Another Monday means film school again (it’s Mon/Wed for the summer term). Today’s menu included a look at the Psychological school of contemporary film theory, psychoanalysis to be specific. Each genre of film theory is associated primarily with the era in which it was made popular. Psychoanalytic theory of film can be looked at as psychoanalysis as viewed by Jacques Lacan (a successor to Sigmund Freud).
Everybody knows all about psychoanaysis and its ideas on:
1) The unconscious mind in relation to the conscious mind (Ucs vs Cs)
2) Infantile Sexuality and Repression
and 3) Dreams as a road to the unconscious
In film theory, Laura Mulvey wrote a famous essay on the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window titled Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema (1975). In it she examined the film according to theories of psychoanalysis (as well as the intersection of psychoanalysis and film with feminism). Her essay is still held up today as the most frequently re-printed essay in film theory of any kind.
I also had to hand in a paper comparing and contrasting Italian Neorealism with French New Wave cinema, as well as examine the artistic potential of the two genres by looking at two genre-specific films including Journey to Italy (Rossellini, 1954) and Masculin, féminin (Godard, 1966). Since I just spent enough time talking about film theory I’ll spare you any excerpts from the paper.
Pics: Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy, and Godard’s Masculin Feminine.
