an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, February 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
Psychoanalysis and Film Theory Part 1:
‘A
New Kind of Mirror’
Your
study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory can break the spell.[1]
Theodor Adorno
Introduction
Film theory as we know it today did not come into
existence until the late 1960’s, and since then has been dominated by
psychoanalytic ideas. This article seeks
to specifically investigate the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on film
theory. Its development will be traced
in two articles through classic film theory, the role of Karl Marx and Louis
Althusser, the contributions of semiotics, the debates surrounding apparatus
theory and the gaze, and finally the input of feminism. While this type of broad overview has been
attempted in many general introductions to film theory, it is hoped here to
provide a rough sketch of its formative stages of development, while filling in
the detail on a number of significant issues that highlight Lacan’s
influence.
Classic Film Theory
It was not until after the First World War that it
became possible to identify two particular groups within film criticism. Spearheading the first of these groups was
the figure of Sergei
Eisenstein, whose film-making
and theoretical essays in the 1920’s established a conception of the role of
the cinema as a primarily aesthetic one.
According to Eisenstein, a film’s aesthetic value depended on its
ability to transform reality and in his films this usually took the form of
montage.[2] In opposition to Eisenstein were the
impressionists and surrealists. They
also believed the main function of the cinema to be aesthetic, but thought that
the camera itself was enough to render ordinary objects sublime. Their emphasis on cinema as a visual medium
meant that they regarded narrative in many cases as an obstacle that had to be
overcome. This, coupled with their
emphasis on fragmentation, meant that the impressionist / surrealist tradition
was unsuited to the rapidly expanding business of commercial cinema.
Eisenstein and his followers gradually overshadowed
other theoretical groups to the extent that it was not until after the Second
World War, in the 50’s, that any radical development within film theory took
place. This development was primarily
due to the influence of André Bazin and his two essays, ‘The Evolution of the
Language of Cinema’ and ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’, which
critiqued the two most prestigious schools of thought in film at the time:
Eisenstein’s Soviet school of montage and German expressionism (Ray 2001,
7). Bazin overturned existing
conceptions of film by claiming that cinema’s true purpose was the objective
representation of reality. The
expressionists, surrealists and the Soviet school all evinced a belief in the manipulation of reality: Eisenstein
through abstract montage and mise-en-scene,
and the impressionists and surrealists through their elevation of the image
and disregard for other aspects of cinematography. Bazin argued that cinema offered the chance of completely
objective representation for the first time in history. His position has come under severe criticism
from post-structuralists, for whom reality is always a subjective experience.[3] However, it is interesting to note that
contemporary television would seem to have come full circle in a return to
Bazin’s conception of film: reality TV is the ultimate symptom of a desire for
totally objective, unmediated presentation of everyday life.
Question Marx
The influence of Bazin’s theories was short-lived
and the political upheaval that occurred in France in 1968 was the catalyst for
a complete change of direction in film studies. Bazin’s style of criticism based around the notion of the auteur and the aesthetic function of
cinema soon became outdated as film studies became indisputably political:
‘[t]here was no place outside or above politics; all texts, whatever their
claims to neutrality, had their ideological slant’ (Lapsley and Westlake 1988,
1). Film makers and film critics alike
were forced to consider the relationship between ideology and power and the
position of cinema within that dualism.
