The project became known as 'Screen theory' Theoretical context I'll be very brief here. We didn't think of ourselves as individual subjects until the 'rise of the bourgeoisie''., and the concept has always been associated with private property, individual rights, and a denial of the collective social class aspects of society. Another important aspect is the 'imaginary relationship' we are offered to explain our place and position in society. However, Brecht is cited throughout as a marxist who holds out some hope for revolutionary cultural politics. Some films try to break out of dominant ideological discourses by offering 'progressive' alternatives.
Real alternatives have to reconsider the whole issue of signification.
They have to make viewers aware of the very processes which the cinema uses to make sense of events, and they have to be actively engaged in making sense of reality, the past, and the future for themselves. For Lacan especially, Freudian theory develops into an account of how our sense of ourselves as a thinking individual subject arises from our participation in a system of language. This famous Lacanian argument is summarised superbly on pp. We have to make ourselves aware of it again, and allude to it in film, not increase the phoney fixity of meaning by self-confirming, simplistic narratives. Even here, though, films like this offer only a possibility for politics, with no guarantees that there will be politics.