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The silver screen is a privileged field for the display and elucidation of creative contradictions that, in their different ways, characterise both psychoanalytic metapsychology and feminist theories. With even more directness than literature, cinema as a medium of mass communication (and, therefore, identification) as well as of cultural and political critique, can make the representation of ‘objects’—women, in this case, and by implication men too, in various positions of power, or lack thereof—readily accessible.
Even if located in a new context, this book's central preoccupation boils down yet again to a familiar conundrum: what do women want? It takes Elizabeth Cowie—Freudian and Lacanian theoretician, lecturer in film studies and feminist author (she was a founding editor of m/f)—some three hundred and eighty pages not to answer such an impossible question about the ‘dark continent’ and beyond; and we are grateful to her for it. Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis is the work of a dedicated scholar; a difficult, intelligent, ambitious, occasionally infuriating tour de force by an academic who seems equally at ease in producing articulate reviews of the complexities of psychoanalytic theory and in offering frame-to-frame interpretations of idiosyncratically selected film sequences, as well as a structural analysis of the cinematic vocabulary and grammar.
Predictably, it is language that provides the underpinnings to Cowie's understanding of both cinema and psychoanalysis. This is consistent with her disclosure in the Introduction that her thinking has been influenced by the French intellectual movements of the 1960s and 70s: Saussure's structural linguistics, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, Barthes's semiotics, Althusser's political critique of ideology and, of course, Lacan's école freudienne. Such a rich landscape (only Foucault's contribution seems to have been omitted from the list) allows Cowie to display with confidence several personae thro