This new politically-centered, theoretically-driven film criticism was
given a forum in two highly influential French journals, Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinéthique,
along with their British counterpart Screen. The editorial by Jean-Louis Comolli and
Jean Narboni in the October 1969 issue of Cahiers
illustrates the radical new direction that film studies had taken. In a marked reaction against the subjective,
speculative analyses of classical film theory, Comolli and Narboni stress the
scientific basis of their critique.[4] In addition to scientific methodology, they
also emphasise the political nature of their aims which are heavily influenced
by Marxism. They see film as a product
that becomes transformed into a commodity which ‘is also an ideological product
of the system, which in France means capitalism’ (Comolli and Narboni 1969,
45). Acknowledging their own
imprisonment within capitalist ideology, post-revolution film studies envisaged
that theory would provide the key to unlock their chains. It was through theory that operations of
ideological control in cinema could be recognised, and through theory that
resistance could be asserted. The
post-revolution critics saw the lack of theory in classical film studies as one
of the primary reasons for its impotence:
the
classic theory of cinema that the camera is an impartial instrument which
grasps, or rather is impregnated by, the world in its ‘concrete reality’ is an
eminently reactionary one. What the
camera in fact registers is the vague, unformulated, untheorized, unthought-out
world of the dominant ideology. Cinema is one of the languages through which
the world communicates itself to itself.
They constitute its ideology for they reproduce the world as it is
experienced when filtered through its ideology’. (Conolli and Narboni 1969, 46)
It was the philosophy of Louis Althusser that
provided the political conceptual system for post-revolution film theory. One of the driving forces behind Althusser’s
break with traditional Marxism around 1945 was the desire to establish a
scientific status for his theory in order to bestow upon it a degree of
autonomy. This move was to have a
direct impact on film studies as the first paragraph of Comolli and Narboni’s
editorial elucidates:
Scientific criticism has an obligation to define its fields and
methods. This implies awareness of its
own historical and social situation, a rigorous analysis of the proposed field
of study, the conditions which make the work necessary and those which make it
possible, and the special function it intends to fill. It is essential that we at Cahiers du Cinema should now undertake
just such a global analysis of our positions and aims. (Comolli and Narboni 1969, 43)
It was perhaps this desire for scientific
fortification that attracted Althusser to the theories of Lacan. While psychoanalysis had an enormous direct
influence on film studies, it also influenced it indirectly through the Marxist
theory of Althusser. In order to
re-conceptualise the simplistic base/superstructure model of society espoused
by Marx, Althusser borrowed the psychoanalytic term ‘overdetermination’ in
order to articulate the complex web of conflicting elements, which combine to
generate a historical movement in society.
In psychoanalysis, this term is used to describe how a mental phenomenon
like a symptom can be traced back to several conflicting and often incompatible
desires. J. Laplanche and J. B.
Pontalais define it as ‘[t]he fact that formations of the unconscious
(symptoms, dreams, etc.) can be attributed to a plurality of determining factors…[t]he
formation is related to a multiplicity of unconscious elements which may be
organized in different meaningful sequences, each having its own specific
coherence at a particular level of interpretation’ (Laplanche and Pontalais
1988, 292).
Althusser’s concept of structural causality is also
redolent of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The term refers to the way in which ‘[m]en are no longer agents actively
shaping history, either as individuals or classes, but rather are supports of
the process within the structure’ (Lapsley and Westlake 1988, 6). Lacan also emphasizes the primacy of
societal codes (in the form of the symbolic order) in the shaping of
subjectivity. The way in which the
subject is inculcated into the social order is described by Althusser as
interpellation: a process explicated in all its complexity by Lacan in the
Oedipus and castration complexes, the mirror stage and the acquisition of
language. According to Althusser,
interpellation takes place through ideological state apparatuses (ISA’s):
family, religion, education, media, etc.
In Lacanian terms, these social and familial structures are saturated
with symbolic law. Although both Cahiers du Cinema and Cinéthique used the philosophy of
Althusser as the basis for their critique of ideology, they did so in different
ways. For Cinéthique all films were
hopeless victims of the ideology of the ruling class and had to be rejected in
their entirety, whereas Cahiers du Cinema
divided film into seven different categories, only one of which it wholly
condemned, although this was the largest category: ‘films which are imbued
through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated form,
and give no indication that their makers were even aware of the fact’ (Comolli
and Narboni 1969, 46). This emphasis on
the ideological nature of films and of signification in general owes an obvious
debt to the philosophy of Lacan. But
although there are several points of connection between the two theorists, the
Althusserian and Lacanian subject are nonetheless two distinct and often
opposing entities. For Althusser,
interpellation fixes the subject into a position of permanent blindness to the
ideological mechanisms of his/her society.
