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Marxist film theory is an approach tofilm theory centered on concepts that make a political understanding of the medium possible.[1][failed verification] An individual studying a Marxist representation in a film, might take special interest in its representations ofpolitical hierarchy andsocial injustices.[2]
Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas ofMarxism through film. TheHegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through theKuleshov Experiment and the development ofmontage.[3]
Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individualprotagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over.[4] Eisenstein himself was accused by the Soviet authorities underJoseph Stalin of "formalist error", of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly.[4]
French Marxist film makers, such asJean-Luc Godard, employed radical editing and choice of subject matter as well as subversive parody to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas.
Screen theory is a Marxist–psychoanalytic film theory associated with the British journalScreen in the early 1970s.[5] It considers filmic images as signifiers that do not only encode meanings but also mirrors in which viewers accede to subjectivity.[6] The theory attempts to discover a way of theorizing a politics of freedom through cinema that focuses on diversity instead of unity.[7] 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.[7]
The theoreticians of the "Screen theory" approach—Colin MacCabe,Stephen Heath andLaura Mulvey—describe the "cinematic apparatus" as a version ofAlthusser'sideological state apparatus. 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 thepost-structuralist 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.[8]
Screen theory's origins can be traced to the essays "Mirror Stage" byJacques Lacan andJacques-Alain Miller'sSuture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier.[9] 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.[9]
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