Film Analysis: a Story of an Encounter and of an ethic

Abstract

The psychoanalytical perspective on cinema most frequently adopts either the logic of applied psychoanalysis or an ‘isomorphic’ stance. This limits the contribution that the encounter between cinema and psychoanalysis might have to offer if both fields were approached from a stance which respects the individual power and respective singularity. This paper presents a synthetic identification of what appears as essential in any research-based approach to this question, with an aim to making film analysis as fruitful as possible. Walter Benjamin was quick to recognise that psychoanalysis and cinema opened up new horizons in both seeing and listening, in ways that could not hitherto be seen or heard. He also realised that these two fields could be powerful in their complementarity. The language of cinema –when its true eloquence is recognised– enables us to depict the effects of the real in ways that no other material can. yet this paper argues that exploring harmonious connections between the gaze of psychoanalysis and that of cinema means that a ‘double focal point’ is created. Two focal points which, when they come together, bind the invisible with the visible - the invisible of unconscious stakes with the visible of the image in motion.