…the cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry…., it is also the mental machinery--another industry—which spectators “accustomed to the cinema” have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films. The institution is outside us and inside us, indistinctly collective and intimate, sociological and psychoanalytic.

from Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” quoted in Matlby and Craven, HC 429.