Diana Diamond and Lissa Weinstein on: Faith and faithlessness:  the role of the erotic imagination

The representational world with its myriad images of self in relation to others and the feelings and fantasies that link self to object in reality and fantasy finds its most complete and faithful expression in cinema. Accordingly film remains an arena for the exploration and understanding of some of the most fundamental relational processes and dilemmas that confront us, including those involved in the formation and breaking of long term erotic attachments. The panelists will explore issues of faith and faithlessness in romantic attachments as they are depicted cinematically in two films, Love, by the Hungarian director, Karoly Makk, and Faithless, written by Ingmar Bergman and directed by his romantic partner and muse Liv Ullmann. They will explore some of the dilemmas addressed by these films, including the power of the imagination to sustain erotic attachments even in the face of loss and deprivation, separation and betrayal. They will also include clips and briefer discussion of other films including The Oak (Pintilie, 1998) and Love (Szabo, 2002). They will also focus on how aspects of cinematic technique utilized in these films are uniquely suited to illustrate the idea that the relationship with the internal object continues to evolve and change throughout one’s life,even in the face of death and separation, transforming one’s experience of self and others. Finally, they will discuss the socio-historical conditions that may catalyze or curtail the reliance on and development of the representational world and may foster the displacement of Eros onto the world of objects and memory.

 

 

Alexander Petrov and Helen Taylor Robinson on: The film animator, the writer, the psychoanalyst, and the representation of dreams

Chaired by Ekaterina Golynkina, we shall first screen The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1992), a 20 minutes long Russian paint-on-glass animation film, created by Alexander Petrov after the story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The film won awards in many festivals including the Krakow Film Festival and the Ottawa International Animation Festival. It chronicles the experiences of a man who decides that there is nothing to live for in this world. He is therefore determined to commit suicide but falls asleep. As he sleeps, he descends into a very vivid dream. When he awakes he is a changed man. The Panel will then explore Petrov, Dostoevsky and Freud's representation of dreams. The discussion will focus on the powerful dialectic of pictures and words, and of the unconscious and the conscious, two distinct forms of communication and their consequences in this great Russian tale.

 

Charles Drazin and Andrea Sabbadini on: Inner conflict and emotional pain: A psychoanalytic view of  Brief Encounter (David Lean, UK, 1945)

Charles Drazin will explore the way in which Brief Encounter offers a key to David Lean’s career as a whole. Its themes of illicit love, control, repression and restraint can be traced in Lean’s cinema from his début as a director in 1942, with In Which We Serve, through to his last film, A Passage to India, in 1985. Although Lean would go on to make films on the largest possible scale, his feel for the intimacy of human emotion remained a consistent and striking quality. It could even be said that he made Brief Encounter not once but many times, whether the object of affection was a woman, a ship or a bridge. Using the Brief Encounter of 1945 as an archetype, Drazin shall examine some of these other variations on a very persistent theme.

Andrea Sabbadini will briefly analyze the “impossible” relationship between the married  protagonists of David Lean’s masterpiece by looking at the unconscious motivation driving them towards each other. He will show how Alec and Laura pursue their emotionally fulfilling and physically pleasurable relationship (even if sexually restrained), while feeling at the same time compelled to follow their superego demands to behave in a socially and morally respectable way. This will leave them in a state of inner turmoil and emotional suffering. Sabbadini will speculate on what may have been the repressed conflicts, possibly dating back to childhood experiences, then repeated in their hopeless and wonderful love affair.

 

Bruce Sklarew and Esther Rashkin on: Screening desire: Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris

Chairman Fabien Gerard will briefly contexualize this period of Bertolucci’s work beginning with The Spider’s Stratagem. Many consider that this three year sequence of work, The Spider's Stratagem, The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris from 1969-1972 was the most inventive and productive in Bertolucci's career. He had started his first analysis in 1969.  In an interview with Andrea Sabbadini he said, "I was talking more about my dreams about the films, my fantasies about the films which weren't yet done, than about myself; I was analyzing the movies that I was in the process of doing." 

