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Film theory has borrowed heavily from psychoanalytic writings to speculate on the nature of film spectatorship. The apex of this concern took place in the 1970s when film writers went beyond Freud and vigorously adopted the ideas of Jacques Lacan to explain the viewing experience. Lacan's thinking, especially with his concept of the mirror phase that put such an emphasis on the gaze, seemed to offer some kind of psychoanalytic way to talk about film spectator-ship. His thinking also seemed to offer a way of talking about film spectatorship in a cultural and ideological way, a way to satisfy the sudden dedication of film criticism to social concerns after the student and worker uprisings of 1968 in France, especially since it offered a theoretical underpinning to the writing of the popular Marxist, Louis Althusser.
Lacan's ideas were applied to cinematic theory by Louis Baudry (1970) and Christian Metz (1974), whose writings had a significant impact, once they were translated, in England and the United States. The litany of writers who developed or bounced off these ideas is too long to mention, but it can be safely said that this discourse dominated film theory well into the 1980s. But the waning spirit of this school of thought was caused by three factors, I believe: (1) the discourse itself adopted something of the opaqueness and sheer difficulty of access that we find so eminently in Lacan's writing itself; (2) the analogies used to link Lacan and the cinema were stretched to the limit and raised doubts in the minds of even the most devout; and (3) the discourse itself seemed to close the boundaries of the debate rather than open them up — a certain vocabulary had to