The cinema is the apparatus to represent the ideas of what the whole film wants to convey to its audience. Cinema is being compared as to be an imaginary signifier:
“The cinema involves us in the imaginary; it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonenthe less the only signifier present” (Metz 2000, 410)
Apparatus theory is derived from different ideologues of the spectators. The common factors of it include the Marxist, Psychoanalytic and Semiotic theories. It has been a vague interpretation of human interest over what they believe. And so they also have the power to signify something they see or hear or felt on screen on their belief.
For over years we can definitely see how economics grow in every country that are being presented by cinema unconsciously or even on purpose and audience may not recognize. If we are going to view the context of a normal citizen in a community, a capitalist that has a power to rule by the use of money uses slaves for profitable reasons. From the Hegelian dialectic, Marx explained how a community be in peace through a class conflict to produce a synthesized community where there’s class less society. This type of analysis can be explained through a film consisting of economic problem like Spartacus. It was all about the Roman Revolution where Sparatacus showed the real proletariat of the ancient times with odd mixture of under-class humility and iron-willed rebelliousness. Although he had a poor army, he still proved how to be a good military leader. And so synthesis closed the story and peace reigns.
Lacan explained further how psychoanalytic theory of Freud applies the same idea in this theory. His mirror stage explains how film works at the unconscious level. The screen is the mirror and we are unconsciously processing the informations we encounter on the screen. We are also the one who give interpretation on those informations formulating into a conclusion. But again, the factors of having sexual differences, meaning for every languages, etc affects the perception on an idea.
And lastly Semiotics by Barthes helps the Appartus theory to associate an accumulation of symbols/signs to derive a meaning. And thus what is seen or heard on the screen may give a meaning to the spectators.
What we perceived in the screen of films is not always alike to other people. But we can understand it through our own beliefs or ideology. Meanings could be conveyed through our own perceptions.So what is present on us is really absent. Everything projected on us has an associated connotation and/or denotation which only ourselves can be convinced from the factors affecting what we see, hear or even feel.
Cinema 