1. What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Psychoanalysis and Feminism I

2. Lecture structure 1. Cinema and the unconscious
2. The screen as mirror: Baudry
3. Feminism: Mulvey

3. Introduction
Whereas semiotic approaches focused on cinema’s relationship to language, psychoanalytic approaches explored cinema’s relationship to the mind, especially the unconscious.

4. Lacan combined Freudian psychoanalysis with Saussurean linguistics, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language.

6. 1. Cinema and the unconscious

8. Cinema as dream
‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ (Freud, cited in Viki Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 6)
‘Cinema is something like the royal road to the cultural unconscious; it takes up the place occupied by the dream in Freud’s classic account of psychoanalytic interpretation’ (Lebeau, ibid.)

9. Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1944)

10. 2. The screen as mirror: Baudry
Psychoanalytic theorists compared the cinema screen to a mirror (dominant approach from mid-1960s to mid-1980s).

11. Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’
Between the ages of 6 and 18 months, children begin to develop a sense of themselves as distinct from other people
A split occurs between the child’s sense of his or her own body and the imaginary sense of self as unified and perfect that he or she gleans from reflected images.

12. Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’ (1970)
Projector, darkened theatre and screen reconstruct the child’s encounter with the mirror.
‘This psychological phase […] generates via the mirror image of a unified body the constitution or at least the first sketches of the “I”’.
Limited mobility
Visual encounter
Images constitute us as an imaginary unity.

13. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)

14. 3. Feminism: Mulvey Visual pleasure is gendered
‘mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order’ (‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975))

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

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

17. ‘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.

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

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

21. 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).

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