In this stimulating collection of theoretical writings on film, photography and art, Timothy Murray examines relations between artistic practice, sexual and racial politics, theory and cultural studies.

Like a Film investigates how the cinematic apparatus has invaded the theory of culture, as a way of weaving together the disparate ‘psycho- political’ fabrics of cultural production, psychoanalysis and politically- marked subject positions. Murray analyses the impact of cinematic perceptions and productions on a wide array of cultural practices: experimental art, from the film-making of Yvonne Rainer and Derek Jarman to the art of Helen and Newton Hanison; social and political narratives of feminism, homosexuality, race and ecology; the representational and visual theory of Lyotard, Torok, Barthes, Ropars-Wuilleumier, Žižek, 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 destabilising traumas of culture remain accessible to us because they are structured so much like film.

In direct response to multicultural debates over the value of theory and the aim of artistic practice, the book addresses questions of cultural identity, the role of Continental psychoanalysis and philosophy and the ideological importance of artistic form. Like a Film will be essential reading to students of film, art and art history, theory, cultural studies and gay studies.

Timothy Murray is Professor of English at Cornell University. A former editor of Theatre Journal, he is the author of Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France.