The Lacanian subject is ceaselessly developing and changing through
language, and although constituted by the symbolic order is ‘the producer as
well as the product of meaning’ (Lapsley and Westlake 1988, 53). This idea is explored more fully in the
following section in relation to the graph of desire.
Cinematic Semiotics
Robert Lapsley and Micheal Westlake isolate two
aspects of Lacanian theory, which were to prove crucial to film studies. The first is Lacan’s reversal of the
Cartesian notion of subjectivity.
Rather than the subject creating and naming the world, Lacan states that
is in fact language itself, which creates the world, ‘the concept…engenders the
thing’ (Lacan 1989, 72). This idea has
many implications for filmic criticism, as speech can thus be conceived of as
already saturated with the predominant ideology, making it difficult or even
impossible to utilise speech to criticize ideological norms. In fact, Lacan even goes so far as to say
that language can never fully
articulate what the subject wishes to say: the unsignifiable order of the real
is evidence of this.
The second of Lacan’s theories that proved
indispensable for film studies is his re-reading of Ferdinand de Saussure. Lacan reverses Saussure’s formula for the
sign, placing language above reality (S/s).
He states that, ‘[f]or the human being the word or the concept is
nothing other than the word in its materiality. It is the thing itself.
It is not just a shadow, a breath, a virtual illusion of the thing, it is the thing itself’
(Lacan 1987, 178, my italics). Language
murders the thing and takes its place.
In this model of the sign, there is an endless sliding of signifiers
over signifieds, which is temporarily halted by the point de caption. The graph
of desire (Lacan 1989, 335) articulates succinctly the complexities inherent in
signification. The horizontal vector
represents the signifying chain, and intersects with the vector ΔS
at two points. The first point of
intersection denotes the constitution of the signifier from ‘a synchronic and
enumerable collection of elements in which each is sustained only by the
principle of its opposition to each of the others’ (Lacan 1989, 336). In short, this point represents the
signifier, which attains its status through its difference from other terms in
the system of language. The second
point of intersection denotes the moment of punctuation, in which the signifier
at the first point of intersection attains its full meaning retroactively. The two points of intersection are not
symmetrical, nor are they intended to be.
The first is ‘a locus (a place rather than a space) and the second is ‘a
moment (a rhythm rather than a duration) (Lacan 1989, 336). The elementary cell of the graph cited here
is simplistic, but serves to illustrate the relationship between subject and
meaning.[5]
Meaning is
produced après-coup by the subject
through the retroactive nature of punctuation (the second point of
intersection) in the subject’s enunciation.
However, the subject is also produced by signification, as the meaning
of the signifier at the first point of signification is a differential meaning,
not an inherent meaning. This means
that the subject must choose from a selection of signifiers that are available
to him/her, which themselves shape and define the signified. Collectively, these signifieds construct the
world in which the subject exists, and so construct subjectivity itself. For Lacan, there is an unending flux between
the subject and signification, and this idea occurs in film studies in several
different ways.
Christian Metz defends the analysis of cinema from a
linguistic or semiotic point of view because although it is not a langue in the Saussurian sense of the
word, it is certainly a language. Metz
argues that the cinema does not constitute a langue for three reasons: because there is no intercommunication;
because it is duplication of reality rather than the unmotivated, arbitrary
relationship between signifier and signified and finally because it lacks ‘the
double articulation that…is the hallmark of natural language’ (Lapsley and
Westlake 1988, 39). Natural language
can be described as having a double articulation because it is comprised of
both words (morphemes) and smaller units, phonemes, which signify nothing in
themselves, but when combined produce morphemes. While the camera shot could in theory be likened to the phoneme,
there are numerous difficulties with this equation. There are an infinite number of shots to select from, but there
are a finite number of words. Moreover,
the meaning of the shot is not defined by its paradigmatic dimension, i.e. by
the other shots which could have been selected, whereas the meaning of words is defined paradigmatically. Because of these difficulties in analyzing
cinema through its paradigmatic relationships, Metz instead embarked upon an
analysis of the syntagmatic relationships in cinema: his ‘grande syntagmatique’ (Lapsley and Westlake 1988, 40).
