Academic literature on the topic 'Psychoanalytical film theory'
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Journal articles on the topic "Psychoanalytical film theory"
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WHITE, DANIEL. "One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor." Music, Sound, and the Moving Image: Volume 14, Issue 2 14, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 93–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2020.7.
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The opening sequences of narrative films are perhaps the most important moments for establishing a coherent film-world and drawing a viewer into a space and time often quite different from their own, and yet these moments remain largely untheorised within film studies and film music theory in particular. This article analyses the uses of music and sound in the opening sequences of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth trilogies: The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) and The Hobbit (2009-2011). The paratextual nature of opening sequences might lead us to understand them as theoretical gateways or airlocks, but it is the psychoanalytical concept of suture that proves most effective in theorising music’s dual roles in drawing an audience into a film-world and simultaneously building that world around them. This paper’s motivic and harmonic investigation draws particularly on Scott Murphy’s theories of transformational analysis to understand the different ways that musical language can be established as a form of cinematic suture.
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Musante, Dewey. "Objet A(ffect) and Che(www) Vuoi." Screen Bodies 2, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 25–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/screen.2017.020203.
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Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon (2014) and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Spring (2015) initially seem like two horror films birthed in the spirit of classical psychoanalytic film criticism. They deal with a monstrous female, a fearful, castrated male, and the “otherness” of sexual relationships. Through a close analysis of each film, however, I suggest in the following that both films “think” through problems of the gendered other, sexual politics, and cinematic affect outside the bounds of contemporary psychoanalytic or affect theory. By suggesting and analyzing two neologisms that blend the insights of psychoanalytic and affective film theory—objet a(ffect) and che(www) vuoi—I argue that both films not only complicate typical readings of horror films “about” gender and sex, but that each film performs its own type of philosophical thought about gender and “otherness” through its very form and content.
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Budzowska, Małgorzata. "In the Universe of Cassandra: The Ancient Topos of Clairvoyance in the Futuristic World of Minority Report (2002)." Text Matters, no. 10 (November 24, 2020): 151–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.10.09.
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The figure of Cassandra is well-known from numerous representations in ancient and modern literature as an archetype of a woman who has the power to see the future, but whose visions are not believed. In ancient Greek literature, Cassandra was an important character serving as a prophet of an approaching catastrophe. In her modern adaptations, this figure became a metaphor in psychoanalytical research on human moral behaviour (Melanie Klein and the Cassandra complex) developed in feminist writing. Cassandra has also been of interest to filmmakers, with perhaps the best adaptation of the subject of Cassandra’s clairvoyance being Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report. Loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story The Minority Report, the plot presents a version of the Cassandra myth, in which a woman together with male twins operate as a group mind to predict future crimes. Their visions are used by the state to prevent the crimes and imprison the would-be criminals. This article offers a thorough analysis of all the ancient and modern features of the metaphor of Cassandra employed in this movie within the overarching framework of the central theme of free will vs. determinism. According to this approach, the central theme is examined with reference to ancient Aristotelian and Stoic moral philosophy, the modern feminist psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein, and the political philosophy and legal issues in the post-9/11 world.
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Jung, Kyunghoon, Ba-ro Kim, Minkyu Kim, Jungsik Park, YeiBeech Jang, and Woobin Im. "Film Reception and Dominant Desire: A Study on the Reception of Roaring Currents with Psychoanalytic Text-Mining." Criticism and Theory Society of Korea 22, no. 2 (June 30, 2017): 85–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.19116/theory.2017.22.2.85.
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Herges, Katja. "Body Fluids and Fluid Bodies: Trans-Corporeal Connections in Contemporary German Narratives of Illness." Humanities 8, no. 1 (March 12, 2019): 55. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h8010055.
