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Dream and Photography in A Psychoanalitic Film

Dream and Photography in a psychoanalitic film, secrets of a soul.

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DenisseGonzález
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103 views11 pages

Dream and Photography in A Psychoanalitic Film

Dream and Photography in a psychoanalitic film, secrets of a soul.

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DenisseGonzález
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DREAM AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN A PSYCHOANALYTIC FILM: SECRETS OF A SOUL By Nick Browne and Bruce McPherson Itis through psychoanalysis that the dream has become a special object of attention and a problem for the disciplines of interpretation. The appearance of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in Vienna in 1900, within a few years of the first ‘exhibitions of film in Paris in 1896, established a pattern of affinity and convergence between dream and film that has inspired and informed critical and theoretical \writing on the cinema almost from the beginning. Itwas earlier, in July, 1895, with the successful interpretation of the “Specimen Dream,” the Dream of lrma's Injection, that Freud could claim that “the Secret of Dreams was revealed’ to him. The history of the analogy between the experiential modes of dream and cinema— ‘not just the observations of a line of distinguished German, French, and American critics, whose work constitutes something of an “approach” —has served asa formal and practical model for filmmakers. Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Cocteau's Orpheus, and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad are notable films whose form was more or less explicitly provided by the features of the dream experience. Most recently, in the field of film theory, the analogy between dream and film has been reformulated as the relation between the image and the spectator. The recent work of Christian Metz (1975, 1976) and Jean Louis Baudry (1976) have concentrated not on the interpretation of individual works but more generally on the description of the “place” of the filmic spectator from within a psychoanalytic, specifically Lacanian, idiom. Each has investigated the mode of imaginary relations that the spectator enjoys with the depicted world, This relation is founded on a central analogy: that between the arrangement of the apparatus (projector, light, screen, spectator) and certain psychoanalytic models of the topology and dynamic of the psyche itself. The functioning of that cinema apparatus implies or inscribes a spectator in such a way as to guarantee a specific “impression of reality,” a form of realism that both inherits the Western tradition of painting and inflects it in accord with the contemporary (Ideological) requirements of the society in which iti embedde romero 1 No.1. Spring 1980 35, .0192.289/80/13000038/50095 © Homan ences rs Commentary on Pabst’s film Secrets of a Soul (Germany, 1925) poses problems of a different order: it was the first deliberate conjunction of psycho- analysis and film. The flm was made with the cooperation of people close to Freud, Sachs and Abraham, as a demonstration of clinical methods (including dream interpretation) and of the therapeutic powers of psychoanalysis. This context and purpose are important in understanding certain things about the film's presen- tation. Freud was skeptical about the project; his principal objection was, as he wrote to Abraham: “I still do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible” (Abraham & Freud, 1965, p. 384).! Although Hanns Sachs collaborated closely with the director, G. W. Pabst, and apparently had an unlimited say in the psychoanalytic aspects of the film, the interpretation the film offers is constrained, if not disingenuous. Chodorkoff and Baxter (1974) indicate that the social milieu may have constrained the film and that Pabst was confronted with the problem of “how to avoid sensational aspects of psychoanalysis which the masses are drawn to..."; presumably the sexual aetiology ‘of neurosis was considered sensational, and Freud’s own circumspection about such matters was regarded as exemplary. If such was its intention, the film at least succeeded in limiting sexually explicit scenes or explanations; however, this avoidance is at the expense of the psychoanalytic interpretation offered in the film. Notwithstanding, the film, if not the accompanying psychoanalytic explanation, ‘ives a vivid and convincing representation of Martin's symbolic mental life. ‘The film emphasizes psychoanalytic technique as a means of recovering significant traces of the past. The narrative form of the film and the treatmentof the process of memory determine the film's dramatic structure. At the crucial moment—and through an act of re-memorization—the film condenses in a single event the origin of the neurosis and an act of seeing, and brings to the fore as a

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