1970s psychoanalytic theory and after

One of the major differences between pre- and post-1970s psychoanalytic theory was that the latter saw the cinema as an institution or an apparatus. Whereas early approaches, such as those of Tarratt, concentrated on the film text in relation to its hidden or repressed meanings, 1970s theory, as formulated by Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey, emphasized the crucial importance of the cinema as an apparatus and as a signifying practice of ideology, the viewer-screen relationship, and the way in which the viewer was 'constructed' as transcendental during the spectatorial process.

Psychoanalytic film theory from the 1970s to the 1990s has travelled in at least four different, but related, directions. These should not be seen as linear progressions as they frequently overlap: The first stage was influenced by apparatus theory as proposed by Baudry and Metz. In an attempt to avoid the totalizing imperative of the structuralist approach, they drew on psychoanalysis as a way of widening their theoretical base. The second development was instituted by the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who contested aspects of the work of Baudry and Metz by rebutting the naturalization

of the filmic protagonist as an Oedipal hero, and the view of the screen-spectator relationship as a one-way process. The third stage involved a number of feminist responses to Mulvey's work. These did not all follow the same direction. In general, they included critical studies of the female Oedipal trajectory, masculinity and masochism, fantasy theory and spectatorship, and woman as active, sadistic monster. The fourth stage involves theorists who use psychoanalytic theory in conjunction with other critical approaches to the cinema as in post-colonial theory, queer theory, and body theory.

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998