Psychoanalyzing Cinema

Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the two: the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-siecle Paris, this study offers a detailed reading of the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory.

The essays within this collection explore the possibilities and potentialities of all three positions, presenting encounters that are, at times contradictory, at other times supportive, as well as complementary. The collection thereby enriches the questions that are being raised within contemporary cinematic studies.

These fifteen carefully chosen essays by well-known scholars demonstrate the vitality and variety of psychoanalytic film criticism, as well as the crucial role feminist theory has played in its development. Among the films discussed are Duel in the Sun, The Best Years of Our Lives, Three Faces of Eve, Tender is the Night, Pandora's Box, Secrets of the Soul, and the works of Jacques Tourneur (director of The Cat People and other features).

With readings of key `youth' films of the 1980s, this book expands the psychoanalytic framework within which current debates regarding fantasy and spectatorship have been taking place.

"... less about film than about the psychology of the viewing experience." --American Film Employing Freudian psychoanalysis, Christian Metz explores the nature of cinematic spectatorship and looks at the operations of meaning in the film text.

The "new" realism of Italian cinema after World War II represented and in many ways attempted to contain the turmoil of a society struggling to rid itself of Fascism while fighting off the threat of radical egalitarianism at the same time. In this boldly revisionist book, Vincent F. Rocchio combines Lacanian psychoanalysis with narratology and Marxist critical theory to examine the previously neglected relationship between Neorealist films and the historical spectators they address. Rocchio builds his analysis around case studies of the films Rome: Open City, Bicycle Thieves, La Terra Trema, Bitter Rice, and Senso. Through the lens of psychoanalysis, he challenges the traditional understanding of Neorealism as a progressive cinema and instead reveals the anxieties it encodes: a society in political turmoil, an economic system in collapse, and a national cinema in ruins; while war, occupation, collaboration, and retaliation remain a part of everyday life. These case studies demonstrate how Lacanian psychoanalysis can play a key role in analyzing the structure of cinematic discourse and its strategies of containment. As one of the first books outside of feminist film theory to bring the ideas of Lacan to theories of cinema, this book offers innovative methods that reinvigorate film analysis. Clear and detailed insights into both Italian culture and the films under investigation will make this engaging reading for anyone interested in film and cultural studies.

For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes. This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger. Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensable tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.

Only book that focuses on psychoanalysis and European Cinema As well as more academic essays the book contains transcriptions of informal discussions between experts and live audiences