Was there a recent article on the work of Krystof Kieslovsky?  I think
I missed that issue and was wondering if you could send me a copy?

Thanks -
Nancy Mockros

[log in to unmask] wrote:


>.:,
>.', :. .
>.. , ..' : ..
>.. '. .. ,. ..: ..
>.. .:   .'..  ,. . ... F I L M - P H I L O S O P H Y
>.   ' ...,...  . . .:. . .
>. .. .  :   ...   .'..  ..,.. ISSN 1466-4615
>. ., .  . :...  . .   '.. Journal : Salon : Portal
>. .'.  ,  : ..... . PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD
>.  .:..'...,.   . http://www.film-philosophy.com
>.. :.,.. '....
>....:,. '. vol. 7 no. 27, September 2003
>.' :. .
>.,'
>
>
>
>Jamie Clarke
>
>The Parallax Review:
>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.
>
>The volume of essays _Endless Night_ was born out of a conference
entitled 'Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Parallel Histories' at UCLA in
November 1993. The conference was designed to mark the hundred year
anniversaries of the two pursuits, and to bring together film scholars
and practising psychoanalysts in order to rub the two historical lines
together and spark debate in what has been increasingly considered a
somewhat beleaguered enterprise. Yet as Janet Bergstrom admits, in her
excellent Introduction, the conference itself provoked an overriding
sense of non-convergence, with the understanding that 'the reasons that
psychoanalysts reflect on the cinema are not the same as those that
motivate film theorists to draw on psychoanalysis' (1). However, it is
Bergstrom's consideration that this very incompatibility need not be
experienced as a catastrophe, but moreover signals that this particular
area remains a fecund zone for research. It is in this context that
_Endless Night_ surfaces with 'unfinished business' (2), as Bergstrom
puts it, not so much like the traumatic return of the repressed, but in
a more modest fashion as a further specialised sector of film enquiry
rendered more fireproof from its engagement with the clinical
extra-academic community.
>
>Bergstrom details that psychoanalytic film theory 'has renewed itself
over time and remains one of the most vital areas within contemporary
film theory' (2). This assertion seems to me to require unpacking.
Cine-psychoanalysis, throughout the 1970s the hegemonic school
alongside Althusserian Marxism, has come under a sustained attack from
more historically sensitive, social science inspired paradigms of film
analysis, most notably cultural studies and more recently the cognitive
psychological approaches of 'Post-Theory'. In parallel, clinical
psychoanalysis has been overtaken by behavioural psychology and
pharmo-therapy. The renewals and evolutions within film studies and
psychoanalysis in this context are, as much as anything, a response to
fighting a rearguard action against more normative approaches, and I
would argue that the consensus now is that the psychoanalytic paradigm
is largely residual. As a consequence of these countervailing
tendencies, there is something of a splintered and uncertain focus to
the volume with a number of the contributions ruminating on the
collapse of the cine-psychoanalytic paradigm; a number providing close
readings of specific texts using psychoanalysis as a decoding
instrument; a handful speculating on Freudian psychoanalysis's
(coincident?) historical interrelationship with (or as it turns out
non-convergence with, or outright avoidance of) the historical
development of cinematic technologies; and finally, Slavoj Zizek's
article that surpasses the properly cinematic paradigm in an analysis
of the new cyber-subject, with its ramifications for the hard-shelled,
corn fed Oedipal subject presupposed by the Classical cinema. I shall
take each of these on their own terms.
