Abstracts & Synopses



Michael Apted
Michael’s presentation will be on how he moves between fiction and non-fiction, movies and documentaries in his work, and how each is influenced by the other. He will be showing examples from his work to illustrate his talk.

Emanuel Berman
Documentary directors and their protagonists: A transferential/ counter-transferential relationship?

Unlike fictional figures created by scriptwriters, directors and actors, the protagonists of documentaries are flesh-and-blood individuals. They are chosen by the director – usually on the basis of some identification or fascination – and may experience this choice as an opportunity to be heard and understood. The process of filming forces director and protagonist(s) into a complex interaction, which extends and transforms the initial relationship. Mutual gratitude and fear of exploitation or damage, mutual dependence and the anger it arouses, fluctuations between experiences of gratifying mirroring and of embarrassing exposure, struggle about the ownership and correct interpretation of one’s story – these are some of the possible nuances of the evolving dynamics, which in spite of different goals and setting may resemble characteristics of an analytic transferential/ counter-transferential relationship. These issues will be informally explored in a discussion (including relevant clips) with the directors of three dissimilar films, which deal with a woman penetrating a close-knit group of male soldiers, a director pursuing a controversial politician, and the traumatic childhood of five adult sisters.

José Luis Borau
FILM: Leo

Winner of the 2000 Goya Award for Best Director, Leo is an atmospheric romantic thriller set in the wilderness of industrial Madrid. The film features Iciar Bollain in the title role, a homeless woman struggling to reconcile herself with the pains of her past. She is a tough and lonely outsider, a representative of the underclass, who must struggle to keep herself fed and clothed. Bollain delivers a grim and powerful performance as the tortured woman trapped in her past. Leo is a disturbing glimpse of modern Madrid and it's inhabitants, masterfully executed by acclaimed director José Luis Borau.

Michael Brearley
Filming psychoanalysis: Feature or documentary

I will suggest that it is impossible for a variety of reasons for a
documentary film on psychoanalysis to portray actual sessions without
infringing damagingly on the process itself.
This is inevitably frustrating, since it puts film-maker and viewer in
the position of the child excluded from the Oedipal couple, and the
restriction has lead some film-makers to withdraw from the idea.
We believe, however, that this very restriction can be used in a creative way if
the feelings involved are faced and made a part of the film. The
film-maker Hugh Brody has been willing to take this seriously.

Vinko Bresan
MARSAL [Marshal Tito's Spirit]: Film as abreaction

Tito's death represented for some the death of the father of the nation, and for others long waited liberation from a totalitarian leader. With the war in ex-Yugoslavia, Tito's name has become almost shameful to mention. Vinko Bresan's movie Marshal Tito's Spirit articulates the repressed problem with lot of humour. Marshal Tito's ghost appears on an Adriatic island and the Mayor starts organising "socialist spiritualistic tourism".
Both communists and nationalists are involved in a performance which works as collective psychodrama in which all the participants abreact not just their individual pasts, but also the collective, denied, one. The film has a cathartic meaning for the public too, and is an interesting starting point for various psychoanalytic considerations about projections and the return of repressed, while humour once again proves to be closely connected with the unconscious.

Hugh Brody
Filming psychoanalysis: Feature or documentary

My presentation will begin with the opening scenes of his film Nineteen
Nineteen, starring Paul Scofield and Maria Schell. In these scenes the
two central figures see one another in a television documentary about
Freud, and reveal that they were once Freud's patients. They then
meet, and begin to recall their analyses, including an interpretation of
a dream. This film clip raises central questions about use of
documentary and drama. The story of the writing of this film
illustrates the struggle that can take place between these two forms,
and how, in this case, the writers opted for a fictional form. In the
film project that I am developing with Michael Brearley, Andrea
Sabbadini and Paul Williams, the same struggle has been at work. Our
decision is to opt for documentary, but not to the exclusion of art. By
telling the story of this struggle, the discussion leads into central
questions about both film and psychoanalysis, as well as to the
difficulties such films face from the market place.

