Cronenburg and Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychoanalysis, as stemmed from Freud, brings the "unconscious" to the foreground of importance, adding value to those thoughts, feelings, etcetera, that are usually repressed. Film, as a mass entertainment, serves as a way for an audience to "experience" situations that they do not always have the chance to experience, but, to do so, relies on somehow pulling the viewer in so that they do not necessarily realise, while they are watching, that they are watching a film, but, instead, feel as if they are the one caught up in the action of the piece. So, then, the filmmaker's job is to prompt this experience for the audience and can do so by positioning the viewer to feel as if they, themselves, are witnessing the events in the film.How can a viewer so believe in a film when they, all the time, know that the world and story of the film is fiction and fantasy? The power of cinema comes in its power to duplicate the real world, the world we know. Cinema is able to show us the world we live our lives in, but it goes beyond that; it is also capable of manipulation- unlike many other arts, which can simply observe and record with minimal manipulation. It is manipulation that sparks interest in the world, as portrayed in film. If there
Political activists claim that the psychoanalytic approach to film does not provide any guide-lines on how the individual might resist the workings of an ideology that appeared to dictate completely the formation of subjectivity as split and fractured. Vaughan states; "I'm interested in how the human body is being re-fashioned by technology. This is an interesting point when one establishes the fact that the psychoanalytic film approach was strongly influenced by theory's of Freud, specifically the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety. The 1970s theory was developed in reaction to viewer response; it is interesting to note that there has been a renewal of interest in the area in recent years. This apparatus includes the projector, which substitutes for the camera during reproduction, the screen on which the image is projected, the theatre in which the screen is present, and even ourselves, the viewers because we can choose simply not to see the image by not looking (although, we most likely do not). You need the fantasy to give shape to the reality you're trying to move towards. The entire thrust of 1970s psychoanalytic film theory was based on the fact that there is no clear or straightforward relation between the conscious and the unconscious. The viewer should, and can, however, be made to lose moment to moment realisation that they are not a part of the film. But it differs from the primordial mirror in one essential point: although, as in the latter, everything may come to be projected, there is one thing only that is never reflected in it: the spectator's own body. Nor have they explored the mutual possession of this experience of perception and its expression by filmmaker, film, and spectator- all viewers viewing, engaged as participants in dynamically and directionally reversible acts that reflexively and reflectively constitute the perception of expression and the expression of perception" (Sobchack 38). "Thus the film is like the mirror. This does not necessarily mean the viewer must not be allowed to realise they are actually watching a film, for the simple fact that every viewer does know this fact, so the possibility of this is none. that there is no cause-and-effect relation, which manifests itself in appearance, between what the subject desires to achieve and what takes place in reality. Psychoanalytic criticism was accused of becoming totalising and repetitive.
Common topics in this essay:
,
Sight Sound,
Film Comment,
Age Cronenburg,
Vaughan I'm,
Crash Central,
Crash I'm,
JG Ballard,
American Nightmare,
Elias Koteas,
real world,
world film,
watching film,
creed 87,
real world inhabit,
psychoanalytic film,
human body,
world story,
relate character,
realise watching,
gaze filmmaker,
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Acceptance Essays