Metz divides the narrative syntax of the cinema into
eight parts, ranging from the smallest segment, the autonomous shot to the
largest segment, the sequence. While
Metz’s analysis set up a detailed schema for understanding a film’s
construction, it was nonetheless open to criticism. Segments from films could not be categorized as neatly as Metz
imagined and he was also criticized for being so formulaic that there was
little room for practical interpretation of the workings of meaning and
ideology within cinema. Metz’s grande syntagmatique did elicit several
progressive critical responses however.
Film director Pier Paolo Pasolini argued against Metz’s proposition that
there was nothing in the cinema to correspond to phonemes, which would align it
to language’s dual articulation.
Pasolini names the smaller units of cinema ‘cinemes’, which represent
reality, or objects from reality.
Through a process of selection and combination cinemes were formed into
shots, analogous to language’s morphemes.
Umberto Eco criticized Pasolini’s naivety in supposing that the cinema
could articulate an unmediated reality.
Rather, Eco argues that reality is represented in the cinema through a
system of cultural codes which are intimately connected to ideology. He states also that cinemes could not be
equivalent to phonemes, since phonemes only possess meaning in combination,
whereas cinemes possess meaning in isolation.
Against Metz’s uni-articulation and Pasolini’s double-articulation, Eco
contends that the cinema has a triple articulation made up of semes, smaller
iconic signs which only attain meaning in relation to semes, and finally the
‘conditions of perception’ (Lapsley and Westlake 1988, 45), which takes into
account the audience’s perception of light, shade, textures, colours, etc.
which contribute to their understanding of the filmic text. Later on, Eco revised this model slightly,
suggesting that signs are better thought of as ‘sign-functions correlating a
unit of expression with a unit of content in a temporary encoding’ (Lapsley and Westlake 1988, 46, my italics),
recognizing that signs are defined by their context and that their meaning
cannot be fixed.[6]
The
relationship between the subject and the narrative text in the cinema was
explored by many film critics and much of the remaining sections are concerned
with an analysis of this relationship from various critical viewpoints. One such critic is Colin McCabe, who was on
the editorial board for the revolutionary British film journal Screen in the 1970’s and was also a
regular contributor. Screen took on board the challenge of
analyzing the relationship between ideology, subjectivity and signification,
and did so through psychoanalysis, semiotics and Althusserian Marxism. It is in the structuralist mode that McCabe
theorizes the production of meaning in film in the article that will be
discussed here.[7]
The model for McCabe’s analysis of film is a
literary one. Since the dominant mode
of film was (and still is) realism, McCabe finds his model in the classic
realist text, the nineteenth century novel, which he defines as ‘one in which
there is a hierarchy amongst the discourses which compose the text and this
hierarchy is defined in terms of an empirical notion of truth’ (McCabe 1974,
54). The Marxist influence of McCabe’s
analysis is obvious. Extrapolating the
hierarchical divisions within the realist novel allows him to uncover the
mechanisms of ideology within the text.
McCabe divides the realist novel into narrative prose and object
language. Narrative prose is
characterised by the omniscient narrator, informing, commenting and providing
judgement on the object language, the language of the characters, represented
in inverted commas. McCabe states that
the narrative prose is the first order of hierarchy in the novel. It ‘functions as a metalanguage that can
state all the truths in the object language’ (McCabe 1974, 54). The narrative prose attempts to conceal its
status as metalanguage: since its words are not spoken, it is almost as if they
are not there. Its invisibility hides
its function as purveyor of the dominant ideology. In film, McCabe believes that the camera is analogous to the
metalanguage of the classic realist novel: ‘[t]he camera shows us what happens
– it tells the truth against which we can measure the discourses’ (McCabe 1974,
56).
