Psychoanalytical Film Theory and Art Criticism –

Cinema makes absence presence. What is absent is made present in cinema and therefore
cinema is fundamentally linked to illusion. A director’s mind creates it and an actor’s mind
believes it; it is a vivid manifestation of one’s thoughts and illusions being interpreted by other
minds. It is in this vacuum of complexity between the creator’s mind and the collective
viewership psyche that cinema features. Similarly the advent of psychoanalysis made a
previously absent understanding of psychopathology of the human brain present, it further
took its seat in art criticism, in theories pertaining to all fictive processes and finally, in
psychoanalytic film criticism.
At the end of the nineteenth century, psychoanalysis was created, and film happened to follow
shortly afterward. Though literary theory took up psychoanalysis in the 1930s and 1940s but,
surprisingly enough, it did not fully enter into film theory until as late as the early 1970s.
Early applications of psychoanalysis to cinema concentrated on unmasking latent meanings
behind screen images, before moving on to a consideration of film as a representation
of fantasy. From there, a wider consideration of the subject position of the viewer led to wider
artistic and ideological engagements with critical theory – leading to art-house criticism and
psychoanalytic film theory proper.
The focus of my presentation is to bring to light, through local, topical references, this fantastic
critical conception - a brainchild of modernism – a confluence of psychoanalysis and film
criticism which seeks to analyze the mind behind, the mind of and the mind in art-house world
cinema.
My presentation begins with an overview and analysis of the two distinct waves in which
psychoanalytic film theory occurred and was developed. We must remember, that like all forms
of critical discourses or theories, we cannot confine psychoanalytic film theory temporally, and
that psychoanalysis, not necessarily science but an interpretative practice is an instrument to
analyze any given film of any period or language, or even other forms of art.
1) The first wave, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focused on a formal critique of
cinema’s dissemination of ideology, and especially on the role of the cinematic apparatus in
this process.
a) The main figures of this first wave were Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura
Mulvey.
b) They took their primary inspiration from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and
they most often read Lacan through the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s account
of subject formation and concept of Ideological State Apparatus.
 c) Thus, psychoanalytical film theory finds one of its sources in the Apparatus Theory,
which states that cinema is by nature ideological because its mechanics of
representation are ideological and because the films are created to represent reality.
d) Ex : We see very hauntingly claustrophobic manifestation of this theory in the
propagandist film industry of Nazi Germany under Joseph Goebbels. State censored and
sponsored projects such as Triumph of the Will and Jew Suss were made as, what
Althusser would call, ISAs, and showcased as independent art to strengthen the
hegemonized unconscious of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

