Contents Acknowledgements PART I THE IMAGINARY SIGNIFIER I The Imaginary and the Good Object' in the Cinema and in the Theory of the Ci nema Going to the cinema Talking about the cinema Loving the cinema 2 The Investigators Imaginary 369477 Psychoanalysis, linguistics, history Freudian psychoanalysis and other psychoanalyses various kinds of psychoanalytic study of the cinema 25 Psychoanalysis of the film scri 27 Psychoanalysis of the textual system 32 Psychoanalysis of the cinema-signifier 33 The major regimes of the signifier 37 3 Identification, Mirror 42 Perception, imaginary The all-perceiving subject 45 Identification with the camera 49 On the idealistic theory of the cinema 52 On some sub-codes of identification 54 Seeing afl 56 4 The Passion for Perceiving 58 The scopic regime of the cinema 61 Theatre fiction, cinema fiction 66 5 Disavowal. Fetishism 69 Structures of belief 71 The cinema as technique 74 Fetish and frame 77