Often considered to be the discursive founder of the structuralist enterprise in film, revisiting Metz’s earliest publications reveals a more complex and often surprising picture. In a group of texts published between 1964 and 1972, Metz marks out a conflicted conceptual space within structuralism — between a precedent aesthetic discourse in film theory and an emergent discourse of signification, between phenomenology and semiology, between semiology and film, and between sign and image — whose stakes are played out in the imagination and construction of “theory” as a concept whose rarity before the 1960s cannot be underestimated. Indeed the early Metz takes on two projects in the early sixties whose scales are enormously ambitious. Having become associated with the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) from 1963 under Roland Barthes’s tutelage (and in 1966 elected a directeur d’études), Metz takes on one of the central obstacles to expanding linguistics into a general semiology of culture, that is, to show that the methods and concepts of structural linguistics and the study of speech or langue are applicable to non-spoken phenomena; in short photography and film. As is clear even in Barthes’s early essays on photography, the image is viewed here as both an object of fascination and an obstacle to a general science of signs, which can only demonstrate its universality if it can master the image in signification. The enunciative a priori or implied defining question of the aesthetic discourse from the 1910s through the 1930s was “In what ways can film be considered an art?” And in repeatedly returning to this question, debating it, worrying it, probing it from different angles and from a variety of conceptual frames, the discourse fractured and eroded the concept of the aesthetic itself in a way commensurate with the larger project of modernism in the arts. The enunciative a priori of the discourse of signification, raised by Barthes in “The Rhetoric of the Image,” is “How does meaning get into the image?,” as if the image itself, in its analogical plenitude, is opaque to meaning.[1] Semiology can only lay claim to founding a general science of signs if it can demonstrate that the image is surrounded by meaning, crossed with or shot through with signification, bathed in sense. However, and in a way analogous to the aesthetic discourse, semiology founders in its confrontations with the image; or, as Barthes’s encounters with the image makes clear from the beginning, from a semiological perspective there is something traumatic, anxious, or imponderable in the image that semiology feels compelled to master, and in many respects fails to master. Barthes will finally embrace the idea of an unmasterable core of non-meaning in the image in his return to “phenomenology” in Camera Lucida.