Screen Theory Culture demonstrates the influence of Screen magazine on structuralist and post-structuralist film studies. As editor of Screen in the 1970s I was part of that magazine's persuasive definition of film studies. My film essays of the time did much to set a still current agenda on point of view and subjectivity. This book presents a range of documents from the 1970s and 1980s which have not been brought together in this form before, together with a major essay by myself which demonstrates the complexity of theoretical and practical engagement in film culture during this period. The original research represented here includes the first application of the literary notion of the fantastic to film 'Vampyr and the Fantastic' and a substantial elaboration of Kristeva's semiotics and Foucault's theory of authorship to the study of a director as text: Notes on the Dreyer Text.

My essays on Dreyer utilised psychoanalytic and linguistic theory on subjectivity and point of view to establish that authorship in art cinema could be understood in terms of variations in a subcode of pronoun functions, and that the work of Kristeva could usefully be extended to produce psychoanalytic readings of art cinema texts. Both sets of work on point of view, psychoanalysis and subjectivity are, I would argue, still relevant in the field today.