>
>Zizek's 'Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Closure of Being' involves a
complex and theoretically dense analysis of the effects of digital
technologies and virtual reality on subjectivity, that hinges on the
exchange of imitation for simulation. Zizek revisits a series of
philosophical commonplaces from Plato's cave, through Hegel's
suprasensible effect, to Lacan's theory of anamorphia, to argue that
these produce an interface between 'himself and his raw natural
environs' (99). However, Zizek repudiates the proto-Baudrillard
argument that this condemns the subject to a relativisitic nihilism by
stipulating that this effect is not accelerating but is rather a
trans-historical effect of all technologies. In this respect his
position is closer to Derrida's than he himself often allows, whereby,
'there is no Spirit without Spirits, no pure spiritual universe of
Ideas without the obscene' (99). Where Zizek claims to differ from
deconstruction is in his argument that simulation, by drawing attention
to its own computated reality effect, demonstrates more effectively the
plastic and contingent nature of reality itself. This then prompts
Zizek to reject both the referential argument (of some stable support
in reality) for representation, and the converse understanding that
there is no external reality beyond the stream of simulacra. For Zizek
acknowledgment of this essential, mediatory, phantasmatic support is
then the route to '('dialectical') materialism' (99) and the early
Marxist understanding that the sensory ecology is programmable.
>
>However, whilst Zizek's ability to navigate between popular culture and
high-flown theory and philosophy often results in unexpected insights,
there persists the impression that his analysis can become a little too
free-wheeling, and Zizek himself a little too enamoured with his own
somersaulting rhetorical argumentation. There can be little doubt that
Zizek has a exemplary understanding of the intricacies of Lacanian
theory, not to mention enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophy,
however these are mostly deployed as explanatory ends in themselves and
their convergence (to use Bergstrom's term) with the cinematic or
digital technology as an historical fact is often sidelined. For
instance, Zizek's analysis of the cyber-subject does not immerse itself
in the harsh realities of the actual production of digital technologies
nor the super-accumulation, consolidation, and monopolisation of the
likes of Microsoft and AOL Time Warner. In this sense his claims to a
dialectical materialism are somewhat idealist, even superstructural.
Indeed, Zizek seems to bang these types of analysis out at will and
regular readers of his now prolific output will no doubt recognise some
of the themes that I have outlined above.
>
>A similar problem stymies the text-centred analyses in the volume, for
instance Joan Copjec's contribution on melodrama. Indeed Copjec is
often positioned alongside Zizek as providing the most sustained
commitment to contemporary cine-psychoanalysis as a paradigm for making
meaning. Copjec's avowedly contentious argument is that 'crying was an
invention of the late eighteenth century' (249). To substantiate this
claim Copjec relies on the creation of a new type of space, namely
public space, that did not allow the specific particularities of the
cogito to be effectively symbolised. There does seem to be an
unacknowledged debt here to the more historically sensitive work of the
late Frankfurt School on the public sphere, represented by Oskar Negt
and Alexander Kluge, and the more recent adaptation of the model by
Miriam Hansen. In this respect, it is my belief that Copjec attempts to
out-manoeuvre such material by situating the emergence of
psychoanalysis as the underside, obscene, in her terms 'unabsorbable'
(252) remainder that failed to be satisfied by the collapse of
differences represented by the public sphere. Crying in this respect
emerged as a howl of dissatisfaction with the consensus. I am
hospitable to this argument and certainly believe that it marks a
corrective to certain proto-Habermasian understandings of communication
predicated on rational interaction. Copjec then proceeds to hook an
argument that melodrama effectively attempted to represent this
repressed other where 'the lack of lack . . . defines melodrama's
excess. It's failure to construct a world for its characters to
inhabit' (260). She proceeds with a close reading of _Stella Dallas_
that serves to bulwark her argument. This example is convincing in
itself, but as a model of thematised reading I personally would want
more convincing that melodrama operated in the manner she argues. I
appreciate that this would be difficult to sustain within the confines
of a chapter, but having opened up this area it is somewhat
disappointing that Copjec ultimately retreats into a largely subjective
reading of an individual text.
