During the 1970s, his work had a major impact on film theory in France, Britain, Latin America, and the United States.
[1] As Constance Penley flatly stated in Camera Obscura, "Modern film theory begins with Metz.
Metz applied both Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan's mirror theory to the cinema, proposing that the reason film is popular as an art form lies in its ability to be both an imperfect reflection of reality and a method to delve into the unconscious dream state.
His work has been critiqued by Jean Mitry in 1987 in Semiotics and the Analysis of Film, and virulently so by Jean-François Tarnowski in Positif.
"[4] Published in French in 1991, Impersonal Enunciation received little attention in the English-speaking world until it was translated in 2016, an indicator of a resurgence of interest in Metz as a scholar whose work on multi-screen environments was before its time.