Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 26, September 2003
Rebecca M. Gordon
Waiting for Dawn to Break:
On _Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_
_Endless
Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel
Histories_ Edited by Janet
Bergstrom Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999 ISBN 0-520-20747-5 (hbk);
0-520-20748-3 (pbk) 307 pp. _Endless Night_ developed
from a conference titled 'Cinema and Psychoanalysis:
Parallel Histories' that took place at UCLA in 1993. The
event brought together practicing psychoanalysts and film
theorists working from psychoanalytic perspectives in order
to provide a forum for the exchange of views between the two
disciplines. The aim was to see whether cinema and
psychoanalysis, having developed along parallel historical
lines, might be induced to 'speak' to one another; or even
better, inform one another conceptually. Alas, it did not
happen. As Bergstrom writes, 'one came away from the
conference with the strong impression of nonconvergence, on
the whole, [with] the sense that these 'parallel
histories' of cinema and of psychoanalysis were very far
apart indeed and were likely to remain so' (1). _Endless
Night_ seemed an apt name for the collection, explains
Bergstrom, since psychoanalysis and film theory are both
'drawn to the darkness in their quest for logics of meaning'
(1). The title also seems a bit hopeless, suggesting that
the dawn that failed to break over the course of the
conference might not come for some time. The lack of an easy
correspondence between these two disciplines, however,
compelled the conferences' contributors to confront blind
spots long ignored by psychoanalytic theorists. _Endless
Night_ thus emphasizes the history of psychoanalytic theory
and demonstrates not only that 'history' and 'theory' have a
strong bearing on each other, 'but that film theory must be
written with a strong sense of historical consciousness,
curiosity, and archeological craft' (4). The essays in this
collection are wide-ranging, and difficult to categorize.
The strongest and most interesting pay keen attention to
historical context and/or to the aims of clinical
psychoanalysis (that is, to an actual person's mental
well-being). As one would expect, the underlying philosophy
of the volume is based on a Continental critique of
epistemology and a familiar theory of the subject
constructed through language and dominant forms of
representation. In several of the essays, the authors
identify moments when absolute knowledge or mastery of a
situation is unavailable, because such perfection is
technologically, psychologically, or logically impossible.
More specifically, many of the essays demonstrate a
fascination with perception versus representation, and how
the gap between the two threatens 'truth' when the
perceptible is accidentally or purposefully elided in favor
of a less credible, but more desirable, representation.
Ironically, this problem was one Freud perceived in cinema
from the beginning. Stephen Heath's essay,
'Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories', opens the
collection and poses the volume's primary questions: What
should film analysis do and what does psychoanalysis have to
do with it? Encounters between the two disciplines have
historically failed because each has explored the other
reductively. Critiquing the imprecise, repetitive nature of
much psychoanalytic film writing, Heath situates film
studies' appropriation of psychoanalysis in the 1970s as a
political manoeuvre that no longer produces new ideas.
Psychoanalysis itself, however, has also 'resisted' cinema
at the expense of gaining insight into its own practices
(27, 35-36). From its earliest days, cinema's appeal as an
analogy for mental processes concerned psychoanalysts who
perceived that cinema could seriously misrepresent the
analytic situation, and in turn misconstrue the aims of
psychoanalysis; hence, a tradition of disdain for cinema. If
the relationship between 'cinema and psychoanalysis' is to
be something more than a missed encounter, Heath argues,
then just as film theorists must re-evaluate their 'use' of
psychoanalysis, so psychoanalysts ought to consider more
carefully the way film functions in the analytic session,
for cinema is part of the sociality that creates the patient
on the couch. Such 'mid-range' questions deserve inquiry,
and the resulting work would be quite different from the
psychoanalytic film studies we currently
recognize. Mary Ann Doane approaches
'cinema and psychoanalysis' historically, investigating the
importance of 'time' to both. Doane describes how, at the
turn of the century, new recording technologies (cinema,
phonograph) held out the promise of preserving and
