Psychoanalytic Film Theory and ‘The Rules of the Game’. The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s. In one of the central scenes of Minority Report, Jon Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) is standing in front of the transparent screen on which images start to flicker. It puts forth a show, which also means that it conceals something: if something is projected, its source is always concealed. Initially, its core concepts: the id (the primal, impulsive and selfish part of the psyche), the ego (the realistic mediator between id and super-ego) and the super-ego (the moral conscience) were established by Sigmund Freud (Freud,… The highly influential essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey (1975), gave another impetus for discussing the issue of reception, and triggered the involvement of feminism in psychoanalytical debates concerning films. Although his home city, Vienna, hosted around eighty cinemas, Freud visited the cinema for the first time in 1909 in New York. The relation between the gaze and the look is that the latter is absorbed in the former. During the 1980s the notion of suture was extended and reworked from its previous considerations in order to account for a complex spectatorial experience. This means that unlike in the mirror stage scenario, when one assumes the role of a spectator in the cinema, there is no misrecognition of one’s self in a perfect image. As Ernest Jones documents it, Freud was only “dimly amused by ‘one of the primitive films of those days,’ full of ‘wild chasings’” (Heath 25). It is as if the film narrative of Minority Report halted to contemplate one shot instead of a continuous flow of shots, which runs the risk of disrupting the impression of reality of the diegesis, but the superimposition of the faces of Anderton secures the completeness of the shotreverse shot formation. Theorists like Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec claim that the phase in the history of film theory labeled as Lacanian film theory lacked, in fact, essentially Lacan. Here language comes to mask the body because language is deployed to represent the child for others in the system of communication. The realization of his difference prompts the child to desire the lost unity but, as Freud insists, this desire sexualizes the mother, that is, the mother-child relationship attains a sexual aspect. For further reading check out Laura Mulvey's essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. He notes that the “film spectator may be looking at the images but he or she does not mistake them for his/her own reflected image” (Rushton 112), and then claims that the spectator is absent from the screen, unlike the appearance of his ideal image in the mirror. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Some Preliminary Distinctions. While it is obvious that not all humans have a penis, under certain conditions (precisely the conditions that give rise to the fetish) those who would normally not have a penis may be endowed with one (the fetishist believes they have one), or at least a substitute that will eradicate the anxiety of the missing organ of the penis. The second shot shows the other 180 degree of the diegetic reality, focusing on the squinting eye of the protagonist: the eyes that presumably saw what the spectator perceived as the visual content of the first shot. Interestingly, this doubly imaginary nature of the cinematic representation brings us closer to the impression of reality than in the case of any other art-form. This article seeks to specifically investigate the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on film theory. PSYCHOANALYTIC FILM THEORY meaning - P... About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features © 2020 Google LLC What appears on the screen may – as in the theatre – “be more or less fictional, but the unfolding itself is also fictional: the actor, the décor, the words one hears are all absent” (Metz 1982, 43). One influential trend within this approach, signaled by the name of Bruce Kawin, among others, thinks of film as a representation similar to the “dream screen,” (Kawin qtd. In other words, when “a given signifier (a pronoun, a personal name) grants the subject access to the symbolic order” (Silverman 1992, 137), it does so at the expense of alienating it from its needs and drives. In this sense, the spectator looks at an image, at the screen, in order to fill in or forget this lack. Ettinger's notions articulate the links between aesthetics, ethics and trauma. When the spectator casts his/her glance at the screen, his look is always already preceded by another look: an imaginary look, the gaze of the Absent One/Other. According to Metz, the presence is in a “true space” (ibid) and not in a photographed or projected one. The child also associates the power to castrate with the father because he sees that the mother “is not like him, she does not have a penis” (ibid.). To put it in a nutshell, the fetishist conceals the lack or absence by substituting something for what is missing, to attain a complete picture. the space of the auditorium of the actual cinema where the particular film is projected. From the first half of the 1970s, the role of the spectator became to the focus of psychoanalytic considerations. