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.
This slim book celebrates the capacity of cinema to explore the limits of human emotion and opens up psychoanalysis to new, broader applications in art. Paola Golinelli interweaves themes of loss and beauty, formulating a theory of aesthetics rooted in the infant’s capacity when frustrated to call
to mind an image of the mother’s face. The subject’s ability to summon this mental image assuages the first anxiety of separation, which Freud says is the prototype of all successive losses. Referencing contemporary films and clinical vignettes, her book elaborates on how this pivotal act is foundational to creativity and affirms the ascendency of Eros over Thanatos, providing the possibility for growth, peace, and transcendence.
An early chapter discusses the Venus de Milo as the most popular art object of the Western world. What is it about her? What do twenty-first century humans see in this half-naked, armless figure? Citing Ecco, Golinelli suggests it is because her arms are missing that this goddess attracts us. Ecco claims that this statue, though Parian marble, highlights our vulnerability to time. The mystery behind its magnetism is what he describes as the aesthetic of ruins:
The work can be enjoyed not only in spite of but thanks to its deterioration. And that's why we like the Venus de Milo as it is, more than if it had those useless arms of hers. It speaks to us…of the lost world it comes from.1
A touchstone for Golinelli is Freud (19162) and the notion that aesthetic beauty emerges from recognition of the ephemeral.
A subsequent chapter called “Traumatic States of the Self” revisits Cast Away , an American Hollywood drama directed by Robert Zemeckis about a FedEx worker who travels the globe troubleshooting problems in productivity before his plane crashes in the South Pacific. The sole companion of this modern Robinson Crusoe is a breast-like orb in the form of a volleyball named “Wilson,” with a bloody handprint in place of a nipple. Golinelli points toward