Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier by Homay King Durham, NC:  Duke University Press 2010,  205 pp

Given the first screening of film in Paris in 1896 and the publication of Freud's (2010) Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, cinema and psychoanalysis have been wedded for 120 years. Freud's description of dream-work includes cinematic features such as rapid shifts in time and space, memory fragments, persons known or imagined, and shifts in tone such as terror, exhilaration, and erotic feelings. George Méliès (2012), the French filmmaker and theorist, characterized the dream as a kind of narrative, with close-ups or long shots, representing actions or stories waiting to be told, revealed, or remaining enigmatic.

Psychoanalysis throughout the 20th century has consistently been used to study the psychological, narrative, and formal properties of cinema as an art form. This examination has included themes, authorship, biographies of directors, reception theories of varied audiences, and both national and ethnic assumptions of class, taste, and race. But most of all, cinema is intimate in its viewing, just as the psychoanalytic process is intimate in its talking. Psychoanalyst and theorist Jean Laplanche certainly must have known or experienced, even if unconsciously, that film had been part of his own development of the theory of implantation or imprint of culture on a young child. This process contributes to what Laplanche calls alterity, or the Other within the psyche of the individual being.

In Lost in Translation by Homay King,1 we can review notions of image,

signification, message, and translation, primarily in American films, where mise-en-scène depicts East Asian Orientalist tropes — not based on authentic East Asian aesthetics, but on “hybrid, distorted, or fanciful versions … in the form of Chinoiserie and the similar” (King, Vacheron, & Xiong, 2020).2 King applies Laplanchean