Bruce Sklarew will discuss “The masks of conformity: sadism, homosexuality, and oedipal threats” in Bertolucci’s The Conformist. The complicated structure of flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, without chronological coherence presents a nearly surrealistic dreamlike montage. Bertolucci spoke of a "chaotic fusion of my memories and my fantasies... all mixed up together." The film presents multiple primal scene equivalents and issues of reality versus illusion.

In “Encrypted loss: sex, sadism, and colonial politics in Last Tango in Paris,” Esther Rashkin will link the film’s verbal violence, sexual enactments, and Paul's insistence that he and Jeanne never reveal their names or life stories, to Paul's inability to psychically integrate the trauma of his wife’s suicide. Theories from Freud, Ferenczi, and Abraham and Torok about trauma, mourning, secrets, and incorporation will be brought into play to explore how verbal and sexual aggression can function as symptoms of unburied loss, and how unspeakably traumatic loss can lead to the formation of intrapsychic crypts where the dead reside as if alive, obstructing the process of mourning.

 

 

Workshop on Film Censorship: To cut or not to cut?

In the consulting room, with the patient, the psychoanalyst seeks to disinter thoughts, feelings and experiences from their hiding places. To understand why the mind has needed to banish them. To make the unspeakable speakable. To unravel the censorship process – at its most plain in dreams – in order to free what has been shackled. At its best, the psychoanalytic process engenders freedom of mind where nothing is unsayable; at its worst, state censorship shuts down freedom of mind so that nothing is said. State censorship is established to operate like a super ego, quashing and punishing thoughts, feelings and ideas in films and deciding what limits to impose. It applies its idiosyncratic rules to the material in the name of conserving societal mental health, claiming that it labours always for the greater good. Its processes are frequently opaque, so that it remains a moving target for those whose artistic freedoms – either as artist or art lover – are being curtailed. This workshop seeks to make the process visible by engaging the participants in the censorship task directly. Excerpts from films will be shown where the decision to modify or ban the depiction of the same event resides in a consensus with controversy at its heart. Participants should be aware that some of the material to be screened is quite challenging.

 

Workshop  on Film Editing and Working Through, with Donald Campbell (Chair), Asher Tlalim and Jonathan Sklar
Someone else, the film viewer as well as the psychoanalyst, might see the truth of a person’s unconscious life, from the inconsistencies in the person’s behaviour, such as an incongruity between the way the person says something and the content of what is said. The film editor needs good instincts, experience and knowledge to present in parallel, for example, the conflicts between the actions and words of the protagonist, to let the observer - the viewer of the film – see the split between the part of the mind which has knowledge and the other part which harbours secrets. The editor must present in his film how the unconscious is an elementary and inescapable fact of the everyday life in the film’s hero, to let the observer feel if the person is lying to himself. Sometimes the editor will even make the viewer feel - because of something in the protagonist’s behaviour - darkness on a cloudless day.
Asher Tlalim, a film editor, will present the basic principles of film editing and analyse scenes from Lars von Trier’s and Ingmar Bergman’s films. Tlalim, a renowned Israeli filmmaker, will also show the editor’s thinking process through clips from his own films, especially The Missing Picture.
The Missing Picture focuses on the journeys of three people, one of them Tlalim himself, dealing with shell shock during the Yom Kippur War. The film is edited in one energetic attempt of the three protagonists to liberate themselves from the event that had distorted their lives. Tlalim’s films are always about the shock of trauma as seen in many prisms of the Israeli society. His films try to find images and words for wordless experiences.

 

 

Workshop on The Producers, with Catey Sexton (Chair), Simon Chinn and Irma Brenman Pick
Simon Chinn will discuss and demystify the role of the producer, drawing on his own experience of producing both feature documentaries and factually-based dramas. Using his recent documentary feature Man on Wire as his main example, he will discuss the process of taking a project from conception to screen and the many obstacles faced along the way, especially when working with demanding and proprietorial documentary contributors. Using the drama The Government Inspector (dir: Peter Kosminsky) - which told the tragic story of Dr David Kelly - as another example he will also discuss the challenges of telling real people’s stories in a dramatic framework.