McCabe defines two aspects of the classic realist
text in both novel and film. He states
that ‘[t]he classic realist text cannot deal with the real as
contradictory. In a reciprocal movement
the classic realist text ensures the position of the subject in a relation of
dominant specularity’ (McCabe 1974, 58).
The ‘real’ here does not signify the Lacanian real. It refers rather to the real events which
are related in the subjective discourse of the cinema and conversely in the
object language or dialogue of the realist novel. He is stating therefore that realist narrative cannot accommodate
a tension between metalanguage and object discourse. The nature of the genre means that the object discourse must
subscribe to the commentary of the metalanguage, and therefore to the status of
metalanguage as ideologically motivated.
However, while tension is impossible between these two hierarchical
levels within the film or the novel, it is
possible for either to resist the dominant ideology of society. So while the two elements are necessarily
harmonious within the narrative of filmic text, in unison they are capable of
critique:
the classic realist text (a
heavily ‘closed’ discourse) cannot deal with the real in its contradictions…it
fixes the subject in a point of view from which everything becomes obvious. There is, however, a level of contradiction
into which the classic realist text can enter.
This is the contradiction between the dominant discourse of the text and
the dominant ideological discourses of the time. (McCabe 1974, 62)
While McCabe’s analysis provides a useful account of
the ‘invisible’ operations of the camera as commentator and interpreter of the
action, it fails to provide a theoretical analysis of how the spectator receives this ideological cinematic code and the
exact nature of the relationship between spectator and film. This task required an analysis of the
subject’s relationship with other subjects, images, language and culture, and
film critics found a theoretical paradigm that explicated all of these factors
in psychoanalysis. The emphasis on the
occasion of consumption (the dialectic between subject and film in the cinema,
when he/she is engaged in the act of perception) is one of the most important
differentiating factors between film theory and literary criticism. This is the central focus of the branch of
film studies known as apparatus theory, which relies most heavily on philosophy
of Lacan.
Apparatus Theory
Metz’s foundational essay ‘The Imaginary Signifier’
is an exemplary account of the film/spectator relationship, providing what was to
become a model for the use of psychoanalytic theory in film criticism. In the scientific manner that characterized
post-revolution film studies, Metz sets out to define exactly what the cinema
is and how it differs from the other arts.
He proposes that the main distinguishing factor is that the cinema is a
signifier whose presence is absence, i.e. the act of perception takes place in
real time, but the spectator is viewing an object which is pre-recorded and
thus already absent: it is the object’s ‘replica
in a new kind of mirror’ (Metz 2000, 410).
He states that, ‘[m]ore than the other arts…the cinema involves us in
the imaginary: it drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over
into its own absence, which is none the less the only signifier present’ (Metz
2000, 410). Metz’s definition of the
cinema is an accurate one, although he over-emphasises the difference between
film and other arts. All of the arts
involve an element of presence in absence: reading a book or listening to a
piece of music are activities where the action is not directly present. Even the act of watching a play where the
actors are present on stage necessarily involves the agreed absence of reality
(suspension of disbelief), which is a fundamental convention of drama.
Watching
a film necessarily involves for Metz an instance of identification, since
without identification meaning cannot be generated for the subject. The spectator ‘continues to depend in the
cinema on that permanent play of identification without which there would be no
social life’ (Metz 2000, 411). The
question of what exactly the spectator identifies with proves to be more difficult.
The obvious answer is a character in the film, but Metz points out that
not all films contain characters. Even
in instances where characters are present, there cannot be total
identification: the screen is a mirror but not in a literal sense. Metz concludes that the spectator must
identify with the cinematic apparatus itself, and its re-creation of the act of
looking: ‘the spectator identifies with
himself, with himself as pure act of perception…as condition of possibility
of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject, anterior to
every there is’ (Metz 2000,
413).
