Screen Theory

Lhosayne DixonAlex GarciaAndrew GoncalvesNatalie GonzalezLawrence HolmesMatthew Larue

Screen Theory is a Marxist film theory centrally concerned with analyzing the effects of cinema in "positioning" the spectator (or subject) of the film through the way text (by means of camera placement, editing and other formal characteristics) "fixed" the spectator into a particular kind of "subject-position", which it was argued, "guaranteed" the transmission of a certain kind of "bourgeois ideology" of naturalism, realism and verisimilitude.

According to Screen Theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round.

The analysis of the media (predominantly the cinema) and its effects on the spectator was developed by the British journal Screen, which was, for a time in the late 1970s, heavily influential in the field of film studies.

The goal of Screen Theory is to understand how culture and media can seem to compel us to adopt certain beliefs and identities. So Marxist film theory in general, from Eisenstein to 1970s Screen Theory, concerns looking for what nowadays are called “Media Effects”: the social, psychological, and political influence of the media.

In Screen Theory, it is the text (film) itself which is the central focus of the analysis on the assumption that, since the text "positions" the spectator, all that is necessary is the close analysis of texts from which their "effects" on their spectators can be automatically measured, as spectators are bound to take up the "positions" constructed for them by the text.

Screen Theory emphasizes stitching the spectator into the predetermined subject-position constructed for him or her by the text (film), opening a place in media analysis for the analysis of the text.

Screen Theory focused on how form, not just content (such as social stereotypes or the depiction of traditional social roles) might affect viewers.

Screen Theory included the concept of  “Dominant Specularity” where the viewer is put in a privileged position via the cinematic world, through the use of point-of-view, object-glance, and shot-reverse-shot editing techniques.

Screen Theory’s subject-positioning involves classical Hollywood continuity which creates a kind of voyeuristic, sometimes sadistic, safe space of narrative observation for the viewer.

Part of the appeal of Screen Theory to media scholars rests in the weight in which the theory gives to the effectiveness of language and texts (such as films and media products) as having real effects in society.

Films are products of a culture industry that is common of modern societies’ ideological structure. So the media industry fits right into the various social institutions that tell us who we are and what to believe about the world.

Screen theorists are interested in how we come to think of those ideas as our own. What, in other words, makes us accept the identities that are imposed on us by society?

One of Screen Theory's great achievements, drawing as it did on Psychoanalysis and Marxism, was to restore an emphasis to the analysis of texts (film) which had been absent in a lot of previous work.