ABSTRACT
Literary theory still limps some way behind film theory. Relative to work on the cinema, promoted largely outside universities in educational col-lege and polytechnic courses on communications and in media studies, the teaching of literature remains a massive academic institution retarded by inertia. Despite the extraordinary rise of interest in literary theory since 1968 and though most concepts are available there in some form, film theory has advanced further in working through the new criticism. One reason for this is that the study of film has proceeded unburdened by a sense of ‘the canon’, another is that the cinema, as Brecht recognized, is almost uniquely able to represent the contemporary world to a twentieth-century audience, including a popular audience (few contemporary fictional texts can give as pleasurable a sense of ‘how it is’ as, say, Polanski’s 1974 Chinatown, whose closing words have lent a saying to Modern English: ‘Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown’). Moreover, in Britain there was the special intervention of the film journal, Screen, which became in the ’seventies as progressive and influential as thirty years earlier Scrutiny had been. In a collective project grouped around writing by Ben Brewster, Jacqueline Rose, Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Laura Mulvey among others and following in the wake of the New Left Review’s late-sixties adoption of Althusserian Marxism, Screen committed itself to importing and reworking for the analysis of cinema the writings of Barthes, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault since recognized as poststructuralist.
