Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 28, September 2003
Briana Berg
Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Figuration:
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: Cinema and
Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_ is a compilation of
essays by film theorists and psychoanalysts edited by Janet
Bergstrom. Contributors include Stephen Heath, Mary Ann
Doane, Marc Vernet, Slavoj Zizek, David James Fisher, Peter
Wollen, Janet Walker, Alain de Mijolla, Ayako Saito, Joan
Copjec, and Janet Bergstrom. Film theory and psychoanalysis,
Bergstrom writes, share an 'endless night' [1]
understood as a 'modality of timeless dark wandering', since
'both are drawn to the darkness in their quest for logics of
meaning' (1). The subtitle _Cinema and Psychoanalysis,
Parallel Histories_ originates from an identically named
1993 conference celebrating both fields' centenary
anniversaries. As the title itself suggests, cinema and
psychoanalysis have close historical paths, but the fact
that these are parallel also underlines the difficulty they
may have to meet. Indeed, the aim of the book is to
stimulate the communication between scholars in the field of
cinema and those in psychoanalysis, and, more specifically,
to attract psychoanalysts into the debate on
psychoanalytically informed film theory. Bergstrom writes in
her Introduction that this collection of essays also seeks
to testify to the evolution of psychoanalytic film theory
over the past 30 years, a topic that is explored at length
by Stephen Heath in the first essay. Moreover, she indicates
that _Endless Night_ serves as an update on what film
scholars are currently studying in this field. As such, the
book is clearly intended for an audience well versed in the
questions of 'cinema and psychoanalysis'; yet as it doesn't
include the basic information on the evolution of
psychoanalytic film theory, so it may be necessary for
newcomers and psychoanalysts who are not familiar with the
field to read up on this topic. This could make Bergstrom's
purpose to involve psychoanalysts into the debate on
psychoanalytic film theory more difficult. Up to now the interest in
the parallel histories of cinema and psychoanalysis has
mainly been one-sided, from cinema towards psychoanalysis,
as Stephen Heath points out in his essay, 'Cinema and
Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories'. _Endless Night_
highlights this asymmetry of interests, with only two out of
the 11 essays written by psychoanalysts, namely those by
David James Fisher and Alain de Mijolla, MD. The skepticism
from the psychoanalytic side stems from deep-seated
difficulties; as Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard point out,
'Clinical psychoanalysis
is anchored in the here-and-now phenomena of transference
and resistance and to the associations of a patient who
attempts to put aside his or her psychological censor and
say whatever comes to mind. Applied psychoanalysis runs the
risk of losing its way once the consulting room has been
left behind.' [2] For Bergstrom, the
difficulty arises from the fact that: 'The reasons
psychoanalysts reflect on the cinema are not the same as
those that motivate film theorists to draw on
psychoanalysis.' (1) For her 1990 anthology, _Psychoanalysis
and Cinema_, [3] E. Ann Kaplan compiled essays on
film that drew on psychoanalysis, and later edited special
issues on psychoanalytic film theory in a psychoanalytic
journal, in order to bring together the writings of film
theorists and psychoanalysts. Bergstrom points out that her
endeavor, and similar attempts, have 'not yet generated what
we might call a joint project or shared points of reference'
(5). In this sense, the 'endless night' also refers to the
lack of communication that has existed between these two
fields up until now. Like other books
displaying the wide-ranging title of 'cinema and
psychoanalysis', the problem encountered by _Endless Night_
is the following: in a field of such breadth, what questions
are being analyzed, and from what point of view or school of
thought? Such a book could expound on feminist
interpretations, spectatorship issues, Lacanian theory, or
on any given psychoanalytic concept such as the unconscious,
for example. The subtitle _Cinema and Psychoanalysis,
Parallel Histories_ implies that this book explores a
compound of history, cinema, psychoanalysis, and
