ABSTRACT
Under the rubric of ego-psychology's death, there has evolved a new sustaining of the subject. How? Through deconstruction. There was a notion perpetuated by the editorial board of Screen in the years 1973–83 that deconstruction could manage via various film-strategies to avoid the traditional viewings' ego-psychological identifications. The “mismatch” was the most notorious of these ruses; film after film was analysed to find a mismatch, or an assumed mismatch between ideology and image (but the wrong way round!). John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln, Dreyer's Gertrude, Lang's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Welles' Touch of Evil, Hitchcock's The Birds, Berwick Street Collective's The Nightcleaners, Dwoskin's Times For, Godard/Gorin's Tout Va Bien, all served this purpose; the effects were that then a series of second generation cine-semiotic academics offered the same positions on their good-object films: Gilda, Waiting for Mr Goodbar, Nashville, Dressed to Kill, Jeanne Dielman, Thriller. Noel Burch, who (in Theory of Film Practice) posited this theoretical stance in the late 1960s and early 1970s in regard to Eisenstein's Strike and October, as well as films by Lang, Dreyer, Antonioni, and others, cannot be forgotten here; additionally, his position's entrenchment was a detour from dealing with the possibilities of a materialist, avant-garde, experimental film practice and its necessary subversions.
