Issue 14: Conference Reports
Emergent Encounters in Film Theory: Intersections between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy
Emergent Encounters in Film Theory: Intersections between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, King's College, London, 21st March 2009
A Report by Davide Caputo, University of Exeter, UK
As its name suggests, the goal of this event was to explore possible points of intersection between philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to film theory. The specific need for such a conference emerges in the wake of the recent theoretical trend toward philosophy, as exemplified by D.N. Rodowick (The Virtual Life of Film, 2007) and Daniel Frampton (Filmosophy, 2006). The conference wished to address what effect such a turn might have on psychoanalytically based theory. It specifically posed the question of whether philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches are by definition mutually exclusive, or if this recent shift has constructed intellectual walls that inhibit cross-pollination between the two disciplines.
The conference was a one-day event organised by King's College London (specifically by Davina Quinlivan, Markos Hadjioannou, Ruth McPhee and Louis Bayman). The keynote speakers were Professor Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University) and Dr. Vicky Lebeau (University of Sussex), who began the morning and afternoon respectively with a one-hour plenary session. Each plenary was followed by three parallel panels consisting of three different, but thematically connected, twenty-minute papers. In these panels, a variety of international academics took up the challenge outlined above.
One of the recurring themes in the papers presented was the concept of absence, which will also, as it turns out, be reflected in this report. Due to the parallel nature of the panel sessions, I was only able to attend two of the six on offer (one in the morning, one in the afternoon). As a result, my comments on the sessions I did not attend are simply quick summaries based on the abstracts provided at the conference.
Starting the day was Shaviro's talk, a preview of a work in progress entitled 'Post-Cinematic Affect', which includes sections on the Grace Jones video for Corporate Cannibal(2008), Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (2006) and Olivier Assayas's Boarding Gate (2007). Shaviro's appearance at King's marked the end of his UK tour with this paper, and was limited to the section on Boarding Gate, in which he discussed the film in terms of mapping, as opposed to representing, non-visible space. Shaviro suggested that the director is diagramming (in the Deleuzian sense) the essentially unrepresentable phenomenon of globalised capitalism. In so doing, the film transduces the forces of finance onto the screen in a manner reminiscent of Deleuze's discussion of Bacon, in which impalpable forces (not just their effects) are rendered visible through mapping, not mimesis. Related to this process, Shaviro also proposed that Boarding Gate demonstrates the changing nature of the any-space whatever, moving beyond Deleuze's description of any-spaces formed via destructive forces, to those equally 'any' any-spaces being formed by the constructive forces of the now-global minimalist aesthetic, as typified by five-star hotels and hotel-like luxury flats around the world. Shaviro argued that Assayas shares Bazin's idea of cinema rendering the reality of the world; but since the world has changed, suggests Shaviro, so does the way we render it need to change. (For more information, see Shaviro's blog, The Pinocchio Theory, on www.shaviro.com)
Following the Shaviro session, attendees had to choose between three separate panel discussions. In 'Status Unknown? Conceptualising New Formations of Identity', Dr. Pat Brereton (Dublin City University) presented a paper entitled 'The Talking Cure and Nature as Therapy: Framing a Study of Representations of Suicide in Irish Cinema.' This paper explored portrayals of male self-destruction in On the Edge (John Carney, 2000), Disco Pigs (Kirsten Sheridan, 2002), and Garage (Mark O'Halloran, 2007). Dr. Corin Depper (Kingston University, London) then discussed Godard's Eloge de l'Amour (2001) in a paper entitled 'States of Love: Godard, Badiou, and the Inaesthetics of 'Non-Cinema''. And Dr. Richard Letteri (Furman University in South Carolina) presented his paper 'History, Silence, and Homelessness in Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams (2005)', which analysed the film in Heideggerian and Freudian terms.
