Psychoanalytic Film Theory Research Articles

Derivative Desires and Plastic Pedagogies: Malabou, Psychoanalysis and The Big Short

This article explores Catherine Malabou’s philosophical foray into neuroscience, especially her continuing work on the topics of brain plasticity and epigenesis. I lay the groundwork for a productive intersection of Malabou’s philosophy with Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory, despite Malabou’s tendency to treat the brain’s plasticity as an issue beyond the scope of the Freudian-Lacanian conception of the unconscious. Through consideration of Todd McGowan’s development of a Lacanian ontology, and by reference to the structure of derivative finance in late capitalism, especially as depicted in The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015), the article argues in favor of an epigenesis of desire, in which attentiveness to the sedimented layers and conflicted temporalities of the brain’s synaptic connections may prove illuminating for philosophical studies of films that adopt a pedagogical stance toward recent historical or political events.

Cinematic Desire and Fantasy in Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La Invención De Morel (1940)

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between the concepts of desire and fantasy, as understood by Lacanian theory, and their manifestation in cinema. In order to do so, it explores and discusses cinema’s influence over literature, focusing on how this relationship is reflected in the novel La Invención de Morel ([1940] 1953), written by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares. The analysis employs scholarship from film critics McGowan (2007), Metz (1982), Zizek (1989, 2006), Mulvey (1975, 1989), and others through the lens of Psychoanalytic Film Theory.

PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACH TO COMPLEX NARRATIVE IN MOVING IMAGE: NOLAN’S MEMENTO

This article explores Christopher Nolan’s Memento as an exemplar of complex narrative in moving images with a psychoanalytical approach. Psychoanalysis has provided a foundation for commentators, film critics and theorists to analyse cinema. By using Freud’s Iceberg Analogy of the unconscious mind, this article examines the parallelism between the emergence of unconscious complex mental states, how they are expressed through emotions and behaviour in moving images and how spectators reflect their unconscious emotions and mental states. The article focuses on Memento and analyses the movie's character and narrative structure. Memento was chosen as Christopher Nolan captured the scary extent of the human mind's complexity and its unconsciousness. Through complex narrative structures, he created associations between audiences’ unconsciousness and negative emotions of repression and stress associated with it, such as helplessness, fear of having no purpose, misjudgement or unfair treatment. This article examines the scene structures in relation to the complexity of narratives and narratives’ relation to Leonard Shelby’s unconscious mind, through the framework of psychoanalysis and interpretivist approaches by utilising psychoanalytic film theory and text analysis. It concludes that the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, has a detached preconscious and conscious and unconscious resulting from not his head injury but unconsciously using it as a psychological shield. The detachment between levels of consciousness is depicted as a moving image in black and white. This provides stability and consistency to Leonard’s version of narratives, which plays the reverse. The analysis of Memento with a psychoanalytical approach evidences the parallelism between Freud’s Iceberg Analogy of the unconscious mind and humans' complex unconscious mental states and how this is depicted in moving image.

ANALYSIS OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, AND DRUG CONSUMPTION SCENES IN THE TAMIL FILM 'VIKRAM' BY PSYCHOANALYTIC FILM THEORY

Psychoanalytic film theory, developed by Sigmund Freud, posits that viewers take on the perspectives of onscreen characters. The film appeals to the 'Id,' the unconscious part of the mind that seeks pleasure, by suggesting that it would be good to acquire and then resolutely repress any desires the audience might have. The 'Ego' of the conscious mind is the conduit through which the subconscious desire to mimic the actions of the film's characters manifests Jung (2007). Kamalhasan starred in the recently released Lokesh-directed Tamil film Vikram. There is a high probability that viewers will favor repressed desire above Id consciousness due to the film's high concentration of drug, tobacco, and alcohol consumption sequences. This research is therefore conducted. This study uses purposive sampling and bases its findings on the theoretical framework of psychoanalytic film theory. Films with depictions of substance abuse were subjected to qualitative and quantitative content analysis to determine the prevalence of these behaviors throughout the medium (Duration of consuming, consuming scene description, the character that is consuming, and the sense that represses the consuming behavior over Id consciousness). The consumption scenes were then discussed in depth by a focus group of five academics (Scene interpretation and capacity of consuming behavior). When everything was said and done, the result was determined by the number of Id awareness variables (desire, violence, Heroism, joy, power, etc.) repressed by the film scenes.

PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SCENES THAT TRIGGER ALCOHOLISM AND SMOKING IN THE PAN INDIA FILM KGF 2

Psychoanalysis is a clinical treatment approach for psychopathology. Sigmund Freud used it to treat his patients by interpreting dreams and unconscious desires. It was later applied to film as a psychoanalytic film theory Margolis (2013). Many film theorists and critics support this theory because cinema has an irrational relationship with the spectator's subconscious. Neither view nor Psychoanalytic film theory can describe the film spectator's unconscious Allen (1999). The fiery treatment of heroic booze and smoking moments in the Pan-Indian Film KGF 2 affected many viewers unconscious. These scenes include powerful temptations that are suppressed over the spectator's psyche's shadow archetypes (dark or hidden personality); a suitable symbolic order (Lacan) is required to unveil persona archetypes (mask or reveal character). The film requires psychological investigation. Although many theorists have contributed to psychoanalysis theory, the researcher favours Carl Jung's psychoanalytic cinema theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. The researcher uses purposive sampling to select KGF-2 as the sample. Smoking and alcoholic scenes were analysed using qualitative and quantitative content analysis (duration of consumption, consuming scene description, the character consuming, and the sense that suppresses the consuming behaviour overshadow archetypes), and five fellow scholars participated in a focus group discussion to interpret those scenes (scene interpretation and capacity of consuming behavior). Finally, the outcome was assessed using shadow archetype variables (desire, violence, heroism, joy, power, and so on) that were suppressed by the film sequences.

At the Edges of Sleep

At the Edges of Sleep

WHO DO WE SEE IN THE PROTAGONIST OF THE CAPTAIN (2017)?

ABSTRACTThe Captain (Der Hauptmann), directed by Robert Schwentke, was the German director's first film with a German crew and in his native language since 2003. It was screened in German cinemas in March 2018 and met with a mixed response from the press. In this article I analyse the film, with the main emphasis being on the question of identification with the film and its protagonist. I employ a number of concepts from psychoanalytic film theory to argue that The Captain has the potential to compel its audience to ask questions about human nature, for example, whether war is the only prerequisite for an individual to transform from an ‘ordinary’ person into a villain. Another question is how the audience might react to the presence of motifs which are symbolic representations of Holocaust victims. The use of such images underlines the ruthlessness of the main character of the film and strengthens the contrast between his physical appearance and his hideous crimes.

Film Theory after Copjec

The importation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into film theory in the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new era of cinema scholarship and criticism. Figures including Raymond Bellour, Laura Mulvey, and Christian Metz are often considered the pioneers of applying Lacanian psychoanalysis in the context of film theory, most notably through their writings in Screen Journal. However, where French and British scholarship on Lacan and film reached its limits, American Lacanianism flourished. When Joan Copjec’s now classic essay “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan” was published in 1989, the trajectory of Lacanian film theory would become radically altered; as Todd McGowan recently put it, the “butchered operation” on Lacan committed by Mulvey and (quoting Copjec) the “Foucaultianization” of Lacan under the auspices of Screen Journal were finally indicted in one gesture through Copjec’s critique. Copjec and McGowan’s unique American view of Lacan marks a pivotal point in the convergence of psychoanalytic theory and cinema studies; by seeking to wrest Lacan from historist/deconstructionist theories of the subject, and by revisiting Lacan beyond the mirror stage, Copjec and McGowan can be said to have instantiated a resuscitation or even a renaissance of Lacanian theory in film studies in particular and in American scholarship more generally. In this essay, this renaissance of Lacanian theory is examined, focusing on the innovations these two American thinkers brought to psychoanalytic film theory and the multiple paths carved out into other disciplines that followed. First, a detailed summation of the contentions between screen theory and Copjec’s position is introduced, as well as McGowan’s assessment thereof. Then, the trajectory of psychoanalytic film theory after Copjec’s arrival is the focus, including the major innovations in her thought from cinematic subjectivity to sexual difference (most notably from Read My Desire) and the way her position spread to philosophy and ontology. Finally, the article identifies the limitations of Copjec’s and McGowan’s thought and seeks new possibilities through which we may continue to apply psychoanalysis to the cinema in the wake of these two important thinkers.

‘A mirror to the room’: Pyer Moss, specular strategy and Black Lives Matter

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s version of historical materialism and with reference to the concept of despecularization from psychoanalytic film theory, this article looks at the historical and cultural significance of Pyer Moss’s Spring/Summer 2015 fashion show, where Kerby Jean-Raymond, the artist and designer behind the label, used the runway to bring attention to state-enforced violence against Black men and women.

