Page 91 - Decoding Culture

84 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

that, Screen also began to forge its own distinctive synthesis of
structuralism, Althusserian marxism and Lacanian psychoanalytic
theory - a heady mixture which was to set the terms of film theo­
retical discussion for years to come (for a good account see
Jancovich, 1995). Later, members of the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (see Chapter 5) would label these
views 'Screen theory', and I shall borrow their usage here. It is to
Screen theory that we must turn our attention if we are to trace the
impact of structuralism any further.

Making Screen theory 1 : semiotics and
psychoanalysis

All that appeared in Screen did not, of course, play a part in Screen
theory, so it is important to remember that the account I shall offer
here is abstracted from a much wider corpus of work. Contributors
(including the present author) were often in disagreement with
each other, sometimes violently, although it is true to say that by
the mid-1970s a distinctive line of argument and, therefore, a kind
of collective intellectual identity could be ascribed to the journal.
Screen had developed a 'problematic', to borrow a favoured
Althusserian term. Many traditions contributed to this synthesis,
including, among those to which I shall not attend, Brechtian
theory, Russian Formalism, and a range of arguments about real­
ism and avant-gardism in several artistic contexts. Since my aim
here is to characterize the main thrust of Screen theory as that
was to influence subsequent cultural studies thinking, I shall look
only at a key triangle of concerns: film semiotics; ideology; and the
subject.
On film semiotics it is instructive to consider the broad trajec­
tory of Christian Metz' work, partly because Metz featured

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