At the beginning of the twentieth century the extraordinary medium of film presented itself as a new way of understanding the increasing complexity of modern life.

Film theory since 1968 has concerned itself not so much with theme and content as with the deeper question of how the medium works on its viewer. What are the mechanisms of identification and pleasure the moviegoer experiences? How is Hollywood realism to be assessed in comparison with the radical claims of modernist and postmodernist cinema? How does film address the spectator as a gendered subject?

Film theory has been profoundly influenced by the writings of such modern thinkers as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida and Kristeva, combining modes of textual analysis relating to linguistics and semiology, a Marxist reading of ideology, and theories of subjectivity, the spectator and gender redefined by psychoanalysis.

This judicious selection from key work by Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane and others represents some of the most important contemporary writing about film. It presents a consistent and developing analysis that will be of interest to students concerned with film and film studies, as well as all those working in cultural, media and communication studies.