It is always more difficult to criticize a publishing journal than a book or article; even so, Terry Eagleton’s remarks on Screen (nlr 107) are not adequate to the rigour and seriousness of that journal’s project. Essentially, Eagleton reproaches Screen with formalism. More than merely the willingness to study form is needed for this criticism to stick. Like other ‘isms’ (economism, theoreticism), the term implies the error of overtotalizing, and so an excessive concern with form as central or exclusive determinant (it is thus a precise definition of the Russian Formalists).
For Eagleton, Screen’s formalism is firstly an excessive concern with techniques of production whose supposedly radical programme presumes that ‘films which draw your attention to the camera thereby impel you out inexorably onto the picket lines’. Screen has disavowed such technical formalism with some consistency. Colin MacCabe (Screen Vol. 17, No. 3, p. 21) refers to the notion that, the breaking of the imaginary relationship can constitute a political goal in itself’ as ‘the ultra-leftish fantasy of the surrealists’, and associates it with certain formulations of the Tel Quel group. Again, in the same issue, Stephen Heath condemns deconstruction based on the notion of ‘film as film’ as representing ‘the impasse of formal device’ in ‘an aesthetics of transgression’, and urges instead work which will bear little resemblance to the officially acknowledged avant-garde (p. 109).