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Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to the ideal of the closed and clean organism without leakage of fluids. In contrast, psychoanalytical feminist body theory by Julia Kristeva (1982), Elisabeth Grosz (1989) and Margrit Shildrick (1999) has deconstructed the abject body and its fluids in Western culture and medicine. While postmodern feminism has often focused on discourses about bodies and illness to the neglect of their materiality, more recently, material feminism has drawn particular attention to lived material bodies with fluid boundaries and evolving corporeal practices (Alaimo and Hekman 2007). Stacy Alaimo has developed a model of the trans-corporeal body that is connected with the environment through fluid boundaries and exchanges (2010, 2012). Influenced by these trends in feminist body theory, illness narratives, often based on autobiographical experiences of female patients or their caregivers, have increased in recent decades in the West (Lorde 1980; Mairs 1996; Stefan 2007; Schmidt 2009; Hustvedt 2010). Such narratives often describe explicitly the material and affective aspects of intimate bodily experiences. In this article, I analyze two German quest illness narratives: Charlotte Roche’s pop novel Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Detlev Buck’s German-Cambodian film Same Same But Different (2010) that is based on the memoir Wohin Du auch gehst by German journalist Benjamin Prüfer (2007). In both narratives, the protagonists and their partners struggle in their search for love and identity with illness or injury in relation to body fluids, including hemorrhoids and HIV. I argue that Feuchtgebiete and Same Same But Different not only critique medical and cultural discourses on body (fluids) and sexuality but also foreground a feminist trans-corporeal concept of the body and of body fluids that is open to fluid identities and material connections with the (global) environment. At the same time, the conventional and sentimental ending of these quest narratives undermines the possibilities of the trans-corporeal body and its fluid exchanges.
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Trinder, Stephen. "Capitalism with a Human Face: Neoliberal Ideology in Neill Blomkamp's District 9." Film-Philosophy 23, no. 1 (February 2019): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/film.2019.0095.
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This article analyses Neill Blomkamp's Academy Award-winning District 9 (2009) to investigate the extent to which popular cinema might support neoliberal ideological positions. It draws upon Slavoj Žižek's psychoanalytic theory of ideology to explore how far anti-capitalist and anti-colonial tendencies in the film should be regarded as an “unconscious fantasy” (1989, p.30) that works towards reinforcing key aspects of neoliberalism. Through an exploration of private military contractor Multinational United (MNU), lead protagonist Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), and the film's spatial composition, this article argues that District 9 works in support of neoliberalism by constructing a social reality that sidesteps genuine criticisms of neoliberalism's role in continued socio-economic marginalisation and ongoing human suffering. This is evident in hollow criticisms of corporate capitalism vis-à-vis MNU and ignorant misrepresentations of the alien Other, which reinforce discourses of cultural and ethnic superiority associated with neoliberalism.
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Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. "Touch as Proximate Distance: Post-Phenomenological Ethics in the Cinema of Isabel Coixet." Film-Philosophy 24, no. 1 (February 2020): 22–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/film.2020.0127.
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In the wake of paradigm-shifting works on cinematic affect over the last few decades that have challenged psychoanalytically based gaze theory, embodied perception and sensory-affective experience have become fundamental concepts in much of contemporary screen studies. Even though the proponents of the affective turn in film studies present diverse theoretical approaches to affect – from Deleuzian “haptic visuality” to phenomenologically informed film theory – it seems evident that they all draw, to a greater or lesser degree, on the sense of touch as the affective axis of perception. Conceptualized this way, the sense of touch facilitates a mode of mutual embodiment between the viewer and the film image, a relationship based on immediacy and exchange, which, according to some of the approaches to cinematic affect, might also translate into a particular ethical position of embracing and opening up to the world and to the Other. The cinema of Isabel Coixet seems to exemplify these claims. Her oeuvre, as I shall illustrate, is often discussed in terms of intimacy, encounter and reciprocity, as well as the sensuous visual and sonorous textures which compose her films. Nevertheless, in this article I will suggest that Coixet evinces a much more ambiguous attitude towards touch, which often goes beyond the prevalent models of haptic visuality or embodied perception as conceptualized in phenomenological film theory. Drawing on Laura McMahon, I seek to interrogate the concept of touch by engaging with Jean-Luc Nancy's anti-ocularcentric, post-phenomenological reflections on community, offering an analysis of three films produced at different moments in Coixet's career – The Secret Life of Words (2005), Yesterday Never Ends (2013) and Endless Night (2015). The choice of works is dictated by their particular tactile aesthetics, as well as their explicit concern to go beyond the models of autonomous being towards an ethics of relationality between self and world, while being mindful of the limit as the very condition for its emergence.
