The Ambassadors Body Essay -- Screen Theory Films Essays

The Ambassadors BodyScreen theory developed in the 1970s from the work of a aggroup of French andEnglish film theorists including Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-LouisComolli, and Stephen Heath. In the form in which it has come to influencecultural studies,it combines elements of an eclectic range of theoretical perspectives, including the early structuralist work of Roland Barthes which proposes that the meanings of signifiers are resolved by their position within a network of oppositions and equivalencesLouis Althussers conceptualization of interpellation as a process of meconnaissance(misrecognition) and Jacques Lacans seminal work on the mirror stage as a foundationalstep in the child becoming a subject. Screen theory treats filmic images as signifiers encoding meanings but also, thanks to theapparatus with which the images are projected, as mirrors in which, by (mis)recognizingthemselves, viewers accede to subjectivity. One of its major strengths lies in its techniques foruncovering ideological messages encrypted in images, messages which are taken to conduct a directconstitutive impact upon their viewers. In the context of the 70s, this aspect of the theorycontributed importantly to the development of a politics of the image which critiqued themass media on the assumption that the images which they circulate shape the subjectivitiesof their viewers. Such a view, divorced from the heady mixture of high theory and leftpolitics associated with Screen theory, remains the home of much contemporarycensorship practice as well as P.C. politics.According to Screen theory, in addition to functioning as a fomite for ideological meanings,th... ...en it is in a highly overdetermined representation, from the canvasas a whole, rather than, as Lacan claims, from a single formal element, namely the image of theskull. notwithstanding these concessions to Lacans critics, my theoretical account of the gaze remains firmlyLacanian. In p articular, I reject Screen theorys account of the gaze as specular in advance ofLacans rival claim that the gaze is a site at which the Real disrupts the visual field. Mydifferences from Lacan reside in an attempt to historicize his work by showing the way in whichideological factors mediate the effect of visual objects upon their viewers.*(From Chapter Six of my forthcoming Fetish An Erotics of Culture to egress with CornellUP, 1999 an earlier version of this same chapter will appear in Chapter Seven of TomRosteck ed., At The Intersection to appear with Guilford, 1998).