What is a filmic image (including the sound) ? A lure. This work must be taken in its analytic sense. i am shut up with the image as though i were taken in by the famous dual relation which establishes the Image-repertoire, the Imaginary. The image is there before me, for me: coalescent (its signifier and its signified nicely blended.), analogical, total, suggestive; it is the perfect lure: I hurl myself at it like an animal at a "lifelike' rag waved in front of it; and of course the image perpetuates in the subject I believe I am the misunderstanding attached to the self and to the Imaginary. In the movie theatre, no matter how far back i sit, I press my nose, to the point of flattening it, right up against the mirror of the screen, against this Imaginary "Other" with which I narcissistically identify (they say that the people who prefer to sit as close to the screen as possible are children and film buffs): the image captivates me , captures me: i am glued to the picture on the screen, and it is in this bond, this glue which establishes the naturalness (the pseudo-nature) of the filmed scene ( a glue prepared with all the ingredients of "technique'): whereas the Real knows only distances, the Symbolic knows only masks: only the image (Imaginary) is close, only the image is true (able to produce the ring of truth). (1975 a p. 106)