psychoanalytically informed film theory -- or *cinema and
psychoanalysis* as Heath calls this particular conjunction
of disciplines. Still, the field's scope remains dauntingly
vast and the perspectives multifold: the histories of cinema
and psychoanalysis can be looked at as separate fields or
together, from the standpoint of historical evolution, of
theoretical development, of conceptual use, etc. Each
article in the book looks at one or the other aspect of
these varied topics, turning _Endless Night_ into an
eclectic collection of essays. Part of the problem stems
from the fact that psychoanalysis is split up into a variety
of different schools across the US and Europe. The same is
true for psychoanalytic film theory, which has integrated
such approaches as Italian semiotics, de Saussure's
linguistics, Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology,
Althusserian political ideology, and Lacanian post-Freudian
psychoanalysis. Bergstrom acknowledges the eclecticism of
_Endless Night_, pointing out in her Introduction that the
histories of cinema, psychoanalysis, and film theory should
act here as a backdrop to the texts; she even grants that
the theory discussed in these essays need not be restricted
to cinema, that it can stretch over to other fields, as we
will see is the case in Slavoj Zizek's essay. Categorizing the essays
into larger thematic topics, as E. Ann Kaplan does in
_Psychoanalysis and Cinema_, might help the reader get their
bearings. The pieces edited in _Endless Night_ roughly fit
into three main categories: those with a historical
viewpoint; studies on how Freud is (re)presented in films
and scripts; and psychoanalytic concepts applied to film (be
it one film, a series of films, or an author's entire
oeuvre). Bergstrom initiates the program in parallel
histories in her Introduction by summarizing an early
psychoanalytic movie, _Le Mystere des Roches de Kador_
(1912), by Leonce Perret. This motion picture is one of the
first to thread together the brand new sciences of cinema
and psychoanalysis, simultaneously using them to further the
plot and to explain how film works. The essays by Stephen
Heath: 'Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories', Mary
Ann Doane: 'Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey,
and the Cinema', and Marc Vernet: 'The Fetish in the Theory
and History of Cinema', can all be grouped into the first
category, which emphasizes the historical side of cinema's
and psychoanalysis's parallel histories. Stephen Heath's
fundamental essay, which shares its identity with the
volume's subtitle, explores how the concepts of
psychoanalytically informed film theory, especially those
inspired from Lacan, have evolved since this field of study
emerged in the 1970s -- a history in which Heath played an
important part. The concepts of suture and fetishism, Heath
states, have taken a back seat to those of real and symptom,
whereas the notion of fantasy is still being studied.
Looking back at film theory's evolution over the last two
decades, he contends that the theories expounded upon in the
era of the journal _Screen_, to which he contributed, narrow
the spectator-film relation down to the effects of
representation on the subject, 'effectively suturing cinema
into an ideology of the subject that takes little account of
the latter's constitution' (33). Heath maintains that
'*cinema and psychoanalysis* involves the specificity of
psychoanalysis in a way that equally reconceives it, and the
same holds in reverse for the cinema, reconceived by the
psychoanalytic theory and concepts with which it is newly
posed' (34). In this, Heath holds true to his earlier
approach on the analysis of film, which Nicolas Tredell
defines in this manner: 'In a sense, one of the
results of Heath's approach is to free a specific film text
from being merely the exemplification of a set of codes and
to allow it to be addressed in its particularity -- not a
particularity that is wholly free of pre-existing codes, but
not one that is wholly determined by them.'
[4] Heath believes the risk,
in *cinema and psychoanalysis*, to be that 'psychoanalysis
*fits* a cinema culturally permeated by psychoanalytic
awareness developed in societies in which psychoanalysis
itself developed (the parallel histories precisely)' (36).
Psychoanalysis should remain a tool used to expand cinematic
representation, not to demonstrate psychoanalytic concepts.
