Fifty Years of Screen, 1959–2009

Abstract

While I was studying for an undergraduate degree in the early 1990s the most well-thumbed collection on my bookshelf was The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (1992). With succinct introductions to key topics such as ‘The female spectator’ and ‘Images of men’, this edited collection brought together groundbreaking articles from stellar academics like Richard Dyer and Jackie Stacey, who are still producing thought-provoking work. More than any other book it was responsible for ‘turning me on’ to film. The cover illustration, Robert Doisneau’s Un Regard oblique, tantalised and infuriated me, and the debates about ‘woman as signifier’ and ‘film and the masquerade’ were enthralling and liberating. As a mature student this was exactly what I wanted from academia; here was a heady brew of structuralism, semiotics, ideology, feminism and psychoanalysis. No matter that it was a retrospective publication – its debates belonging to the previous two decades which by 1992 were being superseded by the turn towards both queer studies and reception studies in the humanities – the arguments still resonated and spoke to the power of the image. This anecdote serves as a reminder of Screen’s place as a seminal journal in film studies, central to the development of film as an academic discipline and its establishment within further and higher education in Britain. As the journal recently marked its fiftieth year, looking back over its achievements is an exciting if rather daunting task. It offers an opportunity to revisit past battles fought for the intellectual soul of film studies and to reflect on new directions in a discipline which is increasingly heterogeneous and multi-faceted. In her recent article marking the half century, Annette Kuhn laid claim for the journal’s three birthdays, the first dating from the early 1950s and the publication of The Film Teacher, the second in 1959 when the first edition of Screen Education appeared, and the third in 1969 when