Lefebvre's lecture on Christian Metz

Arthemis is pleased to present a lecture with

Martin Lefebvre

"Dance and Fetish: Phenomenology and Metz's Epistemological Shift"

Christian Metz is remembered today as having almost single-handedly transformed the culture of film studies. This widely held view is summarized by one commentator who writes that "with Metz a new research paradigm is born, as well as a new generation of scholars. The ontological theories are followed by methodological theories » (Casetti, 1999 : 91). According to another, « Metz exemplified a new kind of film theorist, one who came to the field already 'armed' with the analytic instruments of a specific discipline, who was unapologetically academic and unconnected to the world of film criticism » (Stam, 2000: 108). Of course, Metz didn't just surge like a meteor on the scene of film studies. He arrived in a field that had been dominated in good measure by phenomenology (jn the works of Bazin, the filmologists, Laffay,  Ayffre, Mitry and many others). In fact, there is a phenomenological strand that runs through most of Metz's published work. But how exactly does it co-exist with the structuralist inclination of his research through its linguistic and psychoanalitic moments? Looking at Metz' output as well as non-published archival papers, this talk moves through three phases of development in Metz' "danse" with phenomenology.

Martin Lefebvre is Concordia University Research Chair in Film Studies and Director of ARTHEMIS.