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epff³Programme
 

participants

List of participants
as at 06 October 2005

Christel Airas (psychoanalyst)
Erik Bäfving (film director)
Ronald Baker (psychoanalyst)
David Bell (psychoanalyst)
Emanuel Berman (psychoanalyst)
Bernardo Bertolucci (film director)
Don Campbell (psychoanalyst)
Ian Christie (film scholar)
Maria Vittoria Costantini (psychoanalyst)
Diana Diamond (psychoanalyst)
Peter Evans (film scholar)
Sari Ezouz (screenwriter and film editor)
Glen Gabbard (psychoanalyst)
Matteo Garrone (film director)
Roberto Goisis (psychoanalyst)
Paola Golinelli (psychoanalyst)
Earl Hopper (psychoanalyst)
Eric Karas (psychoanalyst)
Jimmy Karlson (screenwriter)
Roger Kennedy (psychoanalyst)
Jeff Kline (film scholar)
Alina Marazzi (film director)
Barbara Mattson (psychoanalyst)
Chris Mawson (psychoanalyst)
Eileen McGinley (psychoanalyst)
Laura Mulvey (film scholar)
Christian Petzold (film director)
Daniel Pick (psychoanalyst)
Catherine Portugues (film scholar)
Andrea Sabbadini (psychoanalyst)
Gerhard Schneider (psychoanalyst)
Bruce Sklarew (psychoanalyst)
Imelda Staunton (actress)
Alexander Stein (psychoanalyst)
Helen Taylor Robinson (psychoanalyst)
Carol Topolski (psychoanalyst)
Kirsi Vikman (screenwriter)
Margot Waddell (psychoanalyst)
Andrew Webber (film scholar)
Lissa Weinstein (psychoanalyst)
Shimshon Wigoder (psychologist)
Franziska Ylander (psychoanalyst)
Ralf Zwiebel (psychoanalyst)
 

participants'
biographical details

abstracts of contributions

Thursday  evening

Screening Jan Svankmajer Punch and Judy (1966)  and Jabberwocky (1971)

Introduced by Ian Christie and Helen Taylor Robinson

epff3 begins with a welcoming party for all the delegates followed by a showing of two short animation films by the Czech film maker and artist Jan Svankmajer: Punch and Judy and Jabberwocky. Ian Christie will be setting the films in their cultural context, and Helen Taylor Robinson will be asking what the animated form, and this artist in particular with his use of the surreal, puppetry and collage, offers the psychoanalyst when childhood and cruelty are brought together in a traditional humorous genre.

Friday morning

Lecture & Clips Andrea Sabbadini ‘Hable con ella (Spain, 2002):

The talking cure, from Freud to Almodóvar’.

Chair: Peter Evans

I emphasize the complementary importance of our profession as a ‘talking cure’ and the ‘quality listening’ of the analyst if the talking is to be therapeutic. I relate these general themes to Pedro Almodóvar’s Hable con ella [Talk to Her] (2002). This film, from which I will show several illustrative clips, centers on the relationships of two men with two comatose women. They engage in ‘two way monologues’ and ‘one way dialogues’ comparable to the psychoanalytic ones. Interpretations and reconstructions of the protagonists’ lives are constantly challenged within the original structure of the movie. I comment on the special kind of ‘conversation’ that Almodóvar entertains with his audience, as his film forces us to reconsider our assumptions about what can, or cannot, be justified in the name of ‘love’. Finally, I consider the personality of the main protagonist in the light of regressive and rescue fantasies

Friday morning

Panel ‘The past in film: a dialogue between history and psychoanalysis? Reflections on Vincent Monnikendam Mother Dao, the Turtlelike (1999, Holland)’

David Bell (Chair), Laura Mulvey and Daniel Pick

Monnikendam’s enigmatic and moving film deals with Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, but also invites wider anthropological and historical discussion about the shaping of subjectivity and social behaviour in a dramatically changing world. Constituted from old archive footage, this documentary invites speculation about viewpoint and judgement in story-telling, about profoundly unequal relations of power, and (through its own form and content), about the multiple reworkings of the past that occur in and through the present. Viewed as part of this festival, it evokes questions about time and repetition, remembering and working through, and about the role and status of ‘History’ – and its potential recovery - in psychoanalysis.

Friday morning and afternoon

Screening Keren Yedaya Or (Mon Tresor) (2004, 100 min, Israel)

Discussion Light and shadow, transformation and fate

Emanuel Berman (Chair), Sari Ezouz and Shimshon Wigoder

Or [Mon Tresor], a 2004 Israeli film which won awards in many film festivals including Cannes (Golden Camera; Critics Week Grand Prize), was written by Keren Yedaya and Sari Ezouz, directed by Keren Yedaya, and edited by Sari Ezouz.

