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.
Film is of crucial importance in offering the opportunity to explore similar territory to that which the psychoanalyst studies in a different medium. The power of images and music together may create an extra dimension not possible with words alone. Viewing a film, as we normally do, in the darkness of a space shared with others, offers a specialized experience, partaking both of group and individual associations and states of mind. Associations to clinical material as well as one's own personal experiences are evoked. There are also of course issues about what of our experience we may project into film as well as what we may receive from the film and from the others with whom we share the experience.
Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary film by Patrick Guzman, one of Chile's foremost directors, set in the Atacama Desert in Chile, 10,000 feet above sea level. It immediately resonated with me and clearly with the original audience as a different way of thinking about the difference between mourning, melancholia, failed mourning and how to try to differentiate between these states of mind. This piece is not a ‘film review’ in the classical sense: much as a film editor might do, I have chosen to major on an overall theme. As is the issue with any ‘review’, a film interacts with the viewer's conscious and also unconscious preoccupations.
The opening footage shows the painstaking and laborious assembling of an old German telescope, iron wheels and brass cogs creaking and turning. The director explains that when he was young this was used to gaze at the stars. Guzman was always passionate about the skies, had learned the names of many visible stars by heart, and meanwhile he and his family lived “a simple provincial life”. Chile at that time was, as he describes it, “a haven of peace”. “This old telescope that I'm seeing again after so many years reminds me of my childhood. One thinks one has left childhood behind,” he says, but of course as we know we never do.
The art