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Uzuegbunam, Chikezie, and Chinedu Richard Ononiwu. "Highlighting Racial Demonization in 3D Animated Films and Its Implications: A Semiotic Analysis of Frankenweenie." Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations 20, no. 2 (July 1, 2018): 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.21018/rjcpr.2018.2.256.
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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.
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Turvey, Malcolm. "Introduction: A Return to Classical Film Theory?" October 148 (May 2014): 3–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/octo_e_00180.
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When cinema studies was institutionalized in the Anglo-American academy starting in the late 1960s, film scholars for the most part turned away from preexisting traditions of film theorizing in favor of new theories then becoming fashionable in the humanities, principally semiotics and psychoanalysis. Earlier, so-called “classical” film theories—by which I mean, very broadly, film theories produced before the advent of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theorizing in the late ′60s—were either ignored or rejected as naive and outmoded. Due to the influence of the Left on the first generation of film academics, some were even dismissed as “idealist” or in other ways politically compromised. There were, of course, some exceptions. The work of pre-WWII left-wing thinkers and filmmakers such as Benjamin, Kracauer, the Russian Formalists, Bakhtin, Vertov, and Eisenstein continued to be translated and debated, and, due principally to the efforts of Dudley Andrew, André Bazin's film theory remained central to the discipline, if only, for many, as something to be overcome rather than built upon. Translations of texts by Jean Epstein appeared in October and elsewhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Richard Abel's two-volume anthology, French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939 (1988), generated interest in French film theory before Bazin. But on the whole, classical film theory was rejected as a foundation for contemporary film theorizing, even by film theorists like Noël Carroll with no allegiance to semiotics and psychoanalysis.
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Nicholls, Mark. "Male Melancholia and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence." Film Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2004): 25–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2004.58.1.25.
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Abstract Through an analysis of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, this article proposes a psychoanalytically based theory of male melancholia. Grounded in the cultural ambiguities of loss and masculinity, melancholia is revealed as an essential tool for reading Scorsese's film and for understanding representations of male desire in the cinema.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Psychoanalytical film theory"
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Herlöfsson, Isabel. ""I chose not to choose life, I chose something else" : Film och droger: en tematisk fallstudie av spelfilmer med ett historiskt och psykoanalytiskt perspektiv." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för mediestudier, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-101144.
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Ever since the birth of the film medium, stories about drugs and addiction have been produced. There is a fascination with the lifestyle, the effects of drugs and the ways in which it can be portrayed on the screen. The thesis starts off by giving an historical context, ranging from the late 19th Century and up until today, describing how the society and the public have treated the subject and how the narrative mirrors these attitudes. The purpose of the thesis is to take a closer look at this recurrent theme. Eleven fictional films produced between the 1980’s and 2000’s have been chosen and psychoanalytical film theory is used to analyze the ways in which the addict is represented; how filmic disgust and the abject makes the characters tread over physical and social boundaries and how the effect of the drug have the character tread over mental boundaries through dreams and hallucinations.
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Coppel, Eva Parrondo. "Mapping textual surfaces : psychoanalytic theory, subjectivity, and 1940s Hollywood cinema." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.341714.
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Lapsley, Robert. "Where there is no path, only the travelling : psychoanalytic film theory after Deleuze." Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2018. http://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/622066/.