Heath sees the work of Slavoj Zizek as creating such new
perspectives in the field of *cinema and psychoanalysis*:
'Cinema translates psychoanalysis but also confronts it:
film with Zizek -- or rather *Zizek-film*, the particular
new conjunction he makes out of cinema and psychoanalysis
--realizes the unrepresentable, pushes on screen what is
more than in representation, *gets it*.' (36-37) These comments show how
the questions central to Heath's text, 'what should film
analysis do and what does psychoanalysis have to do with
it?' (34), lead back to the roots of Freud's reticence on
this topic: the issue of figuration. Freud refused to lend
his name to _Secrets of a Soul_, [5] the first movie
about psychoanalysis on which his followers, Karl Abraham
and Hanns Sachs, were collaborating. He rejected the idea
that the psychoanalytic process could ever be represented
without simplifying the psychoanalytic endeavor: 'the
unconscious does not present itself to be seen; the image
does not receive the unconscious'. [6] The question
of the figuration of psychoanalysis as a science or a
therapeutic practice is still at the basis of
psychoanalysts' distrust of cinema. For Heath, figuration is
fundamental to any theorization of *cinema and
psychoanalysis*. The risk of simplification runs on both
sides: for Heath psychoanalytic film theory has also
created, in turn, 'its own likenesses of
cinema as essence (the imaginary signifier, the apparatus
theory); as play of signifiers (available for 'filmanalytic'
interpretation); as reflection (mode of translation,
theoretical display) . . . the more psychoanalysis satisfies
its conditions of psychoanalytic representability, the
further it gets from cinema's questions of psychoanalysis'
(49). Whereas Heath's essay
looks back at the past, Slavoj Zizek's 'Cyberspace, or the
Unbearable Closure of Being' starts in the present and
delves into the future. Zizek draws mainly on Lacanian and
philosophical theory to explore the relationship between the
fantasmatic real and reality through virtual reality (VR),
questioning how cyberspace will affect our lives and more
specifically our self. VR's frame is the interface of the
computer: 'The key to the status of VR is provided by the
difference between imitation and simulation: VR doesn't
*imitate* reality, it *simulates* it by way of generating
its semblance.' (100) Whereas imitation is based on reality,
simulation creates something that does not exist, thus
questioning the validity of reality. Zizek contends that VR
affects our experience of reality in three different ways:
within reality, we must differentiate what is natural from
what is artificial; then we must distinguish what is real
from that which is virtual; and finally, we must keep a grip
on self-identity, threatened by Multiple User Domains, which
enable the existence of multiple screen identities. All this
constitutes a threat to the boundaries between the inside
and the outside of the body, of the environment, and
ultimately, of the self. Zizek defines the
screen-personae of the Multiple Domain User (MUD) as 'the
figurations of my ideal ego' (111). MUD presents a splitting
of the self, a *decenterment* of the subject that can be
understood as the swinging back and forth between imaginary
and symbolic identity, that is between repressed traits of
the self and false traits which are 'a mask more real and
binding than the true face beneath it' (109). Zizek makes a
very interesting case here for a therapeutic use of VR,
although he does not address the question of the
psychoanalyst's function: repressed psychical material can
be externalized in order for us to work through it. Heath's
words about *Zizek-film* come to mind here, as this
exemplifies how Zizek turns the use of psychoanalytic film
theory around, using cinema (or rather, in this case, VR) to
address psychoanalytic issues or concepts. Zizek foresees two
responses to VR and the computerization of our modern world:
more *virtualization* or a return to Nature. He calls these
'opposed strategies for the disavowal of *splitting* between
what we call *reality* and the void of the Real filled by a
fantasmatic content' (115). But the imagination is stunted
by VR, which fills every gap, a frustration that reveals
man's need for a Master, one 'whose main role is to *state
the obvious*' (117). Because virtuality allows everything,
there is a need for such a *leader* to show us what we
desire. Cyberspace entails an end of limits, the possibility
of all choices. As such, it is its opposite, 'an unheard-of
imposition of radical closure' (120). How does such an essay,
