Editorial Board (PDF) - Camera Obscura

Editorial In this issue, we are continuing our previous investigation of the logic of enunciation and sexual difference as figured in the cinema by way of an analysis of Now Voyager. At the same time, we are directing attention toward a complementary area of inquiry by offering a dossier on the work of Christian Metz, a dossier which includes part of a previously unpublished translation of Metz’s “Metaphor/Metonymy, or the Imaginary Referent,” as well as articles that consider the importance of Metz’s work from several perspectives. From the vantage point of a different and suggestive textual system, Lea Jacobs approaches the elusive question raised in previous analyses of films as different as Psycho, The Pirate, The Most Dangerous Game, and India Song-the relationship between a textual system of enunciation, woman’s desire, and the look. Jacobs’s study of Now Voyager brings these terms together, more specifically, on the continual process of refiguration of Charlotte Vale, as subject or object of the discourse, subject or object of desire. The relationship between enunciation, woman’s desire, and the look can be seen to underlie most of the essays on films published by Camera Obscura in recent issues. Once again, it should be clear that the relevance of studies of classical textual systems, such as Now Voyager, is by no means limited to an understanding of the specific textual operations of the film in question, but, beyond that, enables us to conceptualize other representations of woman’s desire and social subjectivity. See, for example, articles on India Song, The Dancing Soul ofthe Walking People, and The Story ofAnna 0. in Camera Obscura 5 and 6. “Metaphor/Metonymy,” Christian Metz’s most recent work, continues his concern with the question of the “psychoanalytic constitution of the cinematic signifier,” this time through a consideration of the problem of filmic figuration, “namely, metaphorical and metonymical operations in the film sequence.” The emphasis of “Metaphor/ Metonymy” is on textual operations, rather than on his earlier concerns with cinema as a language-system or cinema as a social-psychical institution. This article is similarly grounded in Metz’s concern with