THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER in the work of edgar Morin has demonstrated because most films consist of fictional narratives and because all films depend even for their signifier on the primary imaginary of photography and phonography. In the Lacanian sense, too, in which the im aginary, opposed to the symbolic but constantly imbricated with it, designates the basic lure of the ego, the definitive imprint of a stage before the Oedipus complex(which also continues after it the durable mark of the mirror which alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the double of his double the subter- ranean persistence of the exclusive relation to the mother, desire as a pure effect of lack and endless pursuit, the initial core of the unconscious (primal repression). All this is undoubtedly reacti vated by the play of that other mirror, the cinema screen, in this respect a veritable psychical substitute, a prosthesis for our pri mally dislocated limbs. But our difficulty-the same one as every where else- will be that of grasping in any detail the intimately ramifying articulation of this imaginary with the feats of the sig nifier, with the semiotic imprint of the law(here the cinematic codes )which also marks the unconscious, and thereby man's pro- ductions, including films The symbolic is at work not only in these films but equally in the discourse of anyone who discusses them, and hence in the articl I am just beginning. This certainly does not mean that the sym- bolic is enough to produce a knowledge, since the uninterpreted dream, the phantasy the symptom, are all symbolic operations Nevertheless, it is in its wake that we can find hope for a little more knowledge, it is one of its avatars that introduces under standing, whereas the imaginary is the site of an unsurpassable opacity, almost by definition. Thus as a beginning it is absolutely essential to tear the symbolic from its own imaginary and to return it to it as a look to tear it from it but not completely or at east not in the sense of ignoring it and fleeing from it( fearing it) the imaginary is also what has to be rediscovered precisely in order to avoid being swallowed up by it: a never-ending task. If here I could manage a small part of this task(in the cinematic field),I should by no means be displeased For the problem of the cinema is always reduplicated as a problem of the theory of the cinema and we can only extract knowledge from what we are(what we are as persons, what we