Introduction

Abstract

It occurred to me last year, when preparing to deliver a lecture to first-year university students on ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, that the essay was about to turn forty. The lecture I was delivering contributed to a year-long course on critical theory, from Plato to Kant to T. S. Eliot to Judith Butler. The week on ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ fell near the end of the course – somewhere following the week on Derrida and before the week on Lauren Berlant. I had given versions of this lecture for several years, tweaking it and moving things around a little each time. Of course I had come to know ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ first as an undergraduate, and then a bit better as a PhD student in cinema studies in the early 1990s, but had only begun really to appreciate its force and brilliance when I began to lecture on it (as many of you have done, and continue to do, I imagine).