Screen, Image, Psyche: On Film, Psychoanalysis, and Becoming Other (NeMLA's 56th Annual Convention, 2025)
Philadelphia
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA's 56th Annual Convention, 2025
Julia Bruehne (University of Bremen)
Matthew Lovett (University of Pittsburgh)
In her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalytic concepts to show how "the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.” Alongside this feminist perspective, there are many other uses to which psychoanalysis can be put in analyzing cinema. This may be formal, but it also may analyze content, plot, visual representation, sound, or costuming. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, emphasized the importance of Lacan's mirror stage for film analysis. Christian Metz, from a Freudian as well as a Lacanian perspective, drew on the role of the cinematic signifier and the question of metonymy, metaphor, and the unconscious dominated by linguistic processes. Friedrich Kittler, on the other hand, assigned film as an art form to the realm of the Lacanian imaginary, while the typewriter stands for the symbolic and the phonograph for the real. However, films, especially avant-garde films, can be composed of all three elements, combining the Lacanian triad into a specific aesthetic form. Further, many filmmakers (including the Surrealists) bring psychoanalytic concepts, themes, and principles to bear in their work, both, again, in terms of form and of content. This panel seeks contributions that show what relationships can obtain between psychoanalysis and film. How is psychoanalysis present in past and contemporary film? How can we analyze film from a psychoanalytic perspective? How do psychoanalysis and aesthetics go together? What happens when image, language, and sound drift apart and develop a life of their own, adding a second story to the plot? And how might, as Mulvey argued, film itself influence our own psyches?
Papers could take a number of forms and be on a number of themes: humour, parody, containment, subjectivity, fragmentation, avant-garde/nouvelle vague/arthouse film, silent film, (post-)modern blockbusters, or revolution, e.g.: how might film cause shifts in its viewers? How has film itself revolutionized how it represents psychosocial phenomena? How are desire, gaze, voice, and other objects a depicted, veiled, or unveiled in cinema? Can films produce revolutionary mindsets, or are they at best capitalist forms of distraction that foreclose revolutionary thinking? Or are films perhaps capable of revealing a potential for (aesthetic and social) revolution before the idea of revolution has even surfaced in official discourses?
We welcome papers on any topic related to psychoanalysis and film, from any psychoanalytic school of thought. How is psychoanalysis present in past and contemporary film? How can we analyze film from a psychoanalytic perspective? How do psychoanalysis and aesthetics go together? What happens when image, language, and sound drift apart and develop a life of their own, adding a second story to the plot? And how might, as Mulvey argued, film itself influence our own psyches?
PLEASE NOTE: Abstracts are to be submitted exclusively via the official NeMLA platform (NOT via email). Thank you.
Julia Brühne