Elizabeth Cowie
Screening memory: allegorical dreaming and tales of the past in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) and Persona (1966)

Bergman's films suggest a disdain for psychoanalysis and the role Freud showed dreams play in our unconscious. Yet dreaming and remembering are central expressive and narrative modes in Bergman's films. How should such sequences be understood and should they be understood psychoanalytically? This presentation will explore the uncanniness of dreaming in Wild Strawberries (1957)and Persona (1966) arising from the epistemic uncertainty for the spectator of these scenes and their role for the character dreaming. And it will look at the issues of interpretation produced by the enigmas and aporias of the narration in relation to Jean Laplanche's notion of the 'enigmatic message' and its demand for translation.

Diana Diamond
Sight and Sound in Sunshine: The Cinematic Representation of Historical and Familial Trauma.
Sunshine portrays what is universal in the individual psyche and what can be configured by historical circumstances and cataclysms. Sunshine refers to Sonnenshein (which in Hungarian means “sunshine”), a Jewish family whose fate through three generations forms the core of the film’s narrative. Sunshine is the name of the family tonic, an elixir which generates the family fortune , also referring to the power of Eros in each generation ensuring the family’s survival at the same time wreaking havoc with family relationships. The paper focuses on the transgenerational transmission of trauma, in particular the incest and the murder of family members in the Holocaust, as well as how film is uniquely suited to represent historical and individual trauma through acoustic and visual modes of representation.

Ildiko Enyedi
FILM: My twentieth century

Directed by Ildiko Enyedi The dazzling and vivacious My Twentieth Century revolves around twin girls abandoned and separated in infancy. One grows up into a hedonistic jewel-thief, the other into a poor but idealistic political agitator.
Their adventures form the springboard for a magic-carpet ride through modern history, full of exotic locales and shameless coincidences. Enyedi fashions an enchanting, imaginative visual style that recreates and slyly transforms the look of old photographs and movies. A discourse on the image as well as on history, this self-reflexive tour-de-force climaxes, appropriately, in a hall of mirrors, and ends with a breathtaking plunge into its own vanishing point.

Lindy Heymann
Kissing Buba

It's 1970 and Tamar is 10. Everything in her world is nicely in order and
that's how she likes it. But when Tamar's mum, Sarah, takes her to visit
her grandmother, she enters a world where nothing makes sense. Who are the
people Buba is so scared of, and why is everything in her flat painted red?
Tamar is frightened but then she finds a very old photograph of a 10 year
old girl, and she begins to look at Buba in a different light.
 

Vicky Lebeau
Another child of violence? Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

‘We absolutely need new images': in 1979, Werner Herzog's claim restates an anxiety about the life of the image in cinema which has become one of the hallmarks of his film-making. This paper explores that anxiety through Herzog's remarkable reflection on the myth of the foundling in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) – a film which, probing the experience of loneliness through the figure of a child who has never seen a human face, can be brought into dialogue with a psychoanalysis of the (maternal) face as the foundation of the domain of the visual.

Chris Mawson (Chair)
Panel: The inner and outer worlds of the film-makers' temporary social structure.

When we form a group in order to pool our resources to address a task, to create something together, inevitably we combine also our anxieties and our habitual means of protecting ourselves, sometimes in the service of the enterprise, and sometimes to its overall detriment. In this panel we will explore the film-makers' actual experiences of working with their colleagues in the temporary social structure - a 'colony' - set in motion by their joint efforts. Bernardo Bertolucci and Fiona Shaw will present descriptions drawn from their experiences as Film Director and Actor respectively, and the Chair will engage the speakers and the audience in drawing out some of the unconscious individual, group and institutional processes affecting the task.

Nanni Moretti
FILM: La Stanza del Figlio

Winner of the 2001 Palme d'Or at Cannes International Film Festival, The Son's Room is a film on how a family copes with the loss of a child. At a Cannes press conference, Moretti, the author of 15 features such as “Dear Diary” (1994) and “Red Wood Pigeon” (1990), said he wanted the father, played by himself, to be a psychoanalyst in order to show how someone used to dealing with the sorrow of others copes himself. Laura Morante, who plays the mother, explained in Italian newspaper La Repubblica that Moretti wanted to tell a story of pain that doesn't reunite but separates and shows how everyone goes his or her own way in order to survive. “This is a beautiful and honest film”, the actress said.

Whedbee Mullen
Abjection, Abstraction, Akerman

Chantal Akerman's work as a filmmaker is marked by an ambiguous relationship to the figure of the mother. Can this relationship be explained in terms of the maternal abject? In News from Home Akerman's juxtaposition of a garrulous mother and the orderly, rectilinear city of New York creates tensions between what can and cannot be considered symbolic or abject.