A Case for Psychoanalytic Visual Dispositif? : Birdman after the “Cinematographic Capture”

This paper investigates how the notion of “superhero” in popular imagination, evident in the multiple live-action adaptations of Detective Comic’s and Marvel Cinematic Universe’s comic book heroes for their commercial value, has been debunked by Alejandro Inarritu’s 2014 Birdman. While the aforementioned dream factories affirm the fantasmatic “flight” inherent to these cinematic creations, especially symbolised by the aviating capacities of most of their superheroes, it is Inarritu’s Birdman, although not commercially comparable, that is theoretically significant here: the “flight” motif paradoxically gestures to the “capture” that is the very cinematic essence. Working with some key psychoanalytic theorists of the apparatus and later the suture, I shall argue that the messianic in this film, embodied by the male lead, whose waning career is resurrected from oblivion given Keaton’s subsequent work acknowledgement despite his Oscar nonsuccess, is revealed by this author to be ultimately the cinematographic apparatus that gives us Baudry’s transcendental subject, a concept arguably bound to his cinematic effect, a term with epistemological import. This paper will also redirect attention to the interpretative liberation associated with “flight", insisting that Baudry’s discussion of the cinematic dispositif is among the first to address the real, albeit with an emphasis on intelligibility, so that release from what I call the “cinematic capture”, a term that Todd McGowan defines as “uncritical subjectivity”, can be enacted. This thesis asserts that Birdman, proposed here as a case for psychoanalytic film theory, unintentionally exposes the traumatic real within the imaginary because of cinematic capture, thus leading to this discussion of the gaze, identification, narration, control and desire. In addition, it will appraise what Baudry calls the “knowledge effect” by responding to the following inquiries that encapsulate the critical stake here. How can one call this effect “knowledge” when the “subjective” of the transcendental subject becomes more pronounced with the other title of Baudry’s apparatus theory, which is suture theory? What can one say about the “reality effect” of the apparatus theory in an age of digitisation the emphasis of which is virtuality and, last but not least, can one argue that Inarritu’s Birdman is an illustrative intervention of the digitised post-cinematic?

The real gaze in Australian cinema

ABSTRACT This paper takes up Todd McGowan’s rethinking of psychoanalytic film theory to consider what such approaches might disclose in the work of a national cinema. I focus on Australia’s national cinema where it is caught, I argue, between the Imaginary gaze of an aestheticized nationalism and a traumatic ‘Real’ gaze that disturbs the field of cultural vision. I show how Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Wake in Fright introduces the Real gaze to Australia’s cinematic vocabulary where it is taken up in the film Renaissance and disturbs the aesthetic inquiry into nationalism with the traumatic Real frequently repressed in national discourses. Here I suggest that if a national cinema can be seen to function as a form of ‘public dreaming,’ this Real gaze functions as a national symptom that, as in the psychoanalytic clinic, troubles the story the subject tells about itself. After mapping the emergence of this Real gaze in Wake in Fright, I consider where this visual trope is reworked in more recent Gothic landscape films, such as Joel Anderson’s Lake Mungo (2008), before considering how post-Mabo history films reverse the terms of this gaze such that what haunts the national Imaginary is put before the viewer without relent.

Domesticating desire: Fantasy and social change in Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs

This article argues that Todd McGowan’s revision to classic psychoanalytic film theory (2007) gives us a means of better understanding the ideologic commitments of Downton Abbey (2010–15). Instead of addressing this question through examination of the politics of the series’ representations or through examination of the genre of the period drama, I use McGowan’s film theory to consider how the series constructs its viewer through ideological operations. Downton Abbey, this article demonstrates, answers the viewer’s desire with fantasy and thus assures viewers of the omnipotence and rightness of the ideological structures under which we live. A comparative examination of Upstairs, Downstairs () reveals that the earlier series – despite thematic and generic similarities – resists solving the viewer’s desire and thus has the radical potential to construct a viewer who is more likely to question ideology. A final comparison of the last minutes of each series demonstrates Downton Abbey’s investment in the fantasy of tradition as well as a current cultural reluctance to productively confront significant social change.

50 Jahre suture! Everything you always wanted to know about the beginning of psychoanalytic film theory* (* but were afraid to ask Oudart)

50 Jahre suture! Everything you always wanted to know about the beginning of psychoanalytic film theory* (* but were afraid to ask Oudart)

Editors’ Introduction

> “Through this book, I imagine the possibility that later generations of media feminists might not have to do this work again: putting a stop, for a while at least, to this particular feminist ‘re’-cycle.” > > —Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision , 20011 > “Theories and concepts help order history, but critically informed production practice, an orientation of learning, thinking, and doing might move us out of these painful historical reveries.” > > —Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance , 20192 alexandra juhasz: In October 2017 I received …

