Screen theory is a Marxist film theory

Marxist film theory

Marxist film theory is one of the oldest forms of film theory.Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film...

 associated with the British journal Screen

Screen (journal)

Screen is a journal of film and television studies based at the John Logie Baird Centre at the University of Glasgow and published by Oxford University Press. It is co-edited by John Caughie, Alan Durant, Simon Frith, Sandra Kemp, Norman King, and Annette Kuhn.- History :Screen originated in the...

 in the 1970s. The theoreticians of this approach -- Colin MacCabe

Colin MacCabe

Colin MacCabe is a British writer and film producer. He is distinguished professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh, professor of English and humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, and a visiting professor at the University of Exeter....

, Stephen Heath and Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London...

 -- describe the "cinematic apparatus

Apparatus theory

Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was a dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s. It maintains that cinema is by nature ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological. Its mechanics of representation...

" as a version of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). According to screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact that the subject is created and subjected at the same time by the narrative on screen is masked by the apparent realism of the communicated content.