In English, the adjective “figural” is a synonym of “figurative.” In France, the notion of “figural” was introduced in the vocabulary of aesthetics by Jean-François Lyotard and then reworked by Gilles Deleuze as a process of rupture and reconfiguration of the codes of representation. Among the precursors of such a principle, Siegfried Kracauer was one of the most precise and innovative. We will trace the archeology of the figural, comparing texts about cinema by Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Antonin Artaud, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Jean Epstein, up to and including those of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Sharits and contemporary filmmakers. This is not the history of a concept, but of the ways of defining cinema as a revolutionary force in the field of mimesis.