The Embodied Spectator and the Uncomfortable Experience of Watching Romance and The Piano Teacher

In this article I investigate the embodied and multi-sensual spectator, whose film experience is not dominated by the disembodied, voyeuristic distance to the screen posited as inevitable by much psychoanalytic film theory. This is a spectator who is 'making sense' of the film through eyes that hear and ears that see, and whose affective disposition allows for an experience not limited to vision as the only sense-maker. I bring into play issues of the body, embodiment, experience, and affect in order to identify possible sources of the ambiguous, bodily discomfort engendered in the spectator by Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999) and The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001). The reactions of discomfort to these films seem to be symptomatic of a not entirely conscious rejoinder to the visual image. I suggest that such reactions indicate that the cinematic bodies touch the spectators on a bodily and psychical level, one that cannot be divided into mind and body but which must be considered embodied. As such, my argument addresses the visual and artistic representation of bodies, but it does so by going beyond traditional ways of 'interpreting the body' as object, seeking instead to investigate the very embodied processes of creating and acquiring this spectatorial knowledge.

Highlighting Racial Demonization in 3D Animated Films and Its Implications: A Semiotic Analysis of Frankenweenie

This article focuses on a semiotic analysis of Frankenweenie, one of Disney Picture’s 3D animated films. Anchored within the psychoanalytic film theory, the aim was to highlight how animated films, as colorful and comic as they are, can demonize a certain group of people. Studying how animated films can do this can lead to an important understanding because children’s exposure to modelled behavior on television and in movies has the potential to influence a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, cause victimization, alter their perceptions of reality, reinforce stereotypes and make them acquire such negative emotions as fear and anxiety, and behaviors like retaliation and passivity. The possibility of these adverse effects is even of greater concern in Africa and similar contexts which are at the receiving end of cultural products such as films that emanate from the West. The findings suggest that the negative portrayal of ‘people of color’ or other characters that represent them, by American film producers and directors seems to be a reoccurring phenomenon. Significantly, from an African perspective, this study corroborates scholars’ position that Disney has continued to portray ‘people of color’ negatively over the years.

Studija filma kroz prizmu psihoanalitičkog i analitičkog shvatanja umjetnosti i stvaralaštva

The field of our interest is psychology of art, that is, the united structural and functional aspects which deal with both the artist and the process of creating artwork, as well as with the very process of the reception of art and the process of its perception. Using the postulates of psychoanalytic and analytic theory, we present a case study - a film, through the prism of Freud and Jung. Psychoanalytic film theory (Freud) analyses the phenomenon of film with the emphasis on the personal and individual aspects of the creator, while analytic psychology (Jung) accentuates the archetypal approach to universality where the artwork is considered as a unique entity with the elements and patterns that can be found in other creative products. Comparing psychoanalytic and analytic approaches in interpreting art and film, a survey of basic terms is given in an attempt to determine, explain and interpret psychological process of the artist and artistic creation. Sublimation, catharsis and regression on the one side, to artistic sublimation, projective identification and reparation, including the concepts such autonomous complex, collective and personal unconscious. These are all the conceptual instruments used by theorists both in psychology and in art in order to better understand the process of creativity, art production and its reception.

Deconstructing Disney's divas: a critique of the singing princess as filmic trope

This article contributes to the discourse of the body and the voice in feminist psychoanalytic film theory by exploring the currently under-theorised notion of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds manifestation in Disney’s Singing Princess as filmic trope. Analyses of vocal musical coding follow her trajectory across 13 Disney princess films to reveal deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings, and why she sings. In this manner, it is argued, the Singing Princess gradually emerges from her genealogical roots as innamorata, a position of vocal corporealisationand diegetic confinement, to one wherein her voice assumes a position of authority over the narrative, and from one of absolute submissiveness and naïve obedience to a greatly enriched experience of her own subjectivity.

Deconstructing Disney’s divas: a critique of the singing princess as filmic trope

This article contributes to the discourse of the body and the voice in feminist psychoanalytic film theory by exploring the currently under-theorised notion of the singing body in particular, as this notion finds manifestation in Disney’s Singing Princess as filmic trope. Analyses of vocal musical coding follow her trajectory across 13 Disney princess films to reveal deeper insight into what she sings, how she sings, and why she sings. In this manner, it is argued, the Singing Princess gradually emerges from her genealogical roots as innamorata, a position of vocal corporealisation and diegetic confinement, to one wherein her voice assumes a position of authority over the narrative, and from one of absolute submissiveness and naive obedience to a greatly enriched experience of her own subjectivity.

Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, by Todd McGowan

Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game, by Todd McGowan