Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema

Abstract

At the start of his arresting chapter on Un Chien Andalou, Andrew Webber writes at some length about the properties of lace as viewing material (his italics): Lace occupies a special sort of space between: between innocence and guile, sacred and profane, the infantile and the adult only, inside and out. Whether on bodies or buildings, it is a cover for intimacy. (p. 93) Lace is seen to stand for the ‘scopophilic seductions of interiors and their fabrics’ (p. 93); it is a material of disavowal that at once covers, and indicates, objects which combine desire and trauma. Intimacy and fragility, the very qualities that lace holds and hides, are aptly evoked in this volume which, at its best, demonstrates the peculiar capacity of cinema as art form to evoke the material complexity and intricacy of psychic life. Projected Shadows collects together an illuminating series of papers from the Third European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, which took place in London in November 2005. As Andrea Sabbadini suggests in his introduction, there has been much discussion already of the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis. The aim of the volume is to deepen ‘this ongoing, constructive dialogue between these two disciplines’ (p. 1). This aim is reflected in the almost even spread of areas of expertise between the contributors; unlike many volumes of psychoanalytic film criticism, this volume draws in the voices of a good number of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists, as well as those of some of the finest film critics in and beyond the field of psychoanalytic criticism (T. Jefferson Kline, Andrew Webber, Catherine Portuges, Laura Mulvey and Ian Christie, among others). This range of perspectives brings with it a wealth of reflections on what it means to bring cinema and psychoanalysis together. At times those reflections are openly pragmatic. In an essay on Matteo Garone's First Love (2004), a film which considers anorexia, Maria Vittoria Costantini and Paola Golinelli explain that psychoanalysis allows them to raise unexplored or repressed areas of the psyche and emotions to consciousness. They go on to ask: ‘What can it give us when we watch a film?’ (p. 46). Their assumption of their own acuity is somewhat unexpected – ‘Compared to the average film viewer, the analyst is more aware and more accustomed to reflecting on his emotions’ (p. 46) – but their conclusion is heartening and frank. They write: ‘Cinema, and more generally art, can provide psychoanalysts with extra tools for dealing with uncertainty and stress when, in the course of their daily practice, they may feel overwhelmed by confusion’ (p. 54). This turn to film as complex narrative which may yield precious matter is also found in Petro Roberto Goisis's beautiful essay on Alina Marazzi's film about the memory of her mother, For One More Hour with You (2002). Goisis writes of his first encounter with the film in a session with one of his patients: Psychoanalysts know how their patients often become a source of inspiration or a stimulus for reading, films, songs, concerts, shows, holidays or other things. In such a context my reaction did not seem strange or peculiar; what I did not expect was that … I would enter into an emotional dimension that still accompanies me. (p. 24)