 2015 - 2016 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0810-5037-01 | Vertigo to Crash: Film and Psychoanalysis | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS | FACULTY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN THE ARTS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 2.0
Course description
In a seminal article in the field, "Naughty Orators: Negation of Voice in Gaslight" the philosopher and film theorist Stanley Cavell asserts that in films the projector itself is maddening because it produces a dream whose origin is found in Cartesian illusion. Am I awake or dreaming? This is a serious question for viewers of films. Cavell writes: "Following the cue of the light, of the rising and falling of the light as a cause of madness, and considering that this rising and falling is the light by which we see the figures on the screen, we have to ask whether there is something in the light of film that is inherently (not, of course, inveterately) maddening." The seminar will examine the connection of film to psychoanalysis on every level that is symbolized in the film and in the psychoanalytical encounter including: the parallel history of film and psychoanalysis, cyberspace and the closure of existence, splitting in films by Chantal Akerman, the relation dream, the relation to memory. We will study narrative organization or the ability to name materials that belong to the realm of trauma. We will examine the representation of transference and countertransference in the relationship of the viewer and the film and the analysand and the analyst. This is a representation of the communication of desire when it is not controlled by an omniscient narrator/analyst. Here communicating desire is grounded in a relationship that comprises doubt and acceptance of the other; acceptance that produces connections with reality such as the acquisition of knowledge (cogito, Descartes), intimacy and love.