i think this book might take the cake for having the most number of impenetrable (ahem), AWESOMEST sentences. how could it not? after all, it’s on structural semiotics, psychoanalysis, and cinema… AND it was written by a french person in the 1970’s.

In order to understand the fiction film, I must both ‘take myself’ for the character (=an imaginary procedure) so that he benefits, by analogical projection, from all the schemata of intelligibility that I have within me, and not to take myself for him (=the return to the real) so that the fiction can be established as such (=as symbolic): this is seeming-real. Similarly, in order to understand the film (at all), I must perceive the photographed object as absent, its photograph as present, and the presence of this absence as signifying.

awesomest rating: 10