Reconsidering Film Theory and Method

MUCH RECENT FILM THEORY is in debt to a corpus of ideas made current during the 1970s-ideas which became consolidated both theoretically and rhetorically at the point of film theory's shift of ground from structuralism to poststructuralism. Some critics speak of this poststructuralist phase of film theory as film theory; others speak of the and distinguish it from a so-called first semiology, one indebted to structuralism. Whichever term we might use to designate the domain of film theory after the move away from structuralism, we are speaking about film theory under the influence of Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-Saussurrean linguistics. This Marxist-psychoanalytic-semiological paradigm emerges in the work of those writing in the 1970s for the British film journal Screen-an important conduit for the dissemination of French poststructuralist thought, though this is often not recognized by literary theorists of poststructuralist and deconstructive persuasions. There have been many recent critiques of contemporary film theory, which share the sense that the Althusserian-Lacaniansemiological paradigm for film theory and criticism has been exhausted.' A more general dissatisfaction with the second semiology and with the tendencies of poststructuralist thought has emerged in cognate areas as well: particularly, criticisms of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction as interpretive models or methods in literary theory and cultural studies--including critical reexaminations of the work of Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, and others. In a confusing series of events, these critiques tend to run parallel with attempts to relegitimate many tenets of deconstruction and poststructuralism, either under the rubric of postmodernism or under the rubric of neostructuralism. I think there are good reasons for film theory to welcome the demise of the second semiology. To support this claim, I will examine the expansionist tendencies of contemporary film theory as well as the ways in which film theory has been transformed into an all-embracing methodology. My objective is to suggest how the disciplinary requirement for a fruitful

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Film theory · Movie theater · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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