Abstract
ABSTRACT: Responding to the popular fascination with psychoanalysis in the 1920s, Photoplay magazine commissioned American neuropsychiatrist Louis Bisch to write a series of articles that applied Freudian concepts to questions of film stardom and spectatorship, genres, censorship, and the cinematic apparatus. Markedly different from the 1970s canonical texts in the field, Bisch’s work articulated a psychoanalytic theory that embraces cinema’s lowbrow mass appeal and encourages spectators to adopt a demystified perspective on Hollywood. This article discusses Bisch’s texts as an early instance of film theory written primarily for a female readership and as a forgotten anti-modernist road not taken in the history of theorizing cinema.
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