Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas

InLike A Film,Timothy Murray investigates how the cinematic apparatus has invaded the theory of culture, weaving together the disparate 'psycho-political' fabrics of cultural production, psychoanalysis and politically marked subject positions. The book analyzes the impact of the apparatus on a wide range of cultural practices: experimental art, from the film-making of Yvonne Rainer and Derek Jarman to Laurence Olivier'sOthello;social and political narratives of race, sexuality, feminism and ecology; the visual theory of Lyotard, Torok, Barthes, Zizek, Silverman and Laplanche; articulations of history from the Renaissance visions of Shakespeare and Caravaggio to modern sexual and political fantasy. Murray suggests that the many destabilizing traumas of culture remain accessible to us because they are structured so much like film. Responding directly to multicultural debates over the value of theory and the aim of artistic practice,Like A Filmaddresses questions of cultural identity, the role of Continental psychoanalysis and philosophy, and the ideological importance of artistic form.