Christian Metz and his development of genre theory

Christian Metz was born in 1931 and died 1993. He was a French Film Theorist best known for pioneering the application Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of semiotics to film. During the 1970's his work had a great impact of film theory in France, Britain and the United States.

In Film language: A semiotics of cinema , Metz focuses on narrative structure- proposing the grand Syntagmatique of system for catogorizing scenes in films.

Metz applied both Sigmund's Frueds 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 both be an imperfect reflection of reality and as a method to delve into the unconscious dream state.

Film Language represents essays from the early stages of Metz’ attempt to found a cinesemiotics. His later work has somewhat superseded this book. Language and Cinema , recently translated and published by Mouton, Belgium, is mostly a recanting of this earlier work. However, Film Language will undoubtedly be the most available and widely read, at least until his later work is also taken up by U.S. publishers. It is easy to take critical potshots at this book; it was a beginning book, opening a new field of inquiry. Cinéthique has already done an extensive analysis of the book and made many important criticisms concerning the relationship of Metz’ theory to his bourgeois ideology. However, it might be more fruitful to try to see what kind of space the book opens up for us in terms of thinking about aesthetics/ideology/cinema and to look at its mistakes as theoretical pitfalls to be avoided. For, even though Metz’ notion of a cinesemiotics and of what constitutes a cinematic code is not yet fully formulated in this book and is there even very misleading, it can still be helpful as a beginning for thinking about films in terms of a culturally and ideologically determined heterogeneity of codes rather than as original and unique expressions of certain “human” themes.

Christian Metz believed that their were four stages to the genre developement theory:

• Classical
• Experimental
• Parody
• Decontruction

Classical-structuring on narrative, mainly victorious/define era

Experimental- encircles generic codes and conventions of a thriller

Parody- Conventions have been deformised

Deconstruction- Generic essentials of thriller varied with current genres such as horror and thriller. Where other genres elements and sub genre's are introduced.

• Se7en- Frankenstein (1931) - Classy/Classical- Dracula (1931)
• Classy/Classical- Carry on screaming - Parody
• Nosferatu (1922) - Experimental-
• The cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)
• Experimental- Scary movie - Parody-
• Abbot and Costello meet Frankinstein (1948) - Parody
• Blair witch project - Deconstruction
• Scream - Deconstruction-
• The sixth sence - Deconstruction

These above are examples of the various stages in Metz theory