[Bellour explains the difference between Christian Metz's semiological approach and his own approach to film analysis, and the degrees to which he became disenchanted with psychoanalysis, despite his debt to Lacan's notion of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic. With reference to his analysis of Hitchcock's North by Northwest, he proceeds to comment on how he evolved such key notions as “symbolic blockage” and “the undiscoverable text,” and proceeds to describe the influence of the Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and his interest in American cinema and filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and Fritz Lang.]

In 1979, you published The Analysis of Film, a compilation of essays, the earliest of which go back to 1966. All of them occurred during the era of structuralism, but the publication of this book also coincided with its historical decline, and its debunking by theorists. Also, in the introduction to the book, you state that you eliminated the word “structural” from the title. Why? Does this mean that these essays cannot be categorized under that banner, and that something else was already beginning to take shape in the book?

As I was explaining to you just now, the reason I did not want to call this book “The Structural Analysis of Film” was so that I could avoid adopting any kind of a recurrent method in my work as a whole that could be reductively objectified. Whatever reinforcement I might have found in the analytical approaches of different authors, such borrowings never took the form of the application of a single method. At the time when I wrote the preface to this compilation of essays, which Christian Metz had persuaded me to assemble, structuralism seemed both dated and ahistorical, at least to me; one could see that beyond structuralist methods proper and their formal applications in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the way structure worked within the context of analyses could not be reduced to the lineaments of a model that existed outside it. Just think of the infinitely subtle play that is deployed in Barthes's works, especially in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977), in which the effects of structure extend into events, ever more minute accidents that are irreducible to any meaning by which they could be constrained.