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The argument of this thesis is twofold. First that psychoanalysis, more specifically approaches inspired by the teaching of Jacques Lacan, can still be useful in thinking encounters with art and, in particular cinema. At the same time, it is acknowledged that psychoanalysis, in its existing forms has its limitations and it is claimed -this is the second argument - that if psychoanalysis is to be worthy of the event of art it should draw on sources beyond the psychoanalytic tradition, in this case, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The thesis falls into two parts. The first considers what psychoanalysis can still contribute. Chapter one assays existing psychoanalytic approaches to cinema, argues that fewer of those theories are outmoded than is currently assumed and seeks to retrieve what is of continuing value. Chapter two is the longest chapter and the heart of the thesis. In support of the contention that the work of Freud and Lacan is still of moment, it explores a series of new psychoanalytic approaches to film and literature which it is claimed do more justice to the event of art. The second part of the thesis considers how Lacan's teaching could be combined with the philosophy of Deleuze to develop these new approaches. Chapter three outlines the relevant aspects of Deleuze's philosophy to establish a framework for the subsequent discussion. Chapter four examines the degree of convergence between the two thinkers and proposes a division of labour: psychoanalysis for artworks which transform subjectivity and Deleuzean thought for those which depart it. Chapter five considers how Deleuze's cinema books point up the absence of any comparable creativity in psychoanalysis and what psychoanalytic film theory could learn from Deleuze's achievement.
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McDougald, Melanie. "Where I am, There (Sh)it will be: Queer Presence in Post Modern Horror Films." unrestricted, 2009. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07162009-154006/.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2009.Title from file title page. Margaret Mills Harper, committee chair; Calvin Thomas, Mary Hocks, committee members. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 14, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 47-48); filmography (p. 49-51).
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Henriquez-Mendoza, Juan Carlos. "The Belief System and the Pop-esoteric Wave: a Theory on the Operational Belief System." Thesis, Boston College, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/3321.
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Thesis advisor: Stephen PfohlThis work inquires about the subjectivity construction individuals perform in our contemporary media culture. It examines the structure of believing that can be inferred from the narrative elaboration of beliefs exerted in social conversations when pop-media related to spirituality or transcendency are used as inputs for conversation. For this purpose, I investigate the consumption of three films that triggered for their audiences intense controversies that included topics belonging to the blurry crossroad where spirituality, science, and religion intersect: What The Bleep do We (k)now!? (USA 2004), The Da Vinci Code (USA 2006), and The Passion of the Christ (USA 2004). My approach departs from the sociology of spirituality perspective, and draws on some insights developed by ritual studies, sociology of religion, social psychoanalysis, consumer studies, and visual studies. Based on a multi-method strategy of inquiry, formal film analysis, focus and discussion groups, and interview data collected from the audience, this dissertation finds that the burgeoning of a media driven popular culture spirituality in Mexico is creating a wave of Pop-Esotericism. As a rational narrative with consumption and conversational drives, Pop-Esotericism is not only a resonant media-reference, but also constitutes a pre-text in the construction of ephemeral and collective conversational spaces wherein the belief system is engaged and refurnished. To give a full account on the pop-esoteric phenomenon and on overall contemporary belief systems, I propose a theoretical model aimed to uncover the dynamics and strategies we engage to articulate spirituality, identity, and reality in our current global media context
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Sociology
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Starrs, D. Bruno. "Aural auteur : sound in the films of Rolf de Heer." Queensland University of Technology, 2009. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/29302/.
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An interpretative methodology for understanding meaning in cinema since the 1950s, auteur analysis is an approach to film studies in which an individual, usually the director, is studied as the author of her or his films. The principal argument of this thesis is that proponents of auteurism have privileged examination of the visual components in a film-maker’s body of work, neglecting the potentially significant role played by sound.
The thesis seeks to address this problematic imbalance by interrogating the creative use of sound in the films written and directed by Rolf de Heer, asking the question, “Does his use of sound make Rolf de Heer an aural auteur?” In so far as the term ‘aural’ encompasses everything in the film that is heard by the audience, the analysis seeks to discover if de Heer has, as Peter Wollen suggests of the auteur and her or his directing of the visual components (1968, 1972 and 1998), unconsciously left a detectable aural signature on his films.