In another panel session, 'Bodily Interfaces: Sensate Screens and Visceral Pleasures', Dr. Jinhee Choi (University of Kent) presented a paper entitled 'Sense and Sensibility: A Corporeal Turn in Film Studies', which took a cue from Vivian Sobchack's concept of the 'phenomenological experience' of cinema to further the discussion of spectatorship. Adriano D'Aloia (L'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan) examined the philosophical and psychoanalytical implications of water and drowning with his paper 'Film in Depth: Drowning Bodies in Contemporary Cinema.' Finally, Dr. Tina Kendall (Anglia Ruskin University) dealt with cinematic 'unpleasure' by analysing the physical experience of watching L'Humanité (1999) and Twentynine Palms (2003) in her paper 'The Forces of Shock: The Thinking Cinema of Bruno Dumont'.
The third session, 'New Geneologies in Film Theory', was the one I chose to attend. In the first of three papers, Dr. Tarja Laine (University of Amsterdam) examined the broken heart, affect, obsession and our troubled relationship with Lynch's diegesis in 'Affective Telepathy, or the Intuition of the Heart in Mulholland Drive'. For Laine, Mulholland Drive (2001) describes a theatre of love in which obsession renders space and time chaotic, and life and death interchangeable. Laine's paper drew a fascinating parallel between Diane/Betty's crumbled psyche and the way the spectator is betrayed by the film's narrative structure. Diane/Betty's inability to make sense of the world (and ultimate suicide) mirrors the way the film denies the spectator narrative satisfaction. In this manner, the film does not only depict affect (i.e. Diane/Betty's psychosis), but causes a similar affect in the puzzled viewer.
Carla Garcia (King's College, London) presented a portion of her ongoing research with her paper 'Rethinking the Cinematic Apparatus with Bion's Theory of Thinking', in which she delineated a conceptual model that connects infantile frustration to cinematic spectatorship. Garcia's paper accessed Bion's theory of early recognition of absence and its effect on thought creation and applies this framework to the similar 'frustration' that occurs when one watches a film. One of the key advantages of the application of Bion's theory to cinema, Garcia argued, is that it allows the discussion of spectatorship to move beyond the pleasures of mastery and scopophilia, as espoused by Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz, and includes 'unpleasure' into the fold.
Ending this panel was Peter Matthews (London College of Communications), who presented a sample of the work being conducted by a recently formed research group - an assembly of film theorists, filmmakers, cognitive psychologists and biochemical experts called Cinema and Psychosis. In his paper 'Karl Jaspers: The Missing Link?' Matthews identified the philosopher-psychiatrist as a model for the type of interdisciplinarity the conference was meant to address. Matthews described Jaspers as a figure who embraces the 'concrete' whilst not forcing us to dismiss psychoanalysis. Like those that preceded it, the key to this paper is the sensory experience of art. 'Art fascinates us because we are poised on the brink of revelation,' Matthews asserted, describing the way cinema can offer perceptual traces of absent, invisible, and inaccessible reality, and thus sets the stage for transcendence. To illustrate, Matthews pointed to iconic images such as Norman's twisted smile at the end of Psycho (1960) and Citizen Kane's (1941) Rosebud, as well as Bresson's work as a whole, as examples of how the screen can serve as cipher to the enigma of the totality of being (i.e. Jaspers's 'encompassing').
Starting the afternoon was the second plenary session in which speaker Vicky Lebeau gave us a preview of her forthcoming book The Arts of Seeing: the cinema of Michael Haneke (Reaktion). Part of Lebeau's work focuses on Haneke's use of absence and duration in his ubiquitous lingering shots, which Haneke himself has suggested (echoed by Lebau) are not so much meditations on death, but unlived lives. Lebau illustrated by examining the opening sequence of The Seventh Continent (1989), in which the camera is fixed in the back seat of a car, looking forward through the windscreen as the vehicle travels through a car wash. In her analysis of this scene and Haneke's work in general, Lebeau evoked Donald Winnicott's discussion of infantile gazing and the horror of the reflection-less specular image, and ultimately challenges us to consider cinema itself as a form of aural and visual thinking.
