Screen theory is a

Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...

–

psychoanalytic film theory Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory. The theory is separate ...

associated with the British journal ''Screen'' in the early 1970s. It considers filmic images as signifiers that do not only encode meanings but also mirrors in which viewers accede to subjectivity. The theory attempts to discover a way of theorizing a politics of freedom through cinema that focuses on diversity instead of unity. Here, the Marxist emphasis on universal consciousness as a basis for defining emancipation shifted to the articulation of diversities and multiplicities of individual and collective experience due to the psychoanalytic elaboration of the unconscious.

Overview

The theoreticians of the "Screen theory" approach—

Colin MacCabe Colin Myles Joseph MacCabe (born 9 February 1949) is an English academic, writer and film producer. He is currently a distinguished professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh.

, Stephen Heath and

Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist and filmmaker. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught ...

—describe the " cinematic apparatus" as a version of Althusser's

ideological state apparatus "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)" ( French: "Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État (Notes pour une recherche)") is an essay by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. First published in ...

. According to Screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact that the subject is created and subjected at the same time by the narrative on screen is masked by the apparent realism of the communicated content. This is also explained by Screen's conceptualization of the

post-structuralist Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of Power (social and poli ...

theory, which regards a text as an act of intervention in the present so that the film is considered a work of production of meanings rather than reflection. Instead of taking representation as a means of reproducing what is real, representation serves as a point of departure. Screen theory's origins can be traced to the essays "Mirror Stage" by

Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, ; ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Sigmund Freud, Freud", Lacan gave The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, year ...

and

Jacques-Alain Miller Jacques-Alain Miller (; born 14 February 1944) is a psychoanalyst and writer. He is one of the founding members of the École de la Cause freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis which he presided fr ...

's ''Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier''. This theory describes an infant who has a fragmented experience of its body but once he looks in a mirror, he sees a whole being instead of fragmentary one. Lacan called this a deception, one that is essential to the function of imaginary order that creates illusory wholeness.

Overview

See also

References

Further reading