Psychoanalytic film theory, a prominent academic school emerging in the 1960s and 70s, applies the concepts of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to analyze how cinema engages the viewer's unconscious, often likening films to dreams. Pioneers like Jean Louis Baudry and Christian Metz explored how films trigger unconscious, irrational processes, turning film watching into a pleasurable experience, while drawing parallels between film's techniques and dream structures. A significant contribution came from Laura Mulvey in the early 1970s, who famously introduced the concept of the "gaze," particularly critiquing the fetishistic male gaze directed at the on-screen female body. Developing through a second wave in the 1980s and 90s, this theory also examines how viewers are offered specific identifications, albeit often illusory, and how films reveal their "unconscious" subtext, deeply connected to human desires and fantasies.