Psychoanalysis Reading

This week I was assigned a reading for my New Genres class on Psychoanalysis (visual culture, visual pleasure, visual disruption). I came across some information I believe to be directly tied to this class. The chapter on Psychoanalysis from the book called Visual Methodologies by Gillian Rose discusses the media of film and its power. I found what to be said particularly intriguing. Since working with Film and Video is a completely new way of thinking and working for me, I found Rose's interpretation or analysis to be quite insightful. Here is an excerpt from the chapter..( I have underlined some key points)

Film has proved particularly amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation, and from the mid-1970s through the 1980s the journal Screen carried many essays exploring particular films in relation to psychoanalytic ideas. Cinema is an especially powerful visual medium because film can create a total world for its audience. Films manipulate the visual, the spatial, and the temporal and, as Laura Mulvery (1989:25) says, by 'playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object'. In particular, film is a powerful means of structuring looking, not only the looks between the film's protagonists but also the looks between its protagonists and its spectators. Since psychoanalysis in its Freudian and Lacaian forms argues that visuality is central to subjectivity, it follows that film can address our sense of self very powerfully- and that psychoanalysis can offer some powerful readings of films.

I hope you too find her writings helpful and eye-opening while filming! -Nicole Muller