>
>Again, Ayako Saito's article 'Hitchcock's Trilogy: A Logic of Mise en
Scene' deploys psychoanalysis to provide close readings of Hitchcock's
successive series of films _Vertigo_, _North by Northwest_, and
_Psycho_, arguing that they represent a movement from the logic of
melancholia through mania to paranoia/schizophrenia. Saito provides a
succinct explanation that what she intends to do is not to diagnose
these films but analyse them in terms of affect. It seems to me that
this caveat is designed to admit that psychoanalytic paradigms of
reading individual films have been largely torpedoed. In response she
argues that affect is a relatively uncharted area in
cine-psychoanalysis given the Lacanian antipathy to the term. She
continues that: 'The analysis of affect, then, lies in the process of
analysing the textual movement in which affects are manifested through
cinematic form and the structure of repetition.' (203) This
understanding then licenses Saito to argue that the Hitchcockian
trilogy of films enacts an ongoing repetition and logical progression
wherein affect is displaced marginally through the three films from
Scottie's melancholia; through Roger's mania; to Norman's paranoid
schizophrenia. Certainly Saito argues her case well and the attached
notes were very valuable in uncovering an area of psychoanalysis that
this reader was comparably unfamiliar with. Where I would problematise
Saito's reading is that it does seem to me that the Hitchcock canon
often lends itself too easily to psychoanalytic paradigms that
testifies as much to the climate of the late 1950s when psychoanalysis
was in its comparative heyday as much as any pre-existing essential
truth of psychoanalysis as a knowledge system. Certainly I would have
found it more interesting to see how affect could inform more recent
films that deal with mental health such as _A Beautiful Mind_ or _Iris_
whose structure seems designed to ratify more voguish understandings of
illness such as cognitive therapy.
>
>I would argue that a similar historical problem then effects the
reading of Janet Walker in the volume. In her article 'Textual Trauma'
she draws parallels between the Freudian understanding of sexual abuse
as a fantasy and the excision of the topic of sexual abuse from the
films _King's Row_ and _Freud_ that come to be regarded as 'dissociated
texts' (182) on the basis of this repression. As Walker understands,
Freud's exploration of fantasy is not to say that sexual abuse was a
fiction but rather that it had an entangled relation to experience that
was activated retroactively. However, the illicit cooption of fantasy
as fiction and sexual abuse as fiction then has a profound impact on a
feminist politics. As Walker powerfully surmises, during the 1980s
literature was produced that 'argue convincingly that in the United
States somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of children are subject to
childhood sexual abuse' (172). It is her argument that attention to the
symptoms in cinema where this incest taboo is repressed can then inform
and mobilise a feminist politics. I agree with this absolutely. My only
reservation would be that, as with Saito, her texts relate to a very
specific moment in Hollywood history. It seems to me that incest and
sexual abuse have been somewhat fetishised more recently -- in texts as
diverse as _Festen_ and _Good Will Hunting_ -- as the secret to be
discovered. I would have liked to know Walker's opinion on this more
recent phenomenon.
>
>Other contributions also focus on John Huston's biopic of Freud, most
obviously Peter Wollen's 'Freud as Adventurer' and David James Fisher's
'Sartre's Freud'. For the most part these historically precise
reflections and elucidations on the production history and intellectual
background that underpinned the emergence of Huston's film are more
accessible and less contentious than the other contributions detailed
above. Fisher details that although Sartre was a lifelong fan of both
cinema and psychoanalysis his own existential philosophy had problems
assimilating an unconscious which 'served to rationalise and create
alibis for bad faith' (127). As a consequence Sartre worked for 'a more
reciprocal, egalitarian model for what he called existential
psychoanalysis' (128). It seems to me that such a model is more
consistent with American ego psychology and more tellingly perhaps with
the ideology of the Classical Hollywood narrative trajectory. However,
both Wollen and Fisher outline the problems that Sartre (who provided
the screenplay) and Huston had in working together (the only thing that
they apparently agreed upon was that Marilyn Monroe be cast as Cecily
Kortner, a decision that was thrown out after an intervention by Anna
Freud). Fisher proceeds to analyse the film and demonstrate that
Sartre's Freud presents psychoanalysis as a model where the subject
comes to terms with their own alienation.