Identification is with the projector, the camera and
the screen of the cinematic apparatus.
The projector duplicates the act of perception by originating from the
back of the subject’s head and presenting a visual image in front of the
subject. The various shots of the
camera are akin to the movement of the head.
As vision is both projective and introjective, the subject projects
his/her gaze and simultaneously introjects the information received from the
gaze. The cinema replicates this
experience, with the screen functioning as the recording surface for what has
been introjected. Opening the eyes to
view the film, ‘I am the projector, receiving it, I am the screen; in both
these figures together, I am the camera, pointed yet recording’ (Metz 2000,
415).
Identification
takes place in the imaginary order. The
imaginary is governed by the symbolic, and the cinema is no exception to this
rule. Any theorization of the imaginary
in cinema must pre-suppose the symbolic since the cinema is a system of
signifiers which signify an absent signified.
Metz does not explicitly acknowledge that the cinematic experience
replicates the experience of the child in the mirror: if the screen takes the
place of the childhood mirror, then both can be said to create a version of
reality that is based upon an illusion.
However, Metz does identify the cinema as characteristically imaginary,
since what is depicted is already a reflection of reality. He focuses on the imaginary at the expense
of the symbolic and this issue has been taken up by several feminist critics
who will be discussed in part two of this article. This emphasis on the imaginary generated a large amount of
theoretical analysis. Like the
childhood mirror, the imaginary completeness that the screen represents merely
serves to disguise an inherent lack.
The means by which this imaginary completeness is created is known as
suture.
Stephen
Heath’s ground-breaking work, Narrative
Space, provides an informed description of suture, foregrounded by a
detailed discussion of filmic narrative space in general. Pivotal to Heath’s analysis is the notion of
‘central projection’ and he outlines the development of this idea from
fifteenth century Italian painting to early photography. It is defined as ‘the art of depicting
three-dimensional objects upon a plane surface in such a manner that the
picture may affect the eye of an
observer in the same way as the natural objects themselves’ (Heath 1993,
69). Central projection, which we now
regard as ‘natural’, dominates modern cinema.
For the illusion of central projection to be fully accurate, it is
essential for the eye of the spectator to be positioned in the central point of
perspective. Anamorphosis is the term
that is used to describe what happens when a painter or a film maker plays with
central projection. This is the
distorted sensation experienced when an image draws the eye to one side. Heath cites Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ as
an example of anamorphosis: ‘playing between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’, it
situates the centre of the projection of the painting…obliquely to the side,
the sense of the painting…only falling into place (exactly) once the position
has been found’ (Heath 1993, 69).
Although unacknowledged by Heath, the emphasis on the importance of
subject position in maintaining the illusion of reality contains strong echoes
of Lacan’s optical experiment, in which the position of the subject is crucial
in order to maintain the delicate balance between the three orders[8]. Watching a film is also based on an optical
illusion in which images on a flat screen appear three-dimensional and
realistic. The identifications
engendered by film narrative centered around the imaginary order are similarly
based upon méconnaisance.
Heath divides filmic space into space in frame and space out of frame. The space in frame is ‘narrative
space’. ‘It is narrative significance
that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and ‘read’’
(Heath 1993, 69). This narrative space
is characterized and delimited by various conventions. For example, most films contain a
master-shot in the opening sequence: a shot that shows the whole setting in
order to allow the spectator to integrate themselves into the spatial layout of
the film. The conventions of the 180
and 30-degree rules also regulate the narrative space of the cinema. The 180 degree rule means that the camera
rarely goes beyond the 180 degree line of the screen, in front of which the
spectator would be placed within the narrative space of the film. In order to avoid a jump in narrative space,
which would interrupt the illusion of total visual access to the narrative
space of the film, the 30-degree rule is common practice, which means that the
camera should not attempt a sudden jump of more than 30 degrees. All of these conventions function to
maintain the illusion of reality that the cinema creates. The illusion or misrecognition that is
inherent in the cinematic experience centers around the complex issue of
suture.