2) The Artistic Eye –

a) Written in French, Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage was the defining theoretical
starting point for traditional psychoanalytic film theorists in the first wave. Lacan
theorizes that the mirror stage allows the infant to see its fragmentary self as an
imaginary whole, and psychoanalytic film theorists began to see the cinema functioning
as a mirror for spectators in precisely the same way.
In the early 1970s, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey separately explored aspects of this seeing
or the "gaze" in the cinema. Metz stressed upon the viewer's lustful longing for completeness
and sense of identification with the camera's vision,[7] - an identification largely "constructed"
by the film itself[8].
b)
c) It was this gaze that Lacan had described as an object-petit or the object-cause of
desire, in his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. This gaze was gendered
and sexualized, and was theoretically combined with the fetishistic aspects of
(especially) the male viewer's regard for the onscreen female body, as we see in Freud’s
1927 essay, “Fetishism”
d) Sigmund Freud suggested that in one form unconscious drives become deflected into
scopophilia, a word used to translate the German schaulust or visual pleasure. Our
theorists speculated that the beginning in the child's sexual curiosity and innocent
voyeurism could, in an adult, lead to a desire for the cinema.
And thus the first wave viewed the audience as a “thirsty, hungry voyeur” seeking solace
in a parallel yet palpably relatable reality.
3) While on the topic of the voyeuristic gaze, I would like to recall the mastermind filmmaker
Alfred Hitchcock. In Rear Window, his 1954 masterpiece of voyeurism, Hitchcock is doing
more than just including us in the obsessive voyeuristic mindset of protagonist L.B. Jeffries,
he is critiquing us for the very act of watching, holding a mirror up to a culture itself
obsessed with spying into the private lives of others, a mass cultural and state-activated
espionage. It is through his use of perspective, camera techniques, and the settings of his
film, that Hitchcock makes us not just viewers, but “passive participants”, almost restricted
and disabled like the protagonist on a wheelchair, reluctantly forced yet gladly complicit in
the thrill and arousal of invading privacy, roughly what psychoanalysis as a practice
participates in.
4) To delve into the thirst and hunger of this gaze, let’s take up the example of two films by
Satyajit Ray. Thinking about the two different male authors, Provatkumar Mukherjee and
Rabindranath Tagore, that have contributed to Ray’s presentation of female experience in
Devi and Charulata respectively, the portrayal of female subjectivity on-screen raises
questions about the role of what Laura Mulvey termed the “male gaze” (1975). She
critiqued the voyeurism and sexualisation often conveyed in depictions of women on-
screen, who are far more likely to be the object, rather than the possessor, of the gaze
(1975). Mulvey’s “male gaze” refers here more generally to the hegemonic
conceptualisations of women that the protagonists of Ray’s films are portrayed as reacting
against and existing within. In Ray’s films, the male gaze is certainly represented. However,
in my opinion, it is provided alongside the depiction of the women protagonists’ subjective
reaction to the circumstances of this male gaze. Rather than complicity in the role of the
male-voyeur, films here provide valuable social critiques of the gendered constrictions
placed upon the women characters’ lives. We therefore see how psychoanalytical film
criticism finds its place in western feminist film theory and it’s offshoots in Indian cinema of
the 70s.

Thus, while the first wave of psychoanalytic film criticism recognizes the fundamental
ideological basis of cinema, and it as a projection of an artistic unconscious onto a mass societal
unconscious, or as cinematically documented day dreams, it does not fail to emphasize the
effervescent boundaries between the politics of the state, politics of gender and sexuality,
politics of art and the politics of the mind.
***
The second wave of psychoanalytic film theory has also had its basis in Lacan’s thought, though
with a significantly different emphasis, and draws heavily on Freudian thought. Beginning in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, this manifestation of psychoanalytic film theory, which continues to
remain productive even today, shifted the focus from cinema’s ideological work to the
relationship between cinema and a trauma that disrupts the functioning of ideology.
In Lacan’s terms, the terrain of psychoanalytic film theory shifted from “the axis of the symbolic
order and the imaginary” to that of “the symbolic order and the real”. Although psychoanalytic
film theorists continue to discuss cinema’s relationship to ideology, they have ceased looking
for ideology in the cinematic apparatus itself and begun to look for it in filmic structure of
“fictive realism”, which liberates the strictly extraneous method of viewing cinema as a
product, not a process.
Outcomes of this insatiable penchant for realism in the early 1900s find root in multiple forms
of art – Tagore’s criticism of the fastidiousness of European theatricians towards naturalism,
and labelling it as “bilati borborota” in his Rongomoncho, Stanislavsky’s invention of the
practical theory of method acting, which we actors can rarely enshrine in practice to ensure
unconditional intermingling of an actor and his character till they are one and the same person.
Then, thanks to Bazin and Astruc comes the auteur theory which places full artistic authority on
the director, who was posited as the author of the film, with his “camera pen”.

