What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Psychoanalysis and Feminism I

Lecture structure 1. Cinema and the unconscious 2. The ‘cinematic mirror-screen’: Baudry 3. Film form and the patriarchal unconscious: Mulvey

1. Cinema and the unconscious In the 1970s, psychoanalytic approaches to the cinema explored how films position spectators and bring them pleasure.

‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ (Freud, cited in Vicky Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 6)

‘Cinema is something like the royal road to the cultural unconscious’ (Lebeau, ibid.)

2. The ‘cinematic mirror-screen’: Baudry The unconscious of the cinematic apparatus Context: May 1968

The return of the repressed in Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

Like Renaissance painting, cinema produces the transcendental subject (of Western bourgeois culture): a mastering vision.

Lacan: the ego is formed through the ‘drama’ of the ‘mirror stage’.

Baudry: cinema reconstructs the conditions of the mirror stage. The spectator identifies with the camera, which takes the place of the transcendental subject. ‘Just as the mirror assembles the fragmented body in a sort of imaginary integration of the self, the transcendental self unites the discontinuous fragments of phenomena, of lived experience, into unifying meaning’ (‘Ideological Effects’, p. 540)

But who is the subject?

3. Film form and the patriarchal unconscious: Mulvey Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to show how ‘the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’ (‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 198)

Two kinds of pleasure offered by mainstream film 1. Scopophilia: taking pleasure in looking at another person as an object.

2. Narcissism: fascination with images of ourselves, or people who seem like us. Linked to the mirror stage and identification.

‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure […].’ Men control the gaze and the narrative.

However, the female figure implies the threat of castration. Mainstream film offers the male unconscious two ways of escaping this: voyeurism and fetishism.

Voyeurism: investigating and demystifying the woman. Linked to sadism.

Fetishism: disavows castration by substituting a fetish object. A fetish is something in which a meaning and value are invested that exceed its actual meaning and value (Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, p. 122).

Mulvey: in Vertigo ‘the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination’.