It is the story of Or (meaning in Hebrew light), an intelligent and resourceful teenager (Dana Ivgi), who lives in a poor section of Tel Aviv with her single mother Ruthie (Ronit Elkabetz). Ruthie is a prostitute, and she resists her daughter's attempts to get her off the streets. Or, worried about her mother's deteriorating health, works hard to find another way to live her own life. At the same time her own sexuality awakens, and she confronts the allures of easy money and momentary glamour which the world of prostitution could offer her.

In our discussion we will deal both with the way this film came into being, and with its major emotional themes, such as the dynamics of prostitution, the fate of parental children, and the conflict between attempts to change one's life and the power of repetition compulsion.  

Friday morning and afternoon

Screening Peter Naess Elling (2001, 85 min, Norway)

Discussion Elling Eric Karas (Chair), Ronald Baker and Chris Mawson

Elling, a gentle but impressive fable, unfolds in Norway. It was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign film in 2002.  It celebrates the unlikely friendship between two eccentric but not mentally ill middle-aged men, one an intelligent obsessive (Elling) and the other uncouth and more easy going. The film studies the differences between these two men who live their respective lives in the margins. The director, Petter Naess, succeeds in the difficult task of finding a balance between humour and seriousness, thereby achieving the admirable result that the audience will tend to laugh with the characters rather than at them. Moreover, he successfully avoids sentimentality by firmly locating the plot in recognisable human foibles and failings, rather than in psychiatric disturbance.

The presentations will center around a psychoanalytic perspective to the story with a view to facilitating a significant and searching discussion on the many important issues brought up by the film.

Friday afternoon

Lecture & Clips Ian Christie ‘Time reversed’ Chair: Carol Topolski

Perhaps the most 'magical' quality of film remains its ability to make time appear to run backwards - a novelty that fascinated early audiences and is now used 'invisibly' within special effects, but also occasionally for narrative purposes. The most striking recent example of such time reversal is probably Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, in which a violent narrative involving rape and murder unrolls from its bloody denouement to an innocent opening. Drawing on a range of other examples, this session, led by the film historian Ian Christie, will look at how such strategies conflict our sense of cause and effect, and can perhaps question how we assign responsibility, blame and value. Might time reversal offer cinema's unique 'conditional' view of human action - its technical illusion reconnecting us with a magical understanding of the world in which consequences preceed their origins in a spectacle of omnipotence?

Friday afternoon

Panel ‘Amour fou: Luis Buñuel Un Chien Andalou  (1928, 16 mins,  France) and beyond’

Margot Waddell (Chair), Andrew Webber and Peter Evans

In his presentation entitled Cut and laced: traumatism and fetishism in Un Chien andalou, Andrew Webber will show how that masterpiece of surrealist cinema makes a knowing appeal to psychoanalysis: its infamous prologue works as a cinematic primal scene, a classic staging of a castration fantasy. His concern will be to demonstrate how the traumatic effects of the film, cued by the cutting of the eye, are sutured into a fetishistic texture, as seen in particular through the function of lace.

Peter Evans will suggest that for Buñuel Love is an irresistible force, but one that invariably makes fools of lovers. Franciso in El (1952), for instance, or Archibaldo in Ensayo de un crimen (1955) head for disaster by pursuing torrid idols of love. In each case Buñuel is careful to expose not only the irrational behaviour of grown-up men, but also the childish origins of their adult predicaments. In El, Franciso is a husband whose paranoid jealousy is partly readable as the result of a mind misshapen by over-identification with the father. The violence towards his lovers in Ensayo is conditioned by Archibaldo's buried hostility towards his mother. Here, as elsewhere, the tormented desires of the adult play out dramas of punishment and revenge against sinning parents. Bunuel's female  characters are not immune from the attention of childhood demons in their struggles with the conflicting demands of amour fou.

The Panel will include a screening of Un Chien andalou as well as clips from other Buñuel’s films.

Friday afternoon

Screening Alina Marazzi Un’ora sola ti vorrei (2002, 55 min, Italy) and Erik Bäfving Boogie-Woogie Daddy (2001, 12 min, Sweden), followed by discussion.

Paola Golinelli (Chair), Alina Marazzi, Erik Bäfving, Roberto Goisis and Franziska Ylander

In the two films, an Italian and a Swedish director deal with the theme of suicidal parents and of the working through of their loss by means of family films and photos. The narration that unfolds before the viewer gives meaning to the traumatic loss, unravelling affectivity and memory.