>
>Wollen takes a slightly different track by arguing that the emphasis on
ego psychology in the film stems from the fact that Huston, Freud, and
Sartre all shared a certain self-possession and conception of
themselves as pioneers in their respective fields (which in turn
explains the problems in collaboration). As Wollen writes, it was
'Freud the adventurer' that John Huston 'admired, identified with and
saw as the object of the film' (155). The fact that Sartre makes
Freud's relationship with his father the central dynamic in the film
then resonates for Wollen. Sartre's own father had died when he was
only one. As Wollen details, this then prompted Sartre to argue 'I have
no superego' (160). Wollen then makes the connection in parenthesis,
'is this so very different from Huston's remark about the unconscious
which Sartre derided: 'In mine, there's nothing at all'' (160). What
emerges from both Fisher's and Wollen's excellent articles is a clash
of egos that to some extent at least adulterates psychoanalysis as a
model where the subject is in conflict with itself. For Sartre at
least, as Wollen recognises, this was the product of his always uneasy
marriage of a somewhat liberal version of Marxism to a bourgeois ethics.
>
>In a connected fashion psychoanalyst Alain de Mijolla looks at the home
movies of Freud taken by his contemporaries, together with fiction
films like Huston's. If Wollen presents Sartre's Freud as a crusading
egocentric adventurer, de Mijolla's clinical experience suggests to him
that there is something radically inconsistent between psychoanalysis
and the cinematic apparatus. For de Mijolla the drawn out temporality
of analysis simply does not lend itself to the accelerated dynamics of
the moving image.
>
>Mary Ann Doane's analysis, 'Temporality, Storage, Legibility',
registers in a Benjaminian mode how the production of modern
technologies had profound ramifications for the conceptualisation and
organisation of time itself. She writes: 'As Friedrich Kittler has
pointed out, the cinema and phonography held out the promise of storing
time at the same time that they posed a potential threat to an entire
symbolic system.' (58) Doane then proceeds to determine how the
psychoanalytic understanding of time emerges in this context (and there
is a perceptible overlap with Copjec here) as a resistance and blocking
of the saturation of stimuli. Using Derrida, Doane thus shows that, for
psychoanalysis, memory, and by extension the subject, emerges on the
basis of its own constitutive failure to totalise itself. Doane then
moves to an analysis of the photography of Etienne-Jules Marey, who she
sees as a precursor of film in that he undertook 'the photography of
film' (67) by capturing and sequencing bodies in motion. There is
something slightly obsessive about Marey's project and it represents
for Doane 'a dream of representation without loss' (78) that again is
dialectically linked for her to the emergence of new technologies of
representation which, as she explains, both Freud and Marey themselves
rejected. Doane, as ever, is insightful and clear. I would be
interested in an expansion of this theory to see how it would fit into
a digital understanding of representation and the overlaps in this
respect with the work of Sean Cubitt. In this regard her article is
complemented by Marc Vernet's 'The Fetish', an article that looks at
the consequences of digital audiovisual technologies on the concept of
the archive. As head of the new library of film in Paris, Vernet argues
that there is a connection between the invisible in scoptophilia (aka
scopophilia) and the unknowable in film archives. He argues that the
loss of aura connected to the digital image constitutes a blocking of
desire, ensuring that the digital text continues to be 'unattainable'
(as in Bellour's famous formulation).
>
>Janet Bergstrom's own article on Chantal Ackerman argues that up to now
critical reflection on Ackerman's mother/daughter films has tended to
be read via the kind of feminist theory of the 1970s (most obviously
Irigaray and Kristeva in the psychoanalytic tradition) that idealised
communication between the mother-daughter circuit. Alternatively,
Bergstrom compellingly draws attention to the fact that Ackerman's own
mother reportedly would never talk to her daughter about her
experiences as a Holocaust survivor. For Bergstrom this then effects
the mode of enunciation in her films where there is a certain splitting
between the represented world that seems stylised.