As in the morning session, attendees had to pick between another three panel sessions. In one session, 'Thinking about a Philo-Psychoanalysis', Dr. David Sorfa (Liverpool John Moores University) presented his paper 'Romantic Comedies and Psychoanalysis: Bad Objects in Film Studies and Philosophy', which applied Melanie Klein's concept of 'good and bad objects' to a discussion of film theory's seeming dismissal of the romantic-comedy, comparing this resistance to philosophy's often equally dismissive attitude to psychoanalysis. Dr. Mattias Frey (University of Kent) then presented the paper 'The Limits of Spectatorship: Towards a Theory of Walking Out', which examined what occurs when the suture fails and spectators are compelled to leave the cinema. Concluding this panel was Dr. Maria Walsh (Chelsea College of Art and Design), who suggested that a Deleuzian approach may be a productive way of reading a gallery piece in her paper 'The Poetics of Becoming Other in Sutapa Biswas' Film Installation Birdsong'.
In a parallel session, 'The Medium Walks the Red Carpet: Theorising Film Form Today', Dr. Elizabeth I. Watkins (University of Bristol) presented 'Images Dissolve: Don't Look Now', an examination of the dissolution of the familiar in Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film. Dr. Michael Goddard (University of Salford) then discussed recent shifts in film theory caused by digital technology in his paper 'The Virtual Life of (Entre-)-Images: Modes of Film Theory after the Loss of the Filmic Object in Rodowick and Bellour'. Finally, Oisin Keohane (London School of Economics) looked at what the spectral dimension of cinema tells us about the ontology of the medium itself, in his paper 'A Question of Timing: Stanley Cavell and the Commerce of Ghosts'.
Of the three afternoon sessions, I attended 'Same Difference? The Legacy of Lacan and Freud'. First to present was Dr. Greg Tuck (University of the West of England), who offered a re-consideration of Todd Solondz's 1998 film in his paper 'Good Lacanians and Bad Hegelians: Sexual Difference and the Dialectic of (Un)Happiness.' In this paper, he describes a world 'made miserable by sexual desire'. Tuck argues that notwithstanding the film's unblinking portrayal of sexuality, its message is surprisingly conservative, seemingly trying to push the anti-masturbation hysteria of the century before into the next. For Tuck, the film sets up a Lacanian binary of feminine stoicism and male skepticism, in which women accept the impossibility of fulfilment through sex as a fact, whereas men simply keep trying (affirming Lacan's sentiment that 'there is no sexual relationship').
Next on the panel was Anna Cooper Sloan (University of Warwick), who presented her paper 'Representative Men: Masculinity, Psychotherapy and Moral Perfectionism in Good Will Hunting', a Cavellian dissection of Gus Van Sant's 1997 film. Sloan's paper demonstrates that the type of male 'moral perfectionism' described by Cavell was alive and well in 1990s Hollywood cinema. For Sloan, Good Will Hunting is an inheritor of the Western, in which the male protagonist, Will, achieves self-actualisation (i.e. moral perfection) and, quite literally, rides off into the sunset. Sloan's paper made the case that this film and the rest of the nineties 'Harvard Cycle' served as a means of men reclaiming the (masculine) territory of the Western, much of which was being lost at this time by a cinema of male melancholy. Her paper also stressed the significance of Will's relationship with his psychoanalyst, which Sloan suggests 'allow(s) Will – and through him all men – to embrace an old-fashioned America'.
Ending this session, as well as the conference, was Patricia Di Risio (University of Melbourne) and her paper 'Thelma & Louise: A Reconfiguration of Gender and Genre'. Moving beyond traditional models of spectatorship offered by the likes of Laura Mulvey and Mary Anne Doane, Di Risio convincingly employed Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome to discuss the type of gender-bending that takes place as co-protagonists Thelma and Louise commandeer the road-movie genre. Her approach thus allows us to consider shifting identities in a more fluid manner than conventional (binary) notions of gender, which tend to divide behaviour into the 'phallic' and 'emasculated'. Di Risio's paper also examined the film's rape scene, which both drives the film and raises the problematic nature of the rape-revenge fantasy that it evokes.
Although it is difficult to conclude that this conference proves or disproves that psychoanalysis and philosophy can be reconciled in film theory, the papers presented demonstrate that merely addressing the issue opens up fruitful new modes of thought. So fruitful, in fact, that many of the ideas presented proved difficult to contain in the short time allocated; motivating me, for one, to devote more thought to the various points of overlap and conflict that connect these two disciplines so dear to film theory.