You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
By taking a close look at two superficially different films, this essay outlines a fresh approach to psychoanalysis and film theory by exploring some ideas and approaches from object-relations psychoanalysis that offer potential for deepening our understanding of the ‘subjective-objective’ world of cinematic experience. It reframes some key analytical and theoretical issues and challenges for film studies, and hopefully yields new insights into interpreting films and understanding the cinematic experience.
This work had its beginnings many years ago. When starting out as a film studies specialist, I was brought face-to-face with a conundrum that set me on a path that led eventually to a series of inquiries into the relationship between cinematic experience, memory, and transitional phenomena: one day, in the course of preparing a class on British cinema, a recollection of seeing a particular film at the age of about six or seven burst into consciousness. The experience was almost bodily: in that moment I relived the powerful emotional response that the film produced in me when I first saw it. Mandy, the story of a deaf-mute little girl's struggle to learn to speak, was made at Ealing Studios in 1952 under the aegis of Alexander Mackendrick, the director also of The Man in the White Suit and Sammy Going South .
I was quickly seized by a desire to reconcile this powerful remembered experience with the analytical stance towards films and cinema that I was identifying with and learning to adopt in my scholarly life—and to do it without letting go of the texture and the intensity of the child's response. The two states seemed worlds apart, though; and film studies then had no way of taking on board the child's, the affective, or the otherwise ‘untutored’, engagement with film in tandem with the detached, intellectual approaches to conceptualising and understanding film spectatorship that were being cultivated within film studies: the principal model for thinking the psych