compelling as it may be, further the theoretical questions
of *cinema and psychoanalysis*? How can one concretely
transpose Zizek's questioning to film? The issue of the
virtual arises in film with CGI (Computer Generated Images),
which leads back to the distinction between imitation and
simulation. But beyond that distinction, the issue really
boils down to the fact that film, even when it features
CGI-created environments and virtual characters, does not
possess the interactive characteristics of VR, which in turn
leads us back to film-spectator relation theories. A future,
more interactive development in the nature of film brings us
back to Zizek: we do not like *interactive* narrative, Zizek
contends, because of the excessive freedom it entails, which
leaves us frustrated. Virtuality's excess of liberty thus
leads back to the *unbearable closure of being*. It would
have been of particular interest had Zizek tackled this
question within the field of cinema. As it is, his text,
although very thought provoking, seems to be somewhat out of
place in this collection of essays, ill fitted to the
categories delineated above. Four essays, each one
considering Freud's image, be it in script or on film, make
up a second category: David James Fisher's 'Sartre's Freud:
Dimensions of Intersubjectivity in _The Freud Scenario_';
'Freud as Adventurer' by Peter Wollen; Janet Walker's
'Textual Trauma in _Kings Row_ and _Freud_'; and 'Freud and
the Psychoanalytic Situation on the Screen' by Alain de
Mijolla. It is interesting to note that the two essays
written by psychoanalysts (Fisher and de Mijolla) deal with
the question of how Freud is represented, be it in Sartre's
scripted vision, Huston's 1962 movie _Freud_, or other
fictional and non-fictional films. Whereas Freud was
concerned with the impossibility to represent the method he
created, his followers dwell on the modalities of Freud's
representation. Yet these concerns intersect at one point in
Alain de Mijolla's essay, in a fascinating development in
the issue of figuration. De Mijolla himself acknowledges
that: 'Nothing, in fact, is less cinematic [than the
psychoanalytic situation], because nothing is less
visual or less apt to provide the material for a dramatic
scene, except in rare moments.' (196-197) Yet he describes
_1919_, a somewhat obscure 1985 British film by Hugh Brody,
as being the 'only film, to my knowledge, that can give
analysts the feeling of an authentic perception of what
happens during the course of psychoanalytic therapy' (196).
This is perhaps made possible because of the fact that the
psychoanalytic situation is not represented frontally in
Brody's picture, but indirectly, through the fictive reunion
of two of Freud's former patients who reminisce about their
treatment and about the father of psychoanalysis through
flashbacks and old newsreels. The situation itself
replicates the therapeutic one, as 'both the patient and the
analyst pursue, in parallel, the evocation of someone who is
missing and around whom their conscious discourse is
organized as well as their silences and their unconscious
fantasies' (198). This is a clever way to represent, without
actually representing it, the 'absent third party' (198)
that is a *fantasmatic organizer*, something Freud had
thought was impossible. Once again, this shows, as Stephen
Heath emphasized in his essay, how the issue of figuration
appears to be the cornerstone of the parallel histories of
cinema and psychoanalysis, a thread leading through the
eclecticism of the essays collected in _Endless
Night_. Fisher's essay focuses on
Sartre between 1958 and 1960, when Sartre was writing the
script for Huston's film _Freud_, also known as _The Freud
Scenario_. This time marked a crucial change in the writer's
lifelong relation with psychoanalysis. In the two years he
worked on the Freud scenario, Sartre seemed to recognize
psychoanalytic notions (such as the Unconscious) that he
rejected before and after this unique time. Sartre's violent
subsequent refutation of psychoanalysis and of the Freud
scenario can account for the fact that this particular text
by Sartre is seldom studied. Fisher discusses Sartre's rare
ability to understand backgrounds other than his own, and
underlines three fundamental aspects in Freud's life that
the French writer emphasized in the script: the
turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism; Freud's intersubjective
method; and the father-son relationship. Fisher ties in
Freud's intersubjective developing of the psychoanalytic
cure with Sartre's writing of the scenario: 'In composing a