>
>My personal favourite article is Stephen Heath's lengthy 'Cinema and
Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories', which takes a more
meta-institutional perspective on precisely why cinema and
psychoanalysis have been conjoined within the academy. Indeed, with the
exception of Bergstrom's Introduction, Heath is the only contributor
that admits to a crisis in psychoanalysis and cine-psychoanalysis in
particular. Heath demonstrates that the leading pioneers of
psychoanalysis, from Klein to Freud himself, really tended to actively
dislike the cinema, and maintains that cinema tends to be more
enamoured with psychoanalysis than the other way around (a fact
confirmed by the distribution of papers in _Endless Night_). As for
cine-psychoanalysis, he explains of the status of certain buzz terms,
'suture is no longer doing so well, nor on the whole is fetishism; the
phallus is mostly holding up, while fantasy is fine but prone to
disparate appreciations; as for real and symptom, they have come up
strong indeed' (33). Heath proceeds to investigate the reasons for
these fluctuations and positions himself against the backdrop of the
_Screen_ journal project. If criticism of cine-psychoanalysis usually
stems from some accusation of ahistoricism, for Heath, it is precisely
because the _Screen_ project was a politicisation of psychoanalysis,
together with the fact that cinema forced psychoanalysis to pass
through the social arena, that ensured its resolute historicism.
>
>On the whole I would recommend _Endless Night_ to anyone with an
interest in the field of cinema studies, although I am less qualified
to speak on behalf of the clinical community. I do believe that the
parallel lines of cinema studies and psychoanalysis need to be
re-negotiated and books such as this are an excellent way to continue.
It is my own belief that perhaps Doane, de Mijolla, and Copjec go some
way towards explaining the non-convergence of the two lines, whereby
there is a dialectical relationship that sees psychoanalysis almost as
a refuge of the private, away from the hustle and bustle of twentieth
century experiences exemplified by their somewhat invasive
technologies. This tends to drive a wedge between the understanding of
the two whilst provoking a sense of mutual fascination, with each
conceptualised as the other's underside that meet only ever at
vanishing point.
>
>Sheffield University, England
>
>
>Copyright ? Film-Philosophy 2003
>
>
>Jamie Clarke, 'The Parallax Review: On _Endless Night: Cinema and
Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 27,
September 2003 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n27clarke>.
>
>. .. .  :   ...   .'..  ..,..
>
>
>_Film-Philosophy_ journal texts are published through the email salon
(as well as on the website) so that they can be discussed and contested
and continued by you members, so please send your thoughts to:
>
>    [log in to unmask]
>
>. .. .  :   ...   .'..  ..,..
>
>
>    Salon Netiquette:
>
>When hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you
are replying to -- namely, do not leave old posts underneath your reply
(but by all means quote lines you particularly want to refer to).
>
>Please do not use html or styled formatting when sending messages --
some members will not be able to read your post, and non-formatted
texts take up less bandwidth and thus download quicker.
>
>Styled formatting can be replaced by a simple ascii text style guide:
to emphasise words *quote with asterisks*; film and book titles should
be marked with underscores -- Deleuze's _Cinema_, Sokurov's _Mother and
Son_; mark titles of articles and all quotations with 'single quotation
marks'; and instead of tabs or indents please separate paragraphs with
a one line gap.
>
>When sending a message please check that the subject line reflects the
message content, and is not just one left over from a previous thread
or digest message.
>
>If you have problems unsubscribing, or sending messages generally, then
do not ask for help via the salon, but simply email the owner at:
>[log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
>
>    Salon Commands:
>
>To change to digest, send the message: set film-philosophy digest
>to: [log in to unmask]
>
>To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy
>to: [log in to unmask]
>
>. .. .  :   ...   .'..  ..,..
>. ., .  . :...  . .   '..
>. .'.  ,  : ..... .
>.  .:..'...,.   .
>.. :.,.. '....
>....:,. '.
>.' :. .
>.,'
>
>

----------------------------------------
Please respond to <[log in to unmask]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The crisis of Western culture is
anxiety of meaninglessness.
- Paul Tillich
Culture is materialization of meaning.
- Emil Brunner