Screen theory is a

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

– psychoanalytic film theory 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. 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 at Bulmers ...

—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 197 ...

. 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 term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...

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 Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...

and Jacques-Alain Miller'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

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Further reading