IMAGINARY SIGNIFIERS/VOYEURISTIC PLEASURES

1. Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 3.

2. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies, Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

3. Stuart E. Liebman, Jean Epstein’s Early Film Theory, 1920–1922 (New York University Dissertation, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1983), p. 55.

4. The likening of films to dreams has accompanied the medium since its inception. See Charles F.

Altman, ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 524–6.

5. Freud described how dreams appear to us using the metaphor of film projection, as quoted in Jean Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Volume II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 532.

6. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965).

7. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Ecrits, a Selection (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977), pp. 1–8.

8. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 177.

9. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 311–546.

10. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 330.

11. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 389.

12. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 258.

13. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 587.

14. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 607.

15. The term cathexis was used by Freud to describe the process whereby a dreamer concentrates in an idea or thought charged with psychical energy (Interpretation of Dreams, p. 210, fn. 1).

16. Freud himself offers this correlation when comparing dream censorship to the social censorship of art (Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 175–7).

17. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan hypothesized that the unconscious is built like a language. Hence he maintained that the linguistic devices of metaphor and metonymy are to be compared or understood as Freud understood condensations and displacements in dreams (compared by Metz respectively to film dissolves and cuts). See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 281–92.

18. Surrealists, claiming there is no ontological difference between dream and reality, relied heavily upon Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of dreams. They also valued the medium of film because it allowed them to place real-looking objects in configurations that were impossible in reality, as they also practised in painting such as René Magritte’s painting of a train rushing out of a cemented fireplace or Salvador Dali’s drawings of melting clocks.

19. This same premise underlines neo-Marxist critiques of narrative continuous films as sweeping spectators away through their apparent continuity and henceforth effectively inculcating in them their ideology (see Chapter 3).

20. Lacan, ‘Mirror Stage’, p. 2.

21. Lacan, ‘Mirror Stage’, p. 2.

22. This is one of the sources of human desire. The notion of frustrated desires is cardinal to Lacan’s psychoanalysis.

23. Lacan had reservations concerning the Freudian understanding of the Ideal Ego (see Lacan, ‘Mirror Stage’, p. 7 fn. 1). Hence, whereas Lacan attributes the initial formation of the Ideal Ego already to the mirror stage, Freud attributed it to the Oedipal stage during which humans acquire a sense of gender and the boy in particular internalizes the figure of the father as Ideal Ego or superego (see on the Oedipus complex in the section dealing with Laura Mulvey).

24. Lacan, ‘Mirror Stage’, p. 2.

25. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, a Selection (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977), pp. 103–4.

26. On Lacan’s modes of cognition and their relation to Freudian stages of maturation see Lacan, Ecrits, pp. ix–xi; Metz, Imaginary Signifier, pp. 81–2, fn. 9.

27. See Chapter 3. See also Baudry, ‘Ideological Effects’; Heath, ‘Narrative Space’.

28. Christian Metz, ‘Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 543–9.

29. Metz, ‘Story/Discourse’, pp. 548–9. The concepts mentioned belong to Freud’s mapping of the human psyche into the ego, the superego and the id. It overlaps Freud’s other mapping of the psyche into the conscious and the unconscious. The id is the unconscious, the source of instinctual energies.

30. Daniel Dayan, ‘The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 438–51.

31. The notion that editing transitions threaten the film’s illusion and the attendant disruption of film’s manipulation of viewers has also generated different variations. See the discussion of Baudry’s and Heath’s positions in Chapter 3, where it is also shown how Lacanian-derived psychoanalytic theories of film informed Althusserian neo-Marxist film research.

32. In Greek mythology the nymph Echo had the power to generate speech, but was punished by jealous Juno who relegated her to the reproduction of sounds made by others.

33. Altman, ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema’, pp. 528–9.

34. Altman, ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema’, pp. 530–1.

35. Carroll, Mystifying Movies.

36. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 303–14.

37. Freud’s discussion of the Oedipus complex has several variations stemming from his claim that both genders have a bisexual component in their identity. All these versions however revolve around what he saw as the ‘positive’ case of the Oedipus complex resolution. On Mulvey’s critical review of Freud’s conception of femininity, see her ‘Visual Pleasure’.

38. Sadism, according to Freud, originates in Thanatos (the death instinct, as opposed to Eros, the sexual libidinal instinct driving fetishization), which nevertheless merges into sexual instincts through which it is discharged.

39. For example, Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 422, fn.1.

40. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 315, fn. 1.

41. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 315.

42. G. Studlar, ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures in the Cinema’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 605.

43. Studlar, ‘Masochism’, p. 605.

44. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’.

45. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, in Screen, 23 (1982), p. 81.

46. Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade’, p. 78.

47. Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade’, p. 87.

48. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 28.

49. Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade’.

50. Alexander Doty, ‘Queer Theory’, in J. Hill, P. C. Gibson, R. Dyer, E. A. Kaplan and P. Willemen (eds.), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 148.

51. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

52. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 25.

53. Patricia White, ‘Feminism and Film’, in Hill et al., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, p. 120.

54. White, ‘Feminism and Film’, p. 120.

55. In Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (British Film Institute, 1986), p. 18.

56. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson Press, 1980), p. 138.

57. Doty, ‘Queer Theory’, p. 149.

58. White, ‘Feminism and Film’, p. 121.

59. Doty, Queer Theory, p. 151.

60. E.g. Chris Straayer, ‘Redressing the “Natural”: The Temporary Transvestite Film’, in B. K. Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 402–27.

61. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:

Routledge, 1991), p. 149.

62. See Michael Heim, ‘The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace’, in M. Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 61.

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