Un’ora sola ti vorrei is the (re)construction of the director’s personal history through the editing of films shot by her grandfather, during family reunions and festivities, in the course of over fifty years. The 16 and 8 mm films run through three generations of women in a north Italian bourgeois family. The work of narrating the history of her family facilitates the process of reparation of the Self and of the internal mother image. Alina Marazzi writes: ‘A few years ago I found some old film reels shot by my grandfather. I started to  watch them with great curiosity and strong emotion, especially those marked with an “L”, the initial of my mother’s name: Liseli. As if by magic those images projected in front of my eyes  seemed to give life back to a mysterious and unknown person to me: Liseli, my mother, died when I was 7 years old. This film is my personal quest of my mother’s face, of whom I had almost no memory at all. When working on the film, made of the images of my mother and the words she wrote in her diaries, the feeling that sustained me was nostalgia. Through this journey I was able to relive the relationship with my mother and discover my love for her’.

‘He didn’t leave a letter, but he did leave a lot of photos’ says the narrator’s voice of Boogie-Woogie Daddy. The photographs were taken by his father himself in different moments of the family life: they put into motion the process of remembering and they support the effort of working through the unbereable loss connected with his suicide. The stillness of the photos, however, seems to underline the difficulty to work through the loss of the idealized father, and the reparation appears more difficult to accomplish. Oscillation between manic and depressive feelings of nostalgia, suffering and rage, leak out in the use of black-and- white and coloured pictures.

Friday afternoon

Panel ‘Cinematic representations of ageing’:

François Ozon The Swimming Pool (2003, France),

Sylvain Chômet Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003, France/Canada)

                     Jan Troell The Flight of the Eagle (1982, Sweden).

Eileen McGinley (Chair), Diana Diamond, Alexander Stein and Lissa Weinstein

This panel will explore cinematic representations of the internal and external changes inherent in the aging process. Diana Diamond’s contribution will employ two recent films -- Under the Sand and The Swimming Pool -- to focus on the depictions of the conflicts and erotic lives of mature, seasoned women confronting the developmental tasks of midlife and the second half of the life cycle, including the acceptance of aging, mortality, finitude, limitations and losses. 

Alexander Stein will take Belleville Rendez-Vous (The Triplets of Belleville), an animated fairytale told without spoken words, to examine related themes of loss, longing, growth, development, and decay.

Lissa Weinstein will focus on The Flight of the Eagle to show the symbolic representations of the central conflicts of narcissism: the need to deny the reality of aging, of bodily imperfection, and the binding nature of choice. These conflicts are symbolized by a need to overcome the relationship to gravity and time, and to represent an idealized version of the self. 

Friday evening

Screening Mike Leigh Vera Drake (2004, 125 min, UK)

Followed by discussion with Imelda Staunton

British director Mike Leigh’s latest film, Vera Drake, was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2004 and is by many considered his best and most controversial work. It is set in 1950 London and centers around the working class family of middle-aged Vera Drake (played with extraordinary sensitivity by Imelda Staunton), a woman who dedicates her life to helping others. Such help, however, also includes the criminal activity of procuring free back-street abortions to unfortunate pregnant girls. Guilty? Naive? The hypocrisy of social morality and conventions is exposed in this moving, funny and profound masterpiece.

Saturday morning

Panel ‘Representations of the Holocaust in Central and Western European cinema’

Earl Hopper (Chair), Catherine Portugues and Bruce Sklarew

This panel will present an compare the different ways in which the Holocaust has been portrayed in Central and in Western European cinema.

Cathy Portugues suggests that the Holocaust in Central European documentary and narrative film has been explored as memory and mourning, trauma and violence, propaganda and history, even comedy and parody. She will explore an aspect of this retrospective gesture in terms of a dynamics of intergenerational memory, a memorial mapping characteristic of selected documentary films, home movie footage, archival materials and fictional narratives that address traumatic experience. She will look at the subjectivity of Holocaust memory through films including István Szabó’s Apa/Father (1966); Péter Forgács’ magisterial work of memory, Private Hungary (1990-2003), and Fateless (Sorstalánság, Hungary/Germany,U.K., 2005), directed by Lajos Koltai and based on Imre Kertész’ novel. The presentation will be accompanied by extracts of film sequences and personal interviews with the filmmakers.

Bruce Sklarew will concentarte instead on the representation of the Holocaust in an important Italian film from the 1970s, Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, from which he will show a number of illustrative clips. In the film, Max (Dick Bogarde), an ex-Nazi SS officer, re-unites with his teen-age sexual 'possession’ in a concentration camp. Now the wife of a conductor, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) masochistically surrenders to Max’s interest, his protective role in saving her life in a camp contributing to binding her to him again. She still inhabits Primo Levi’s grey zone of regressive complicity. In particular, the focus of the discussion will be on the themes of sado-masochistic attachment and regression and on the repetition compulsion these rekindle in the protagonists.

