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There is a certain nostalgic magic about the title of this book, echoed in its slightly out of focus cover, with an old fashioned movie camera and the reels of film, the magic that takes the reader straight into the world of celluloid. The world is illuminated by the light beam from the projector with the particles of dust dancing through it, with a lingering smell of popcorn, Hollywood glamour and high drama.
The content of the book grew out of the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival that took place in November 2001 under the chairmanship of the book's editor, Andrea Sabbadini. The volume belongs to the New Library of Psychoanalysis series.
I was certainly interested but quietly sceptical as well; can the book really reflect the atmosphere of such a complex and rich event; how possible it is to capture the spirit of the moving pictures in the stillness of the written word?
An Introduction by Sabbadini explores the relationship between the cinema and psychoanalysis, the way they influence and inform each other and how psychoanalysis can be used to enquire into the art of the cinema.
The book is divided into four parts; ‘Set and stage’, ‘Working through trauma’, ‘Horror perspectives’ and ‘Documenting internal world’. Each part is then divided into chapters and the contributors include actors, directors, producers, analysts, psychotherapists and film scholars.
‘Set and stage’ follows the Introduction with transcripts from two meetings of thespians and analysts, starting with Bernardo Bertolucci, Fiona Show and Chris Mowson discussing the inner and outer world of the film-maker's temporary inner structure. Bertolucci explains how in 1976, during the making of the film entitled ‘1900’ he came to accept that the movie is not a solitary opus but an expression and a collective creation of whole of the crew colony involved in its making. He likened the group dynamics to a kind of Uutopian, independent republic, where the crew leads almost a second life and becomes so su