And with the “camera gun”, cinema remains a site for the dissemination of ideology, but it has
also become a potential site of political and psychic disruption. The main proponents of this
second wave of psychoanalytic film theory are Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek. The initial aim of
the second wave was to create an authentic Lacanian and part Jungian, part-Freudian film
theory that would approach the cinema with the complexity that it merited.
Freud’s theorization on the topographical structure of the mind – divided into the conscious,
unconscious and the much obscure preconscious, and the structuring of the id, the ego and the
superego all find its place in a basic understanding of human function, and in especially in
cinema, which as Hitchcock says is “life with the dull bits cut out”. His concepts of the Oedipus
complex, narcissism, implicit desire for incest , castration, the unconscious, the return, and
hysteria are all utilized in film theory.[3] The 'unconscious' of a film are examined; came to be
known today as what we call the subtext. Thus, second wave of psychoanalytical film criticism
enter the mind’s eye, and view and analyze the character and the action as psychic causes and
effects and case studies, and analyzes interpersonal relationships, editing patterns, layered
allegories and symbols.
Auteurs like Hitchcock are a classic case study of filmmakers who exercise narrative authority
over his work and thus has produced films which are, in isolation and in collection,
psychopathological subjects of interest. He is known for drawing viewers into the psychological
state of his protagonists, from the insanity of Norman Bates in Psycho, to the trauma of Scotty
Ferguson in Vertigo, to the paranoia of Roger Thornhill in North and North-West and is
successful in creating a kinship between our personal experiences and the experiences
unfolding onscreen by latching onto universal emotional responses, through jarring cuts,
suspense soundscapes and even the posters.
On a symbolic plane, we see visualizations that have often been interpreted as mind metaphors
–In Satyajit Ray’s Kanchenjunga, the enigmatic mountain signifies the unfathomable
unconscious which everyone aspires to unravel, but is submerged in clouds and his hidden to
the plain eye. Tensions fester and events unfold in real time, and when the mountain-
unconscious reveals itself, Indranath is too distracted to witness the splendor; his phallic
authority would always fall short in front of the physical stature of nature’s Kanchenjunga, and
Ray ends on the note that the Kanchenjunga-unconscious was nothing escapable – it was
always there with its Jungian defects.
Similarly, the automobile in films such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Ajantrik and Chalti Ka naam
Gaadi have been seen as a travelling vehicle of the modern consciousness.
 In the late 1960s we see a lot of films portraying the interactions between mothers and sons in
the Indian context, and are, critically matter of explicating the Oedipus complex. The role of
nurses as nurturing maternal figures and the implicit desire for a return to the womb for an
existential cure is a plot pattern we observe in films such as Asit Sen’s Khamoshi, starring a
stunning Waheeda Rahman, or Suchitra Sen as Rina Brown in Saptapadi, or Harano Sur. They
are young attractive women engaged in the profession of a fetishized caregiving Oedipal figure
but are also romantically engaged with their patients – not only satisfying the Lacanian male
gaze and it’s Freudian complexities but also as opposing thanatos or death drive with eros – the
uninhibited sexual energy that characterizes the life instinct.

The psychoanalytical film criticism’s association with Marxist film theory was a figment of
politics, which witnessed 20th Century Bengali Marxists such as Ritwik Ghatak reverting back to
Stanislavsky, his editing styles, the concept of cinema apparatus theory and psychoanalysis.
His Meghe Dhaka Tara, the first of the trilogy, has been analysed quite interestingly from a
somewhat Jungian perspective by Kumar Shahani (1976). "the triangular division taken from
Tantric abstraction is the key to the understanding of this complex film. The inverted triangle
represents, in the Indian tradition, fertility and the female principle. The breaking up of society
is visualised as a three way division of womanhood. The three principal woman characters
embody the traditional aspects of feminine power. The heroine Nita, has the preserving and the
nurturing quality; her sister Gita, is the sensual woman, their mother represents the cruel
aspect.
Psychoanalytic film theory also helps us demarcate the culminating scene in Subarnarekha
where Ghatak re-interprets Oedipal and incestuous desires in a typically Bengali (Eastern)
setting. The meeting of the brother and the sister in the brothel and Ghatak's melodramatic
treatment of the scene incorporates both 'the usually hidden theme of incestuous aggression in
the commercial Indian cinema while also commenting on the brutalisation of India's revered
classical heritage'.
which finds it’s place in all art forms – jatra exposed on all four sides, proscenium, open on one side,
separated by an orchestral pit only, film as a medium is perhaps more transcendental and psychical in it’s
engagement – a dark audience, kept at an aesthetic distance from a screen projection of motion pictures,
an absence of a presence and the presence of an absence of the artistic end product. Our heads are too,
exposed on all sides to the world, yet the crevices of our mind often remains unexplored. My
presentations comes with the hope of extending film criticism to a model that for me is one of the most
comprehensive methods of literary analysis of the cinema as a text, as a performance, as art and as a
schizoid reality forever captured in celluloid.