Saturday morning

Lecture & Clips Jeff Kline ‘Mourning, rescue and murder: hallucinating an Oedipal conflict in Anne Fontaine’s Comment j’ai tue mon pere (2001, France)

Chair: Laura Mulvey

Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father depicts a successful Versailles Gerontologist, Jean Luc Borde, on the morning of an important award ceremony at his villa. As he prepares for the Soirée, he receives a letter announcing his estranged father's death in Africa. But it seems that his father is not dead, for he appears at the Soirée and introduces himself to Jean-Luc's wife Isa, and other friends. Overcoming his hostility to a man he feels had abandoned him, Jean Luc asks Maurice to stay on for a few days. This visit turns out to be a devastating exposure of Jean-Luc's entire life: his exploitation of his brother, his unethical manipulation of his wife and his tangled affair with Myriem, his lab assistant. Ultimately, Jean-Luc is driven to an assassination attempt that has extremely disquieting results.

An analysis of this film leads not only to a reconfiguration of all our assumptions about the film's "plot" but also to a series of meditations on the process of mourning, and on the intricate connections between mourning, psychoanalysis and the art of the cinema.

Saturday morning and afternoon

Screening Klaus Häro Mother of Mine (2005, 108 min, Finland)

Discussion Christel Airas (Chair), Kirsi Vikman, Jimmy Karlson and Barbara Mattson

Mother of Mine is an epic story of a small person’s plight in the midst of the warring world. More than 70,000 children were evacuated from Finland to Sweden during the Second World War (the Finnish-Russian War 1939-1940). Mother of Mine is the first fictive film ever made on the individual fate of one of these children. It is a story of a boy who has two mothers, but at the same time has none. Director Klaus Härö writes: ‘My objective was to make an emotionally strong and visually appealing film on the fate of one individual war child. The contrast between the warring world and the experiences of a little boy is a compelling starting point for telling a touching story. The film, which is targeted to grown-up audiences, gives the viewers a chance to identify with feelings and thoughts through which they can see their own lives in the light of the prospect of conciliation and peace’.

Saturday morning and afternoon

Screening Matteo Garrone Primo Amore [First Love] (2004, 94 min, Italy)

Discussion Paola Golinelli (Chair), Matteo Garrone and Maria Vittoria Costantini

Primo Amore, a film based on a real story, is centered around the relationship between a woman and a man that dramatically changes into a folie á deux. The man’s delusional idea is to shape the woman’s body into an anoressic one,  just like he shapes gold objects in his work as a goldsmith. The woman masochistically colludes with him, in the hope that by complying with his wishes she will be loved for sacrificing herself to him.

Saturday afternoon

Screening Christian Petzold Wolfsburg (2003, 90 min, Germany)

Discussion Gerhard Schneider (Chair), Christian Petzold and Ralf Zwiebel

Wolfsburg by Christian Petzold  (Berlin), was shown at the 53^rd Berlinale 2003. In the German film-world, Petzold is well-known for the high aesthetic quality of his works. To quote from film critic Ron Holloway: “To my taste, the best German film at the Berlinale was ... Christian Petzold’s Wolfsburg, the third in his trilogy on moral ethics and individual conscience - after the award-winning Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000), about a terrorist family still on run, and the equally acclaimed tele-feature Toter Mann (Dead Man, 2001), about a woman’s pained quest to avenge the murder of her sister. A devotee of the psycho-thriller, Petzold makes sure that each shot counts not just to push the narrative along, but also to uncover layers of personal guilt and remorse, deceit and prevarication, doubt and vacillation. In Wolfsburg a successful car salesman (Benno Fuermann) accidentally kills a youngster on a country road, leaves the scene without reporting it, and thereafter has to drag his hit-and-run conscience along with him everywhere he goes - until, finally, he meets the single mother of the victim (movingly played by Nina Hoss) and forfeits all that he formerly stoood for. Wolfsburg was awarded an International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize“.

Ralf Zwiebel will present his emotional reaction as spectator and interpreter and connect this with the film images and narration. The felt ambivalence toward the film is related both to the formal structure and the story; its central topics are: real and unconscious guilt, “perversion of reparation”  and the loss of an empathic Other. The images and the narration convey a sense of social coldness and a locked inner world that stimulates the reflection on the relationship between inner and outer reality.

Saturday afternoon

Lecture & Clips Glen Gabbard ‘Methodology in psychoanalytic film criticism’

Chair: Don Campbell

This presentation will discuss seven time-honored methodological approaches to psychoanalytic film criticism. Five film clips will be used to illustrate how a psychoanalyst may approach film to illuminate meanings that are otherwise obscure from the viewer.

Enquiries:(+44)(0)207 563 5017
ann.glynn@iopa.org.uk

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epff3@psychoanalysis.org.uk