Psychoanalytical Transgression from Communicative Mode to Fragmented Discourse Murnau’s Nosferatu and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as Case Studies

Abstract

Artists worldwide have been interested in psychoanalytical approaches since 1890s when the well-renowned neurologist Sigmund Freud started his psychotherapeutic research aiming at finding crucial answers to personality development and the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious. With the advent of cinema, Psychoanalysis has attracted many film directors because it suggests interesting conflict between inner human drives and authoritative social norms (Freud, 2005, p. 40). This conflict becomes the thematic tool of classical narrative that is mainly based on the representation of the duality between two contradictory trajectories; most of the times are referred to as the good and the bad. Psychoanalytical representation, in this context, is tackled as a linear reality asit follows a certain logical causation within an ascendant development of events. Psychoanalytical and classical films are, hereafter, communicative since they suggest networks of coded signs that can be decoded through afathomable semiotic method. However, avant-gardist film directors try to adapt psychoanalytical modes with their nonconventional styles that are mainly based on fragmented narrative. On so doing, they abandon the communicative purpose of cinema to shape rather a mental discursive one.