PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CINEMA

Abstract

Rick Altman. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. x + 386 pp. Illus. Mary Ann Doane. The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bioomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 211 pp. Illus. Krin Gabbard and Glen 0. Gabbard. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. xx + 304 pp. Illus. Wes D. Gehring. The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987. xv + 262 pp. Illus. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. New York: The Free Press, 1987. x + 374 pp. Illus. At a time when cinema scholarship is permeated by a virtually incomprehensible vocabulary derived from psychoanalysis and structuralism, a reader may be forgiven a less than enthusiastic response to a new cluster of works spilling from the structuralist/psychoanalytic horn-of-plenty. However, contrary to expecta- tion, each of the five books reviewed here is a great deal less facile than most of the unintelligible and unintelligently done applications of French Structuralism which have dominated film scholarship, ad nauseam, in recent years. Each of these books (excluding Gehring's which does not really touch upon psychoana- lytic themes) has managed in varying degrees to digest and use facets of structuralist thought without becoming too enmeshed in the very obfuscating "patriarchal" discourse which most structuralists claim to abhor yet repeat anyway. In fact, the myth of the film scholar as detached scientist would be an appropriate study for film scholarship; structuralists in particular might benefit from analyzing their own assumptions of scientism, as Joel Kovel has done for psychoanalysis in a recent critique which identifies the scientific pose as an extension of bourgeoisie ideology.11 mention this issue because it keeps appear- ing in some way in each of the books reviewed here.