Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.
[3] Early applications of psychoanalysis to cinema concentrated on unmasking latent meanings behind screen images, before moving on to a consideration of film as a representation of fantasy.
[5] From 1969, as a reaction to the unrest in Paris in May 68, a theoretical examination of the medium of cinema developed, starting in France, more precisely on the part of French film criticism, the basis of which was a mixture of psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism and Marxism .
The starting point was formed by the considerations of the French theorist Jean Louis Baudry and the writings on film theory by Christian Metz, whose Le signifiant imaginaire.
[7] In the early 1970s, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey separately explored aspects of the "gaze" in the cinema, Metz stressing the viewer's identification with the camera's vision,[8] - an identification largely "constructed" by the film itself[9] - and Mulvey the fetishistic aspects of (especially) the male viewer's regard for the onscreen female body.
[20] The role of trauma in cinematic representation came more to the fore,[21] and Lacanian analysis was seen to offer fertile ways of speaking of film rather than definitive answers or conclusive self-knowledge.