Screen: film and ideology From the film text to to filmic discourse. Demystifying ideology as the task of criticism. Roland Barthes’s Mythologies: "Since Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, criticism--the tearing away of the ideological wrappings with which our society surrounds knowledge, feeling, behavior, values--is the great work of this century."

Intellectual liaisons

History of Screen 1971. The Society for Education in Film and Television breaks with the British Film Institute to pursue a more activist educational policy. 1971-74. Translations from Cahiers du cinéma and Cinéthique. Translations of Soviet film theory of the 1920s. Critical essays on realism. 1974-1976. Translated work of Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others (semiotics and close analysis). Special issues on Bertolt Brecht. Avant-garde and independent cinema. Feminist film theory.

Louis Althusser “Ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relation of individuals to the real conditions of their existence.” The function of ideology is to construct individuals as subjects. Ideology structures imaginary relations to real identities and behaviors. Ideologies are perpetuated as structured fictions with their own internal logic and coherence.

Colin MacCabe: Empiricism and Realism As an ideology, empiricism . . . Assumes that all knowledge is a product of perception and the visible world. Knowledge or value is a property of objects in the world (rather than the theories or the cognitive activities of individuals). One only needs the proper instruments to extract that knowledge. The tools themselves are considered to be neutral and value-free. What kinds of tools? Forms of looking, technologies of observation, language: definitions, concepts, questions. Does the camera simply show reality as given, or does it transform its object, producing an effect of "naturalizing" the image by repressing any awareness of the stages required to produce an image: selection, framing, editing, lab work, etc.?

Peter Wollen: Godard and counter-cinema Hollywood Linear narrative Identification Transparency Unity Closure Entertainment Fiction Counter-cinema Episodic narrative Distance Foregrounding Conflict Open-endedness Criticism Reality