Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of
Marxism through film. The
Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the
Kuleshov Experiment and the development of
montage. Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual
protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over. Eisenstein himself was accused by the Soviet authorities under
Joseph Stalin of "formalist error", of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly. It considers filmic images as signifiers that do not only encode meanings but also mirrors in which viewers accede to subjectivity. The theory attempts to discover a way of theorizing a politics of freedom through cinema that focuses on diversity instead of unity. Here, the Marxist emphasis on universal consciousness as a basis for defining emancipation shifted to the articulation of diversities and multiplicities of individual and collective experience due to the psychoanalytic elaboration of the unconscious. Screen theory's origins can be traced to the essays "Mirror Stage" by
Jacques Lacan and
Jacques-Alain Miller's
Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier. This theory describes an infant who has a fragmented experience of its body but once he looks in a mirror, he sees a whole being instead of fragmentary one. == See also ==