fictional biography of Freud, I believe that Sartre was
pursuing his own self-analysis and writing part of his own
autobiography.' (129) Yet Fisher never considers that
perhaps Sartre is working through his own father-son
relationship, in the same way Sartre shows Freud doing so in
the Freud scenario; many elements, such as Sartre's
ambivalence towards the father of psychoanalysis, his shift
from refuting to almost embracing psychoanalytic concepts,
only to reject psychoanalysis totally thereafter, and his
uncanny ability to understand Freud and his background, all
point toward this possibility. Janet Walker makes a
profoundly interesting analysis of the parallel between the
excision of incest from filmic material and its excision
from psychoanalytic theory, which leads to the emergence of
textual scars in film. In John Huston's _Freud_, as in
Freud's etiology of hysteria, references to the reality of
childhood seduction are eliminated, although there are many
cases in *real life* in which incest is in fact committed,
as statistics show. Textual scarring, writes Walker, serves
as 'a strategy to give covert expression to a deeply
troubling subject'. (172) The repressed topic resurfaces in
the intertext, the material surrounding the filmic text: the
various scripts for Huston's film _Freud_ show how the idea
of an actual incest was slowly removed from the text, and
was finally not to appear at all in the movie. This
repression from textual consciousness leads to dissociation,
or *textual trauma*: Walker shows how in another film, Sam
Wood's _Kings Row_, incest is simultaneously denied yet
still emerges sporadically. Walker offers a real
psychoanalytic understanding of the texts' substance, a
superb example of psychoanalysis as a tool to push the
cinematic envelope. As such, her essay reaches over into the
third group of essays. The third section
delineated in _Endless Night_ centers on psychoanalytic
concepts applied to film and includes the following pieces:
Ayako Saito's 'Hitchcock's Trilogy: A Logic of Mise en
Scene'; 'More! From Melodrama to Magnitude' by Joan Copjec;
and 'Chantal Akerman: Splitting' by Janet Bergstrom. From
the viewpoint of one who studies the *aesthetics* of cinema,
this last section stands out as the most inspiring of the
three categories delineated above. Copjec's essay offers an
in-depth analysis of the hysterical fantasy in _Stella
Dallas_ through free-indirect speech; Bergstrom's study of
Chantal Akerman's mother-daughter relationship from the
standpoint of Andre Green's essay on 'The Dead Mother'
provides an understanding of this filmmaker's oeuvre and of
her approach to film; Ayako Saito's 'Hitchcock's Trilogy: A
Logic of Mise en Scene' explores the concept of affect in
the cinematic text; this concept has not been studied much
in psychoanalytically informed film theory until now,
mainly, Saito contends, because of the emphasis put by the
Lacanian model on language and the gaze, and its dismissal
of affect as being too empirical. Saito defines affect as
'any kind of feeling or emotion *attached to ideas*' (202)
and related to the drives; affects are present not only in
the narrative, but also in its visual style and its overall
mood. Using the writings of French psychoanalyst Andre
Green, she analyzes the trilogy, _Vertigo_, _North by
Northwest_, and _Psycho_, as a textual whole on the basis of
three thoroughly researched psychopathological structures
with specific symptoms, defense mechanisms, and
configurations of affect: melancholia, mania, and
paranoia/schizophrenia. Looking for the text's affective
logic, Saito found a clinical and filmic continuity in the
progression from one state to the next, not only between the
films but within them as well: 'The apparently different
styles of the trilogy are inter- and intra-textually
connected, once we understand them in the light of an
underlying affective logic, namely the incorporation of a
loss which the subject is unable to recognize because it was
buried before being registered and thus its wound was unable
to heal.' (235) In each film, the mother
stands out as the unattainable object: the mad mother
Madeleine (Carlotta) in _Vertigo_; the phallic mother, Mrs
Thornhill, in _North by Northwest_; and the dead mother, Mrs
Bates, in _Psycho_: 'The secret fiction which runs through
the trilogy is a fiction of madness, haunted by the
mad/bad/dead mother, which transposes affect into rhythms,
signs, and forms, and from which different cinematic styles
are generated.' (235) Saito's approach opens new paths for
psychoanalytic film theory, not only because it takes into