The thesis delivers an innovative outcome by demonstrating that auteur analysis that goes beyond the mise-en-scène (i.e. visuals) is productive and worthwhile as an interpretive response to film. De Heer’s use of the aural point of view and binaural sound recording, his interest in providing a ‘voice’ for marginalised people, his self-penned song lyrics, his close and early collaboration with composer Graham Tardif and sound designer Jim Currie, his ‘hands-on’ approach to sound recording and sound editing and his predilection for making films about sound are all shown to be examples of de Heer’s aural auteurism.
As well as the three published (or accepted for publication) interviews with de Heer, Tardif and Currie, the dissertation consists of seven papers refereed and published (or accepted for publication) in journals and international conference proceedings, a literature review and a unifying essay. The papers presented are close textual analyses of de Heer’s films which, when considered as a whole, support the thesis’ overall argument and serve as a comprehensive auteur analysis, the first such sustained study of his work, and the first with an emphasis on the aural.
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Hayter, Tamiko Southcott. "Perverse pleasures: Spectatorship- The blair witch project." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/1799.
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Student Number : 9803476V -
MA research report -
School of Arts -
Faculty of HumanitiesBy drawing on contemporary scholarship that addresses spectatorship in the cinema generally, and in the horror genre specifically, I analyze the perverse pleasure afforded by The Blair Witch Project. To do this I argue that pleasure in horror is afforded through the masochistic positioning of the viewer, especially in relation to psychoanalytic theories surrounding gender in spectator positioning. I also look at the way the film re-deploys conventions, both documentary conceptions of the ‘real’, as well as generic expectations of horror, to activate the perverse pleasure of horror.
Books on the topic "Psychoanalytical film theory"
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rickels, laurence. Critique of Fantasy, Vol. 1: Between a Crypt and a Datemark. Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2020.
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Granados, Janice. 10 bud p̊a livet: En psykoanalytisk gennemgang af Kieslowski's "Dekalog"-film. [København?]: Borgen, 1994.
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Women and sado-masochistic tension in film and prime time television melodrama: An application of psychoanalytic film theory to television. Bethel, CT: Rutledge Books, 1996.
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The difficulty of difference: Psychoanalysis, sexual difference & film theory. New York: Routledge, 1991.
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Manning, Malcolm. Film and fantasy: A consideration of the importance of recent work in film theory based on the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy.... [Derby]: Derbyshire College of Higher Education, 1987.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0001.
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This introduction traces the book’s origins across three significant dialogical moments. First is the mediated moment of television producer Middleweek interviewing the 7/7 survivor Tulloch, followed by their intertextual engagement with two texts of intimacy, Chéreau’s film and Giddens’s book. Second is an interdisciplinary dialogue employing feminist mapping theory to forge a “bridging” and “rainbow” scholarship between disciplinary fields that provide ways of seeing real sex films, including risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical theory, and critical geopolitical theory, in combination with concepts of genre, authorship, production, stardom, social audience, and spectatorship. Third is a dialogue within theories of risk modernity exploring the tension between the “demand for constant emotional closeness” and the quest for “confluent love” in real sex film as the utopia and dystopia of love are played out through cinema.
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Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Rules of the Game. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015.
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McGowan, Todd. Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501304675.
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Halle, Randall. The Film Apparatus. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038457.003.0002.
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This chapter illustrates how the discussion of cinematic apparatus was international and in many instances foundational for the establishment of film studies as a discipline. Apparatus offered a means to consider precisely the study of film as more than formal analysis of the projected image; it sought to arrive at a more comprehensive discussion of cinema. The production of the image was understood not simply as an industrial tale, but as a matter of signification, social relations, modes of production, methods of projection, space of reception, and subjective effects on spectators. In the 1960s, the discourse on the apparatus was connected to the quest for revolutionary forms. By the 1980s, the debates regarding apparatus theory became bogged down by considerations of ideology and an overwhelming focus on psychoanalytic models.
Book chapters on the topic "Psychoanalytical film theory"
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Cooke, Jennifer. "Oedipus the Pharmakos and the Psychoanalytic Plague." In Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film, 73–96. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230235427_4.
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Thrower, Stephen. "Foreword." In The Descent, 7–8. Liverpool University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733711.003.0001.
