Film Reviews

This is the first in an occasional series of arts reviews that we plan to publish alongside the regular book reviews. The medium is film in this issue, but we hope eventually to cover all media, applying psychoanalytic thought to the various meanings of an artistic object in itself, or as a representative of an artist's repertoire. Reviews are invited on any art form from music to television soaps to anything that can be considered a created object. Please contact Carol Topolski, Book Reviews Editor, 7 Belmont Road, London SW4 OBZ. Tel. 020-7627 0607.

The Attraction of Fear: Some Psychoanalytic Observations on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

The relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema is complex and fascinating. To begin with, they are both young disciplines, just over a century old; in fact they happen to share the same birthday - the screening of Louis Lumière's first films in Paris coinciding chronologically with the publication of the first psychoanalytic book, Studies on Hysteria, by Breuer and Freud . Alfred Hitchcock was born with Die Traumdeutung four years later.

But there is plenty more that cinema and psychoanalysis have in common. They both allow, indeed encourage through a process of free associations (mostly visual in one case, verbal in the other), the exploration of deep emotional meanings in our existence and of the often uncertain boundaries between reality and fantasy. Gabbard (1997) has suggested that ‘to a large extent, film speaks the language of the unconscious’. Dreams, for example, which have such a central place in psychoanalytic theory and technique, use a similar idiom as do many movies - symbolic expression, condensation, displacement, flashbacks and editorial cuts leading to distortions of time and space.

Alongside semiological studies of the film language and ‘deconstructive’ approaches to cinematic (as well as literary) texts, psychoanalytic theories have been since the 1960s the most influential in academic film criticism, especially o