Topics in Film: Psychoanalysis and Cinema

FLM 3400

Psychoanalysis and cinema both emerged in the closing years of the nineteenth century and since their inception have maintained an ambivalent relationship. Freud's early followers saw the new medium of film as an ideal way to disseminate the new "science" of psychoanalysis while Freud himself remained skeptical that the unconscious could ever be represented. This course will address the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema from two perspectives: first, considering the way in which cinema has historically attempted to represent the unconscious and its impact on film form. Second, the course will explore the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts such as dreams, transference, imaginary, masquerade, fetishism, fantasy, the gaze and the objet a have been used to account for our investment, as spectators, in cinematic representation. Drawing on films from both Hollywood and other cinemas (including Secrets of the Soul (1926) Un chien andalou (1929), Now Voyager (1942), Spellbound (1944), Brief Encounter (1945), Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom (1960), Blue Steel (1990), Crash (1996)) this course will explore the complex history of representing unconscious desire from the early Surrealist experiments, through the pioneering work of Baudry and Metz in the 1970s on film ideology to the feminist critique of the cinematic spectacle and spectatorship. The course will conclude with an assessment of contemporary, Žižekian inspired psychoanalytic film studies. Prerequisites: ENG 1002, one Principles of Textual Analysis.