The Research About Second Film Semiotics Of Metz

In the mid 1960 s, with the vigorous development of the structuralism trend in France, "film semiotics" has became a new branch of semiotics,which discuss the films in a semiotics theory. The birth of film semiotics has an important influence on the western film theory and brings the western film theory into a modern period. In kinds of film semiotics theory, a famous American scholar,Nick Brown(Charles Nikki Brown, 1937-2009), points out that " Metz’s(Christian Mertz,1931-1993)theory is the most complete and most influential." Christian Metz’semiotics strives to analyse the film as a science and take for the impressionistic film theory before.In order to distinguish, Metz’s film semiotics can be divided into two phases:The first phase,the so-called first film semiotics phase: "Film and Language " is his representative book. In this period,Metz took the film as a special language,analyzes the characteristics of film language and put forward the “Text System”of the movie,based on Saussure and Barthes’ linguistics and structuralism theory.As a result, Metz made a change from isolated explanation of the movie connotation to a more comprehensive research about the social, cultural significance of films.The second phase, the so-called second film semiotics phase: "The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Film" is his representative book.In this period, Metz absorbed the theory of Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. As its title suggests, Metz’s semiotics research combined linguistic approach and theory of psychoanalysis, and discuss the semiotics about the relationship between the film viewer and the film image.This article focuses on the problem of movie staring,which exist in the Second Film Semiotics of Metz. The text is divided into three parts:the first part mainly describes the theoretical source of Metz’s film semiotics theory in the early stage.Metz is mainly affected by the semiotics of Saussure, Roland. Barthes,and he used the framework and methods of Structuralism to set up the first phase of the semiology theory.The viewpoint of the first film semiotics theory,including view of film language system, the theory about eight ways to organise the scenes in the film and the study of codes and text system.These basic problems of semiotics laid a solid foundation for the second film semiotics theory.The “signifier”, one of the two key words of second film semiotics : "signifier" and the audience, has to be embodied in the first film semiotics.Later, he absorbed the psychoanalysis theory of Freud and Lacan, and combined with linguistics theory, set up the Second Film Semiotics theory. The second part emphasizes the identity of the Angle of the gaze on film medium shadow body identity,the stimulating of the voyeur and fetish desires under the movie identity mechanism, andaudience viewing of psychological structure problems,which construct the most successful films gaze theory of system. Metz’s staring movie theory shows us under the gaze of viewing,the main body is the fate of subject after being reconstructed by the object in the movie step by step and put forward a problem to all of us: "Where is the subject after being constructed by the object ?" The third part mainly stresses the contribution of the second film semiotics to the whole film semiotics, and the significance to the Chinese and western film criticism theory and practices.