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James Marriott’s close reading of Neil Marshall’s The Descent is a gem of accessible psychoanalytic film theory. Speaking as a reader of many texts on horror, it seems to me that psychoanalytical writing on the subject can often stray into aridity, dissertation-speak, convoluted argument and counter-argument and, worst of all, the dogmatic assertion of psychoanalysis as the primary index of truth. This book, however, is meticulous, open-minded and immensely readable. What distinguishes it is Marriott’s clarity of engagement and his readiness to acknowledge branching points of view. There is no need to worry here about abstruse jargon, or the tendency – endemic for a while in psychoanalytic treatises on horror – to neglect the film under discussion in favour of plucking at some ingrown Freudian hair....
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Hughes, Emily. "Psychoanalysis." In Studying Talk to Her, 75–90. Liverpool University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733438.003.0008.
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This chapter analyses Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002) using psychoanalytic film theory. Early psychoanalytic film theory invited the spectator to decode the unconscious of the film-maker, seeing film as a projection or expression of the film-maker's unconscious. For Almodóvar, this approach could be fruitful, as several people have claimed that Talk to Her is somewhat autobiographical. The second branch of psychoanalytic film theory focuses on characters and the audience's challenge and desire to analyse their unconscious motivations. Whilst this approach has been criticised, as arguably characters, by their very nature, are not real and thus have no unconscious, it can prove fruitful in an analysis of Talk to Her, particularly through the explicit references to psychiatry and Benigno's past. The third branch of psychoanalytic film theory is audience-centred, which sees characters' behaviours as being interpreted as explorations of the spectator's own unconscious. This approach is similarly interesting to consider due to the interesting position in which it places the spectator in relation to Benigno and the rape and forces the spectator to ask difficult questions.
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Murray, Terri. "Exploring the ‘Male Gaze’." In Studying Feminist Film Theory, 31–44. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781911325802.003.0002.
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This chapter discusses the three kinds of cinematic ‘look’ that Laura Mulvey associated with the ‘male gaze’. Mulvey's psychoanalytic examination of the pleasures generated by cinema included scopophilic, voyeuristic, and narcissistic pleasures. She argued that fetishistic scopophilia, unlike voyeurism, emphasises the physical beauty of the object. The object is transformed into something satisfying in itself, set apart from story and character involvement. This is illustrated with reference to Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) in Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932). Despite the story being about a woman and her predicament in patriarchal society, viewer identification is exclusively with male characters, and Helen is always an object for male spectators within the film and within the cinema. The chapter then contrasts von Sternberg with Mulvey's other key example, Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of merely presupposing male scopophilia/voyeurism, Hitchcock knowingly comments on these phenomena, making them the subject of his films. Though not mentioned by Mulvey, Psycho (1960) is offered as a case study in how the horror/slasher genre developed conventions that generated scopophilic and narcissistic pleasures for male viewers, perhaps catering to violent male fantasies.
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Marcus, Laura. "From The Grass is Singing to The Golden Notebook: Film, Literature and Psychoanalysis." In Doris Lessing and the Forming of History. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474414432.003.0007.
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This chapter discusses the place of cinema in Lessing’s early work, focusing in particular on The Golden Notebook (1962). Cinema first appears in Lessing’s work as a gendered site of communal spectatorship and distraction in The Grass is Singing (1950), in common with the work of other mid-century women writers such as Jean Rhys. But in The Golden Notebook, cinema and filmic consciousness increasingly acts as a privileged metaphor for the description of dreams and visions, influencing the novel’s striking descriptions of dreams and dreaming – a formal achievement of Lessing’s work often over-looked. This chapter suggests that this conflation of dreaming and cinematographic consciousness bears comparison with the work of psychoanalytic theorists such as Ella Freeman Sharpe, Bertram Lewin, and Didier Anzieu, and their concepts such as the ‘dream screen’ and ‘projection,’ and with the work of psychoanalytically-inflected feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey. Additionally, it explores the resonances of the descriptions of some of The Golden Notebooks imagined films with the techniques of postwar nouvelle vague directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni.
