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.
The cinema screen, according to this book, holds the mirror up to nature, to the unconscious conflicts and defenses of the audience. This assertion is demonstrated by analyses of the plots of American, British, and French films of A grade, over two hundred in number, released after 1945. Their themes, classified under Lovers and Loved Ones, Parents and Children, Killers and Victims, Performers and Onlookers, are interpreted in terms of psychoanalytic concepts,
and the characteristic ways in which each national group deals with emotional dilemmas are compared.
In explaining the purpose of this book the authors say '… where a group of people share a common culture, they are likely to have daydreams in common'. They quote the lines:
But when a dream night after night is brought
Throughout a week and such weeks few or many
Recur each year for several years, can any
Discern the dream from real life in aught?
Yet the authors conservatively correlate actuality and celluloid fantasy. Their statements are graded according to their degrees of confirmability. First, there are the assertions that certain defense mechanisms, as revealed in movie plots, are typical of particular nationalities; next, there are the '… guesses about the psychological processes of movie makers and their audiences to account for the emotional significance of recurrent themes'; and last, '… assumptions about real life patterns of American culture, and attempts to connect them with some of the movie themes and their emotional bases'.
We can follow with confidence the thinking of these authors, since they are armed with caution and self-criticism. Indeed we can go further than their observations and inferences and ask several questions. To what extent can distinctive characteristics of different groups be explained and defined in terms of defense mechanisms? To what extent could similar studies be used to further our understanding of other nations, more remo