Laura Mulvey (Chair)
Film, feminism and the maternal body

This Panel addresses ways in which certain feminist film-makers have approached the representation of the maternal body on the screen. One of the most significant aspirations behind feminism has been the desire to find means of articulating those aspects of femininity that have, traditionally, been repressed or distorted in culture. And this aspiration has strongly influenced feminism's interest in psychoanalytic theory. The challenge to represent the maternal body and also the mother-daughter relationship has been important to feminist film-makers, particularly those active in the avant-garde movement of the 1970s. The Panel will concentrate on certain select moments from chosen films to discuss these questions and issues in detail.

Eva Parrondo Coppel
Portrayal of a classical femme fatale: The Ugliest Woman in the World (Miguel Bardem, Spain, 1999)

This paper takes the Spanish noir film The Ugliest Woman in the World (Miguel Bardem, 1999) as a contemporary case study that follows the classical conventions in the portrayal of the femme fatale. The aim of the paper is to argue for the crucial distinction between the Other of the drives (as embodied by the femme fatale) and the Other of desire ('Woman'/'Man') in order to understand the construction of sexual difference in films.  

Liliana Pedrón de Martín
Denunciation: An Attempt To Avoid Madness

Thomas Vinterberg, director of the film Festen (The Celebration, Denmark, 1998) and member of the Danish Group, Dogma 95, has conceived another significant cinematographic work. This filmmaker group, which opposes commercial, conventional, cinema, has created a movement which rejects the superfluous, going back-to-basics filmmaking: digital video, handheld camera, natural sounds and lighting. In this search of aesthetic truth, against simulation, there is an implicit denunciation. The Celebration provides Vinterberg the opportunity to denounce incestuous perversion in the family, reveal the enigma of suicide, and family complicity that induces madness. In terms of psychoanalysis, the denunciation tries to avoid denial and the splitting of the ego that diminishes creativity and thinking capacity, and helps to discover a historical truth.

Helen Taylor Robinson
"As far as the imagination dictates”; the Form of the Imagination/ the Form of Psychoanalysis with reference to Beckett’s “Film” and Freud’s “Psychoanalysis”

With reference to Beckett’s one work of the imagination for the screen “FILM” I will present a 10 minute address to the audience after showing the film (25 minutes running time). This will in a concentrated way examine the freely operating unconscious that creates formal constraints only insofar as they enhance the imaginative endeavour, (Beckettian film-form), and indicate briefly where and how psychoanalytic form has challenged the deepest unconscious freedoms of the mind, so parting company with the greatest and deepest exploration of what Mind is, and relinquishing this task, “the form of things unknown” to the artists.
Beckett’s willingness to create what he calls “obscenities of form” and psychoanalysis’ unwillingness to go as far as the imagination dictates constitutes my deliberately provocative debate about both formal mediums, Art and Psychoanalysis.

Miguel Sapochnik
The Dreamer:

In a dark vision of the future where emotionally suppressed human clones
are mass manufactured and discarded for the latest model, a male and female
clone share a last look as they wait for termination. Against the callous
inhumanity of the termination plant workers, the woman is electrocuted and
dropped into a furnace before the man is hooked up. But the circuit fails,
and in the desperate moments before his death we see that he is not a
soulless creation.  

Bruce Sklarew
Musical Blending and Altruistic Surrender in Bertolucci's Besieged

In Bertolucci’s elegant chamber work, Besieged, a young African medical student cleans a grand house in exchange for a room. The owner, an eccentric, older British pianist falls in love with her, not knowing that her husband is a political prisoner. Music is the seductive conduit and integrator of the narrative, an intrinsic element of the story itself. Classical and African pop melds in Coltran’s ‘My Favourite Thing’ and is sublimated into an unusual Ostinato. As the musician divests himself of his valuable artistic possessions including his grand piano to ransom her husband out of prison, Bertolucci states that the film illustrates Corteau¹s adage, ‘There is no love, there is only proof of love.’ The seaming altruism is explored discussing slips, coverages, the use of externalization and identification in Anna Freud’s altruistic surrender, and a latent homosexual linkage. Besieged ends in a delicious ambiguity.