The Imaginary and the 'good object in the Cinema and in the Theory of the cinema Reduced to its most fundamental procedures, any psychoana- lytic reflection on the cinema might be defined in Lacanian terms as an attempt to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and to win it for the symbolic, in the hope of extending the latter by a new province: an enterprise of displacement, a territorial enterprise, a symbolising advance; that is to say, in the field of films as in other fields, the psychoanalytic itinerary is from the outset a semiological one, even(above all)if in comparison with the discourse of a more classical semiology it shifts its point of focus from the statement [the nonce] to the enunciation [the enunciation f Those who look superficially or who share the ritual eagerness to detect changes'as often as possible will perhaps think that i have abandoned certain positions or turned away from them when in fact, more simply -less simply, of course-I am accept- ing the temptation(the attempt) to drive a little deeper into the very procedures of knowledge, which constantly symbolises new fragments of the real in order to annex them to reality.There are formulae that are not imagined For a time at least they range themselves with the real. For a time, at least: let us there fore attempt to imagine some of them It has very often, and rightly been said that the cinema is a tech- nique of the imaginary. A technique, on the other hand, which is peculiar to a historical epoch(that of capitalism)and a state of society so-called industrial civilisation a technique of the imaginary but in two senses. In the ordi- nary sense of the word, as a whole critical tendency culminating