The
term originates with Lacan, who uses it only once in his seminar of 1965, and
was later transformed into a concept by Jacques-Alain Miller in his article for
Les Cahiers pour l’analyse, later
printed in Screen as ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the
Signifer)’. In this article, Miller
theorizes the notion of suture as the relationship between the subject and the
signifying chain. Roudinesco
illuminates the objections that Lacan had to this article, which are quite
significant in light of later usages of the term. Unhappy with Miller’s article, he alludes to it in ‘Science and
Truth’, taking a completely opposing position.
Rather than seeing suture as the closure of the relationship between the
subject and the chain, Lacan favours its openness, and argues that ‘science
fails to suture or produce a complete formalization of the subject’ (Roudinesco
1997, 327). Summarising the polarity
and subsequent impact of the opposing positions of Miller and Lacan, Roudinesco
states that,
although
Miller’s contribution was useful to Lacan, its tenor was quite opposite to his
own. Lacan’s logic of the subject was
based on opening, ambiguity, ambivalence, and the idea of an impossible
mastery; Miller’s interpretation of that logic was the harbinger of all the
dogmas that were to come. (Roudinesco 1997, 327)
In the 1960’s, Jean Pierre Oudart contributed a
description of the operations of suture in cinema to Cahiers. He argues that the
cinema screen initially produces jouissance
in the subject, who is absorbed in the imaginary misrecognition of images,
similar to the experience of the mirror stage.
As always however, the symbolic encroaches upon the imaginary when the
spectator becomes aware of the frame.
This awareness consequently produces an anxiety in the subject who is
unsure whose point of view is being depicted, threatening to shatter the
cinematic illusion. This threat is
forestalled by the traditional shot/reverse shot mechanism, whereby a second
shot allows the first to be shown as a character’s field of vision. This maintains the illusion of completeness
and allows the spectator to remain in his/her position as voyeur. Suture became an important concept in film
studies in both Britain and France until it underwent another transformation
with the advent of deconstruction, where it became ‘a vague notion rather than
a concept, as synonymous with ‘closure’: ‘suture’ signaled that the gap, the
opening, of a structure was obliterated, enabling the structure to
(mis)perceive itself as a self-enclosed totality of representation’ (Zizek
2001, 31). Heath’s narrative space is
thus dependent upon the action of suture since the cinema, as much as the
childhood mirror, poses for the spectator ‘an absence, a lack, which is
ceaselessly recaptured for…the film, the process binding the spectator as
subject in the realization of the film’s space’ (Heath 1993, 88).
From its very beginning
then, throughout its influence by Marxism and semiotics, film theory has relied
on psychoanalytic theory to provide a philosophical, pseudo-scientific and
sociological basis for the conceptualization of the spectator. However, the psychoanalytic subject espoused
by film studies is not without its critics.
Many have accused the discipline of diluting Lacanian theory to serve their
own purposes, reducing the complexities of the Lacanian subject to a deceiving
simplicity. In the second part of this
article, the writings of Joan Copjec and Slavoj Zizek on the issue of the gaze
will be analysed. These critics, along
with other discussed in part two, show that far from the cinematic screen being
a mirror akin to the mirror of childhood described in Lacan’s mirror stage,
that the mirror is in fact a screen, and that the spectator is not the one who
looks, but rather is being looked at.
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in Aesthetics and Politics. ed. by
Frederic Jameson. London: Verso.
Comolli, Jean-Louis and Jean
Narboni, [1969]. ‘Cinema/Ideology
Criticism (1)’ in Contemporary Film
Theory, ed. Anthony Easthope. New York: Longman, 1993. [pp. 43-51]
Heath, Stephen, 1993, ‘From Narrative Space’ in Contemporary
Film Theory. ed. by Anthony Easthope. New York: Longman. [pp. 68-94]
Lacan, Jacques, 1989. Ecrits: a
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