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).

"... 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 Couch and the Silver Screen is a collection of original contributions which explore European cinema from psychoanalytic perspectives. Both classic and contemporary films are presented and analysed by a variety of authors, including leading cinema historians and theorists, psychoanalysts with a specific expertise in the interpretation of films, as well as the filmmakers themselves. This composite approach offers a fascinating insight into the world of cinema. The Couch and the Silver Screen is illustrated with stills throughout and Andrea Sabbadini's introduction provides a theoretical and historical context for the current state of psychoanalytic studies of films. The book is organised into four clear sections - Set and Stage, Working Through Trauma, Horror Perspectives and Documenting Internal Worlds - which form the basis for engaging chapters including: easily readable and jargon-free film reviews. essays on specific subjects such as perspectives on the horror film genre and adolescent development. transcripts of live debates among film directors including Bernardo Bertolucci, actors, critics and psychoanalysts discussing films. The cultural richness of the material presented, combined with the originality of multidisciplinary dialogues on European cinema, makes this book appealing not only to film buffs, but also to professionals, academics and students interested in the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the arts.

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.

Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis examines the theory and politics of representation in narrative film. Questioning current accounts of cinema's pleasures for men and women, Elizabeth Cowie draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan to propose a new understanding of the relation of identification, fantasy and the drives, and of voyeurism and fetishism to the pleasures of cinema and to the making of the feminine and masculine spectators of film.

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.