Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has been used extensively in film studies from the late 1960s and 1970s onwards. Inspired by Jacques Lacan, the work of Metz and Baudry in France and Mulvey and McCabe in the United Kingdom laid the foundations for film theory that explored the relationship between cinematic systems such as the apparatus and the screen on the one hand and the spectator on the other. The objects of these examinations were exclusively fictional texts. I use psychoanalysis differently through an interrogation of a largely untheorised embodied relationship between the documentary filmmaker and the subject of her or his film from a psychoanalytical perspective. There are many types of documentary film. I focus in this work on films in which a testimony, sometimes dealing with trauma, or an autobiographical account of the other, is gathered by the filmmaker. To this end I work with a number of documentary texts, including my own practice. I look at the potential tensions that these encounters might create between the need to gain as full a disclosure as possible, often fuelled by the filmmaker’s unconscious desire (which may or may not coincide with the consciously stated aim), and the ethical responsibility for the subject of the film. I suggest that a variety of unconscious mechanisms known from clinical psychoanalytical practice might be operating in the process of documentary filmmaking. These unconscious ‘hidden’ factors, notably transference, have a major influence on the decisions made in the creation of the final texts and therefore also have an impact on the future audiences of these films, which is why it is important to bring them to light. The thesis deals also with ethics of the documentary encounter. Apart from mainly Lacanian psychoanalytical thought, I draw on post-Second World War philosophy dealing with the relationship of the ‘I’ to the Other, led by Emmanuel Levinas, but including Althusser, Badiou, Butler, Derrida and others.