representing time in an undifferentiated flow of images and
sounds. This ability threatened not only sensory overload
but the banalization of meaning itself, for which of these
moments ought to be 'stored' or remembered? Doane compares
Freud's description of the unconscious as a 'Mystic Writing
Pad', a perfect repository for memory, with Etienne-Jules
Marey's attempts to photograph movement, as two efforts to
control the problem of representing and storing 'time'. She
further theorizes that cinema's turn to narrative was in
part an attempt to structure time and retrieve meaning from
total representation (84). Doane's essay is ultimately about
'the subject' -- in particular the subject's anxiety in the
face of an ongoing archivalization of life. 'The subject' also
figures, though less historically, in essays by Marc Vernet
and Slavoj Zizek. Vernet, as director of the Bibliotheque du
Film, is, like Doane, fascinated by storage, memory, and the
archive. Untroubled by the subject's anxiety, however,
Vernet's essay emphasizes the fetishistic pleasure inherent
in the film researcher's quest for 'the real thing'. Zizek's
essay, definitely the most theoretically dense of the
collection, celebrates the 'pure subjectlessness' offered by
Virtual Reality. As Heath states in his own essay, this is
brilliant as a performance of 'Zizek' but does little to
clarify connections between cinema and
psychoanalysis. David James Fisher's and
Peter Wollen's articles investigate the creative context of
John Huston's _Freud_ (1962) and Jean-Paul Sartre's
screenplay for the film. Fisher relates how, in the course
of researching the script, Sartre became aware of Freud's
struggle against Viennese anti-Semitism, his discovery of
the intersubjective relationship between analyst and
analysand, and his bond with his father. Fisher further
suggests that Sartre's philosophical need to understand 'the
other' -- here, Freud -- led him to write a script that
demonstrates a combination of theoretical and practical
work, namely Sartrean dialectical analysis and Freudian
psychoanalytic intersubjectivity (150). Peter Wollen, using
a rich array of letters and other documents, discovers that
Freud, Sartre, and Huston shared a parallel fascination with
adventure, and a parallel hostility toward 'the paternal
bond'. Wollen argues that 'Freud as adventurer' is the Freud
that attracted both Sartre and Huston. That same desire to
see themselves as adventurers unburdened by filial piety,
however, led Sartre and Huston to distort their evidence in
order to retain Freud as a filmic hero. The essays by Copjec,
Bergstrom, Walker, and Saito offer textual analyses of
specific films in order to explain how cinematic genres or
structures can be understood in psychoanalytic terms. They
are the most 'traditional' examples of psychoanalytic film
studies in the volume, but Bergstrom's and Walker's essays
move beyond theory to consider the real consequences of
psychic trauma and the ways it is, or isn't, depicted on the
screen. Concerned above all with
psychoanalysis's emphasis on sexual difference, Copjec moves
rather sweepingly from eighteenth-century discourse on
sensibility to 1940s women's films, arguing that melodrama
operates structurally as a feminine mode of discourse,
creating an indeterminate reality 'not constructed through
the imposition of a limit' (257). She offers an
interpretation of _Stella Dallas_, a film open to
conflicting feminist readings, that considers the
possibility of a woman (Stella) belonging to and knowing
herself as belonging to, the society she has helped create,
as opposed to being hysterically separated from
it. Walker and Bergstrom are
likewise concerned about sexual difference and
psychoanalysis, but more than the other contributors to the
volume, they are also interested in the ways that a film's
structure can reveal or conceal instances of psychic trauma.
The operations of personal or institutional censorship, they
suggest, can trouble not only the depiction but possibly the
treatment of psychic trauma in real life. Bergstrom's essay
focuses on Chantal Akerman's films. She suggests that their
singular style expresses Akerman's experience of being the
child of Holocaust survivors. Though Akerman avoids speaking
about her personal experience -- as does her mother --
Bergstrom finds multiple instances of miscommunication
between mothers and children in Akerman's films, which echo
both the autobiographical moments Akerman *has* discussed
publicly, and psychoanalyst Andre Green's description of the
'dead mother' phenomenon. Janet Walker argues that Freud's
repudiation of seduction theory as a way to account for his
patients' tales of childhood sexual abuse has haunted the
way psychoanalysis -- and Hollywood -- approach incest.
