The Ambassadors Body Essay -- Screen Theory Films Essays

The Ambassadors Body mask system developed in the seventies from the work of a group of French andEnglish film theorists including Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-LouisComolli, and Stephen Heath. In the form in which it has come to influencecultural studies,it combines elements of an eclectic range of supposititious perspectives, including the early structuralist work of Roland Barthes which proposes that the meanings of signifiers ardetermined by their position at heart a network of oppositions and equivalencesLouis Althussers conceptualization of interpellation as a fulfil of meconnaissance(misrecognition) and Jacques Lacans seminal work on the mirror stage as a foundationalstep in the child becoming a subject. Screen theory treats filmic images as signifiers encoding meanings but also, thanks to theapparatus through which the images are projected, as mirrors in which, by (mis)recognizingthemselves, viewers accede to subjectivity. One of its majo r strengths lies in its techniques foruncovering ideological messages encrypted in images, messages which are taken to digest a directconstitutive impact upon their viewers. In the context of the 70s, this thought of the theorycontributed importantly to the development of a politics of the image which critiqued the survey media on the assumption that the images which they circulate shape the subjectivitiesof their viewers. Such a view, disunite from the heady mixture of high theory and leftpolitics associated with Screen theory, remains the cornerstone of much contemporarycensorship practice as well as P.C. politics.According to Screen theory, in addition to functioning as a vehicle for ideological meanings,th... ...en it is in a super overdetermined way, from the canvasas a whole, rather than, as Lacan removes, from a private formal element, namely the image of theskull. Despite these concessions to Lacans critics, my theoretical bill of the paying attention remains fir mlyLacanian. In particular, I reject Screen theorys account of the gaze as specular in favor ofLacans rival claim that the gaze is a site at which the Real disrupts the visual field. Mydifferences from Lacan busy in an attempt to historicize his work by showing the way in whichideological factors mediate the effect of visual objects upon their viewers.*(From Chapter Six of my forthcoming voodoo An Erotics of Culture to advance with CornellUP, 1999 an earlier version of this same chapter will appear in Chapter Seven of TomRosteck ed., At The Intersection to appear with Guilford, 1998).