From Film Theory to Post-Theory

Abstract

Many contemporary Lacanian film theorists credit Žižek for the recent rebirth of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis for film theory. Žižek’s philosophical rereading of Lacanian psychoanalysis has influenced many film theorists toward a reexamination of some of the problematics developed by early Lacanian film theorists, most of whom constructed psychoanalytic theories of film and spectatorship in the 1960s and 1970s. Notable figures in this endeavor include Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Colin MacCabe, and Stephen Heath (to name only a few).1 These early adopters of Lacanian psychoanalysis for a theory of film— and, specifically, film spectatorship—employed a much earlier version of Lacanian theory, mainly developed in Lacan’s work of the 1950s and 1960s in his Ecrits and early seminars.