The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism

D.N. Rodowick offers a critical analysis of the development of film theory since 1968. He shows how debates concerning the literary principles of modernism–semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism–have transformed our understanding of cinematic meaning. Rodowick explores the literary paradigms established in France during the late 1960s and traces their influence on the work of diverse filmmaker/theorists including Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Gidal, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen. By exploring the “new French feminisms” of Irigaray and Kristeva, he investigates the relation of political modernism to psychoanalysis and theories of sexual difference. In a new introduction written especially for this edition, Rodowick considers the continuing legacy of this theoretical tradition in relation to the emergence of cultural studies approaches to film.