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Lie, Sulgi. "On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture." In Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema. Nieuwe Prinsengracht 89 1018 VR Amsterdam Nederland: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789462983632_ch04.
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With Kaja Silverman’s works, a reversal within Lacanian theory becomes abundantly clear that turns away from the old identification paradigm of imaginary misjudgement in the mirror stage. Following Lacan’s reformulation of the gaze as an “objet petit a,” the gaze is thought of as divided from the subject and placed on the side of the object. In the synthesis of Copjec’s/Žižek’s work with Michel Chion’s theories of voice and sound, my aim is to conceive of a fundamental acousmatics of film: not only the voice, but also the gaze in film is structurally acousmatic. In Lacan’s understanding, gaze and voice are strictly equivalent objects. As such, it is my intention to conceive of a political aesthetics from a psychoanalytic acousmatics of film. In the point-of-view paradoxes and transsubjective gazes in Rossellini’s and Antonioni’s post-neorealist films, I analyze the political and social dimension of this acousmatics.
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Blümlinger, Christa. "Psychoanalysis Discovers Film TheoryAnne Friedberg and Close Up." In The Moving Eye, 33–42. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190218430.003.0003.
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This chapter analyzes the contribution of Anne Friedberg to the rediscovery of the British journal Close Up, one of the first attempts to apply the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud to film theory. It explores the relationship of the Pool Group (Kenneth MacPherson, Winifred Bryher, and the poet H.D.), who edited the journal, to Freud’s ideas and to the literary and cinematic modernism of the 1920s, especially the German and Russian silent film traditions. The author presents the contribution of Anne Friedberg in introducing the psychoanalytic theorization of film in Close Up as a precursor to the later work of film scholar Christian Metz.
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Ramey, Mark. "Interpreting Fight Club." In Studying Fight Club, 67–99. Liverpool University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733551.003.0005.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter presents a theoretical interpretation of Fight Club (1999). The interpretation of a film text invariably relies on the application of theory. Theory acts as a set of spectacles: looking at the world through its lenses sharpens focus, magnifies detail, and clarifies understanding. Studying Fight Club has already referenced a number of possible theoretical positions, such as postmodernism and feminism. The chapter explores these and other interpretive positions in depth. These include auteur theory; moral panics and media effects theory; political theory; psychoanalytic theory; gender identity and gender relations; postmodernism; and Nietzsche and nihilism. Gender remains the most critically appraised aspect of Fight Club. The film clearly can be read as an exploration of male identity in crisis. Meanwhile, some feminist critics find the film misogynistic and others see it as a homoerotic text.
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Hughes, Emily. "Summary." In Studying Talk to Her, 137–38. Liverpool University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733438.003.0012.
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This chapter summarises the study of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). Talk to Her is a film that reflects the social and historical context of Spain and demonstrates many of Almodóvar's auteur characteristics. Its award-winning screenplay defies traditional conventions in genre and narrative structure whilst still creating something that is aesthetically pleasing and accessible to view. The interpretations cited in this book are not the only interpretations. This is a film which becomes richer through discussion and analysis and by approaching it from different critical approaches such as: auteur, genre, narrative, gender, and psychoanalytic film theory. Indeed, the film leaves the viewer with many interesting questions to consider. Ultimately, it is important to look at the film within the body of Almodóvar's work, particularly through exploring his depictions of rape.
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Ezra, Elizabeth, and Catherine Wheatley. "Introduction: foot notes." In Shoe Reels, 1–17. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474451406.003.0001.
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This chapter, written by the book’s editors, provides an introduction to the role of shoes in cinema, discussing the significance of shoes in terms of gender identity, sexuality, race, ethnicity and social class, through the lens of a range of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and historical approaches. It also presents an overview of the chapters in the book, which cover films in a variety of genres from around the world, and from the silent era to the present. The wearing of shoes, it is argued, tells us a great deal both about the wearer and about the time and place in which the shoes are worn—and there is no better medium than film in which to convey the myriad qualities of shoes, which have the capacity to be both very special and very ordinary.