Using theories of dissociation, Walker traces the way incest
was repressed from the final versions John Huston's _Freud_
and the Warner Brothers film _King's Row_ (1942) but still
exists, displaced, in screenplay drafts, movie trailers, and
censorship documents. Such dislocations are important to
Walker because they demonstrate how incest can be invoked or
suggested by a text, or otherwise remain 'present' without
being demonstrated directly. In Walker's view, the body of
'incest survivor' literature that emerged in the 1980s was
received in psychoanalytic circles and in the popular press
as a crisis of 'false memory' in part because no viable
psychoanalytic theory of childhood sexual trauma existed to
account for it otherwise. In essence, Freud's insistence on
fantasy seems to have contributed to the repression of
incest as a reality. Ayako Saito's essay on
Hitchcock's 'trilogy' -- Vertigo_ (1958), _North by
Northwest_ (1959), and _Psycho_ (1960) -- is the most
traditional 'applied theory' essay in the volume, examining
the psychopathological structures of affect inherent in the
films' styles. Saito attempts to analyze the trilogy's
affective structures as distinct from the affective
responses of spectators, but part of why these films'
affective structures can be distinguished at all is because
the films evoke these same affects in their audiences --
and, as Saito herself suggests, were deliberately intended
to do so (201). To some extent Saito positions herself as
both analyst and ideal spectator, unwittingly performing
some of the problems of transference. The essay would
perhaps be more persuasive if the slipperiness of these
distinctions were acknowledged further, and if Saito had
considered recent cognitive and philosophical inquiries into
emotion/affect, the better to clarify her reasons for
remaining within a psychoanalytic paradigm. (Though Saito
turns to Andre Green's work for a meatier discussion of
affect than Lacan provides, Green was himself trained as a
Lacanian.) Nonetheless, by addressing affect, Saito also
specifically critiques psychoanalytic film theory's emphasis
on language and the gaze at the expense of other questions,
laying open a part of the history of psychoanalysis that was
long ignored because it *didn't* fit the Lacanian
paradigm. Significantly, the
conference that gave rise to this volume took place two
years before the conference that led to Bordwell and
Carroll's _Post-Theory_, showing that film theorists
committed to psychoanalysis were cognizant of the problems
inherent in this approach to film well before anthologies of
'alternative' approaches became commonplace (_Post-Theory_,
_Passionate Views_, _Film Theory and Philosophy_, etc).
Though many of the essays in _Endless Night_ do participate
in the kind of messy Continental philosophizing that film
scholars have been critiquing for some time, the book also
demonstrates a serious attempt by psychoanalytic film
theorists to confront the blind spots and limitations of
their own theoretical history, something that 'cognitivists'
will likely find themselves doing someday as cognitive
science, philosophy, and psychology continue to pursue
questions of affect, emotion, embodied memory, and
empathy. Bergstrom claims that the
consequences of this work do not necessarily hold only for
film, 'rather, they provide a firm grounding from which
those reflecting on other media or in other disciplines may
take measure of how any number of issues raised in these
pages might translate to their own spheres of activity' (5).
This seems dangerously broad, and an effect of the way the
original conference managed not to converge into clearer
lines of thought. The statement also seems to indicate a
desire on the part of academics steeped in the
narrative-rich fields of cinema and psychoanalysis to come
to 'An Answer', and ignore the lesson of psychoanalysis:
that analysis is interminable. (It remains unclear to me,
exactly, what the conference was intended to do for
psychoanalysts; the volume itself is more heavily populated
by articles by cultural and film theorists than practicing
psychoanalysts). Of course, psychoanalysis
is by no means dependent upon cinema, and neither are film
theory nor film studies dependent upon psychoanalysis. What
this volume makes evident is that psychoanalytic film theory
and psychoanalysis, which do share a history of theory, each
also have 'unfinished business' in their theoretical pasts,
which makes further historical, or 'archaeological' research
an interesting prospect. Whether we would still call such
work 'psychoanalytic film studies', however, is
debatable. Bloomington, Indiana,
USA Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Rebecca M. Gordon,
'Waiting for Dawn to Break: On _Endless Night: Cinema and
Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 7 no. 26, September 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n26gordon>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
salon, and receive the journal articles via email as they
are published. here
Save as Plain Text Document...Print...Read...Recycle
Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615)
PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England
Contact: editor@film-philosophy.com
Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage