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film, Black and White and The Nasty Woman and the Neo Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema, editor of Embodied Encounters and co-editor of Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable. But in order to live his life on, this fiction needs to be covered by another fictive scenario to arrive at the concluding dictum: “all the same, I continue to believe.” What this fetishistic scenario entails, therefore, is a doubling up of beliefs. [14][15] by female authors, like Chantal Akerman,[16] as well as by male authors, like Pedro Almodovar. Metz opened the way in the 1960s to the establishment of film theory as a new intellectual discipline. The unfolding of the story, action or fiction is clearly non-identical with the space where it is viewed, i.e. Žižek calls this technique interface. In real life (or in the spectator’s subjective reality) the split between the real body and the imaginary image creates an identity for the subject. Lastly, a possible approach in this analogue model is “suture,” a concept based on the oscillation of shot and reverse shot that is used in narrative films to “stitch” or “sew” (literally, suture) the spectator in the filmic narrative. The camera shows him from behind the screen, so that the shot includes both the eyes of the one who sees (Anderton), and also the object being looked at (the whirl of images on the screen). 16 PSYCHOANALYTIC FILM THEORY AND “THE RULES OF THE GAME” Anthony J. Ballas (University of Colorado Denver) Todd McGowan. As this is a missing look, its nature is imaginary, its source is there but missing at the very same time. Kaja Silverman argues that the basic element of editing, the simple “cut” may be seen to guarantee “that both the preceding and the subsequent shots will function as structuring absences to the present shot. As this above scenario proves, the mechanism of suture works even when it is short-circuited, or when – in extreme cases – the narrative setup attempts to circumvent its operation. According to Gabbard, many criticisms pointed out that the analysis of fictional characters is doomed to failure because these figures are fictional creations – so analyzing the characters should rather be done through the analysis of the filmmaker (13). Source: Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon JATEPress, 2008. To complete the sense of a full spatial setup, another shot needs to cover the missing half (again, 180 degrees) of the previous shot. Useful information to the research scholars and teachers. The narrative is thus safely constructed, and is capable of re-inscribing or “stitching” the spectator into the filmic text. To account for the concept of this absence or lack, Metz studied the difference in watching a theatrical play and watching a film. The First wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. The Myth of Meta-Theory Over the past thirty years, a plethora of publications have argued in favor of a specific psychoanalytic approach to some dimension or convention of cinematic horror. By using a signifier to signal his presence, the child enters language, which is the domain of social interactions. Film theory, too, despite the structural link between psychoanalysis and cinema, did not immediately develop in the direction of psychoanalysis. I have never seen such great guidelines and wide knowledge regarding theories of English literature..I m very thankful for updating such significant information.. At the end of the nineteenth century, psychoanalysis was created, and film happened to follow shortly afterward. What helps the spectator remain in the illusory world of film fiction is the reverse shot that promises a quite similar scenario: first an Imaginary plenitude then disappointment upon the discovery of the frame, and then comes another shot, going on till the end of the film. In this sense, there is a homology between the emergence of Lynch's filmmaking and this innovation in psychoanalytic film theory. Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes of the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Its development will be traced in two articles through classic film theory, the role of Karl Marx and Louis Amazon.com: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (AFI Film Readers) (9780415900294): Kaplan, E. Ann: Books “Psychodynamic” refers to all psychological theories of human functioning and personality and can be traced back to Freud’s original formulation of psychoanalysis. Since the only person having access to her is the father, the child imagines that it was the father who castrated her possibly as a punishment. Film theorists, critics, and commentators have been drawn to psychoanalytic . As Oudart notes: the scene what the spectator is faced with is in fact the reverse shot of the painting the painter is completing. In other words, in order to study visuality and optical phenomena, it is best to turn to psychoanalysis – and it was and is doubly so when it comes to the cinema. Metz used a quite narrow reading of Freud and Lacan’s texts when he talked about the fetishism, nonetheless, the main idea persists in his description of the fetish and its role concerning the relationship of the spectator to the screen. By adopting the changing vantage points of each and every consecutive frame, the spectator enters into a mechanism film theory calls suture. The starting point for this type of analysis is that as the dreamer is passively following the images of the dream sequence, the spectator of a film, too, is immersed in the images on the screen. ideas to explain cinema, because cinema … This becomes apparent in Metz 1986 and Oudart 1977–1978, while Dayan 1976 and Heath 1981 provide a more direct focus on the ideological critique of this process. Obviously, Metz is aware that the analogy is far from perfectly denoting the similarity. The most illustrative example of this is Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man, who was a Russian patient, born as Sergei Constantinovich Pankeiev (Freud 1918). While Charcot used photography and image recordings to document and study forms of hysteria, Freud considered this approach to be a dead-end. This view opens the way for investigations that employ methods of decoding dreams discovered by Freud such as condensation (many features or characters condensed into one figure), displacement (one feature or character is replaced by another one on the basis of some associative connection), and other dream mechanisms in the interpretation of films. Indeed, articles (written between 1964 and 1968) in Metz’s Essais sur la signification au cinema (1968) paved the… As the images start to make sense in being grouped into short clips of continuous events, Anderton spots himself committing a future crime he has, of course, never thought of doing. Lacan’s text has more than just mere connotations to film and visual arts in general because he uses the camera as a signifier for the gaze: “What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. In the sequence of shots, the spectator first encounters a cinematic image, and he or she feels much the same jubilation as the child looking into the mirror, discovering itself, in Lacan’s description of the mirror stage. The Other here is a symbolic construct, “a transcendent or absolute pole of the address, summoned each time that a subject speaks to another subject” (Wright 298). The moment the child gains a notion of himself as complete (i.e. [11], From the 1990 onward the Matrixial theory of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger[12] revolutionized feminist film theory. If he chooses to unite with her, “he runs the risk of punishment from the castrating father” (ibid.). When there is presence, that is, we see something on the screen, there is always something that is outside the frame of the screen. According to Lacan, the mirror stage occurs in infants between six and eighteen months of age, when they misrecognize themselves while looking in the mirror. The film emphasizes this moment by superimposing the objective shot of Anderton’s face (as seen by the camera) and the subjective shot of his picture on the screen (as seen by Anderton). The interface performs a double function here: while it threatens to disrupt narrative unity by short-circuiting the standard operation of suture because it merges the shot and its reverse shot into one image, the interface also draws the spectator’s attention away from the potential narrative block with the very same gesture. On the basis of Roman Jakobson’s idea adapted by Jacques Lacan (Lacan 1977, 146-178), the methods of the interpretation of dreams serve as rhetorical figures – such as metaphor and metonymy – and help the interpreter to establish a coherent interpretation of the particular film. The description of the mirror stage is a basic description of the process of the forming of the self, of the ego. The mirror stage is about identification and the positioning of the subject. The discussion of the term always includes sentences like: “Lacan used the term suture to signify the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious which, in turn, he perceived as an uneasy conjunction between what he terms the Imaginary and the Symbolic” (Hayward 378). At that time hysteria – originating from the Greek hustera, i.e. Obviously, the process of mirroring and the resulting identification with the image can also be taken less literally, as the child starts to acknowledge himself on the way of identification when he recognizes himself in other members of its species (3). Therefore, the look of the camera in the space of fiction becomes the gaze: a lack that is continuously covered by the changing angles and points of view. As Metz defined the notion of the imaginary signifier, “[w]hat is characteristic of the cinema is not the imaginary that it may happen to represent, but the imaginary that it is from the start, the imaginary that constitutes it as a signifier” (Metz 1982, 44). [3] “Psychoanalytic film theory has argued that mass culture can be interpreted symptomatically, and that it functions as a massive screen on which collective fantasy, anxiety, … Finally, the voyeur realizes that although he believed that he is looking at an object, actually his look is preceded or framed by another, absent look that Lacan defines as the gaze. The lack of perfection that the child experiences on the level of his body is filled in or screened over by a fiction: an imago, an ideal image, an illusion of completeness. T h e way psychoanalytic theory is applied to the cinema depends upon which aspect of the medium is being illuminated. Film is an illusion inasmuch as it presents something that is absent. In Lacan’s work the gaze is described as “unapprehensible,” as something there-but-not-there. Subject grammatically marks the source of utterance or action. In an adventure film the protagonist always gets his/her reward and the bad gets punished. While Žižek agrees with most of the criticism that once shook the foundation of the concept of suture, he warns against discrediting it completely. Becoming like his father, the child moves toward social stability by adopting heterosexual orientation through redirecting his repressed desire for the mother toward other women in a socially acceptable manner. As Sartre argues, “in so far as I am under the gaze […] I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears. This article seeks to specifically investigate the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on film theory. It is through various interactions in this Symbolic network – a kind of matrix, or the Matrix which Neo escapes when he meets Morpheus in the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999) – that the child gains a socially legitimate position, in other words, he becomes a subject. When the famous harmonica tune is heard in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) well before the Charles Bronson character appears on the screen, it serves as a metonymy: all the characters know that he is around, that the tune signals his approach as it belongs to him, yet no one can see him. Thus “the signifier stands in for the absent subject … whose lack it can never stop signifying” (ibid.). As Metz noted, “it is in their gaps rather than in their normal functioning that the film state and the dream state tend to converge” (Metz 104).
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