account the oft-ignored question of affect, but also because
that very concept spans different aspects of cinematic
figuration: from the overall textual mood and on-screen
representation, to the use of camera techniques, character
portrayal, and dialogue. Looking at _Endless Night_
from the standpoint of its audience, one can say that this
book is clearly a collection of high caliber essays intended
for scholars with a good knowledge of cinema and
psychoanalysis. Most essays are written by academics who
have been studying the question of psychoanalytic film
theory since its inception in the 1970s and contributing to
its development. _Endless Night_ doesn't provide the
contents of past theorizing, which are simply compared to
what is being debated today. This entails that newcomers to
the field of *cinema and psychoanalysis* (including
psychoanalysts not familiar with these concepts) have to
read up on the basics of psychoanalytic film theory in
another anthology. Bergstrom does, however, supply a
succinct bibliography to that effect. The same stands true
for readers with no psychoanalytic knowledge in the field of
Lacanian theory. This being said, most of the essays,
especially those studying Freud's image on film and those
applying psychoanalytic concepts to the understanding of
cinematic texts, are readily understandable to readers with
psychoanalytic knowledge, given that they look into some
concepts within film theory. To those interested in the more
concrete aspects of *cinema and psychoanalysis*, the essays
dealing with psychoanalytic notions applied to film,
categorized in this review into the last section,
demonstrate new ways to work with *cinema and
psychoanalysis* and clearly stand out as the most inspiring
part of _Endless Night_. In my opinion, given the scope of
the field, it would have been easier for the reader to focus
on their main points of interest, browse through the book,
or apprehend it in its entirety, if the essays had been
split up into different sections. Without such a structure,
it is harder to draw ideas from _Endless Night_, which makes
a fascinating collection of essays appear somewhat disparate
at first reading. In my view, too many goals
are being pursued in this book, which can also account for
the book's eclecticism. Besides its main goal to appeal to
psychoanalysts, _Endless Night_ aims to provide scholars
with an update on the state of psychoanalytic film theory
and on 'the current form of [scholars'] engagement
with *psychoanalysis and cinema*' (2). This second objective
does not facilitate the first task of drawing psychoanalysts
into the debate, if they cannot fully understand the
concepts being discussed without some prior research.
Bergstrom puts yet another purpose forward, writing that
_Endless Night_ 'emphasizes the history of psychoanalytic
film theory' (4). She draws attention to the fact that the
evolution of psychoanalytically informed film theory
highlights a shift toward historical analysis, largely due
to new technology in film preservation and access to
information; this tendency has already been noted by Glen O.
Gabbard and Krin Gabbard, who write that 'debates over the
application of psychoanalysis to film study during the early
1990s took place at the same time that a number of scholars
moved away from film theory and toward more historical
and/or text-oriented work'. [7] _Endless Night_
succeeds, as Bergstrom points out, in demonstrating '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' (4). Geneva,
Switzerland Footnotes 1. The term 'endless
night' is taken from a line in Jim Jarmusch's _Dead Man_
(1995). 2. Glen O. Gabbard and
Krin Gabbard, _Psychiatry and the Cinema_, second ed.
(Washington, DC.: American Psychiatric Press, 1999), p. 202.
3. E. Ann Kaplan, ed.,
_Psychoanalysis and Cinema_ (New York: Routledge,
1990). 4. Nicolas Tredell, ed.,
_Cinemas of the Mind. A Critical History of Film Theory_
(Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), p. 152. 5. _Geheimnisse einer
Seele_, G.W. Pabst, 1926. 6. Sigmund Freud, quoted
by J-B. Pontalis, 'Preface', in Jean-Paul Sartre, _Le
Scenario Freud_ (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 21. 7. Gabbard and Gabbard,
_Psychiatry and the Cinema_, p. 198. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Briana Berg, 'Film Theory,
Psychoanalysis, and Figuration: On _Endless Night: Cinema
and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 7 no. 28, September 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n28berg>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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