging an impersonal act of enunciation? Metz builds a novel theory around the placement and subjectivity of screens within screens, which pulls in—and forces him to reassess—his work on authorship, film language, and the position of the spectator. He draws surprising conclusions that presage current writings on digital media. His analysis enriches work on cybernetic emergence, self-assembly, self-reference, hypertext, and texts that self-produce in such a way that the human element disappears. A critical introduction by Cormac Deane bolsters the connection between Metz's findings and nascent digital-media theory, emphasizing Metz's keen anticipation of the methodological and philosophical concerns we wrestle with today.

The late work of an avant-garde theorist adds clarity to the phenomenology of new media.

Christian Metz (1931–1993) is also the author of Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema; The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema; and Language and Cinema.

The moments of poetry, wit, and charming cinephilia scattered throughout make this work as engaging as it is enlightening.... Essential.

Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London:
Metz returns to and develops the question of what speaks in the moving image: code, or something else. In meticulous and enlightening readings of films, television shows, and changing ways of watching them, Metz's posthumous text is a true ghost in the machine, a revenant who reopens many of the arguments we thought were closed and makes audiovisual media matter, once more, in every sense of the word

In this splendid new translation.... Metz shines through, avoiding jargon, using richly illustrative examples, and writing with a persuasive voice.Publishers Weekly

Warren Buckland, author of The Cognitive Semiotics of Film:
At long last, Christian Metz's final book, Impersonal Enunciation, is available in English, expertly translated by Cormac Deane. Metz's non-deictic, reflexive theory of enunciation, in which the film text continually references itself, constitutes the culmination of his lifelong semiotic analysis of the cinema.

D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago:
Metz's generous personality is captured well here, something that no other English translation has accomplished. It is both an extension of Metz's path-breaking work in bringing the concepts and methods of linguistics and psychoanalysis to the study of film, and the articulation of fundamentally new directions in his thought.