A Conversation with Bruce H. Sklarew

Basseches: You were one of the founders of the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film. Tell me, how did the Forum originate?

Sklarew: Let me begin before the Forum. The first organized program in which psychoanalysts discussed films was originated by Steve Steury in the early eighties when he was director of the Extension Division of the Baltimore-Washington Institute. He coordinated four series of films in collaboration with the American Film Institute at the Kennedy Center. When Steve moved to Milwaukee, I organized a discussion series on Bergman's view of women in the context of female development, as the first of eight series with the Smithsonian Institution and AFI. Then we planned a more ambitious project, a retrospective of the work of Bernardo Bertolucci with his participation. The conference included four analysts, as well as four prominent film scholars, two of whom had written books on Bertolucci. It was to be a joint venture between the Baltimore-Washington Institute and AFI in New York, but as the budget approached ten thousand dollars, both AFI and the Institute pulled out. I then asked Bertolucci if he would consider doing it in Washington. As an Italian Communist, his response was, “I only know one person in Washington, Ronald Reagan. I don't think I want to do it in Washington.” So we scurried around to find a venue in New York. It was like producing an off-Broadway show. Without institutional sponsorship, four analysts—Paula Atkeson, Marianne Goldberger, Gene Gordon, and myself—decided to give ourselves a name: The Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film. Since we had a name and a grand beginning, Gene Gordon and I decided to form an organization, as though that's what the world needs. Later, we changed “Society” to “Forum.” Today we have a national membership of over four hundred, and some overseas.

Basseches: Tell me about the range of the Forum's projects and interests.

Sklarew: They range from the large and ambitious, like two weekend conferences with Bertolucci, to smaller local projects. We organized our fourth program last spring with the Film Society of Lincoln Center on the works of Jean Vigo, who directed the acclaimed L'Atalante and Zero for Conduct. Other projects include series with AFI and the Smithsonian, discussions at Columbia and other universities, collaborations on Jewish films with the Jewish Community Center of D.C. and the George Washington University Hillel, four programs with the Washington School of Psychiatry, and many at local community centers. We publish a newsletter of announcements and film discussions, called Projections, which we hope to develop into a journal. We also make available to members a bibliography on psychoanalysis and film, as well as lists of films discussed and programs. The Forum has chapters in Washington, New York, and San Francisco.

Basseches: So you've been very active. Who belongs to the organization, and who is on your Board?

Sklarew: Gene Gordon and I are co-chairs. Half of the Board are psychoanalysts from the Baltimore-Washington and Washington Institutes. Bertolucci is a nominal member. The rest are psychologists and social workers, an attorney, filmmakers, and film and literary scholars knowledgeable about psychoanalysis. The membership consists predominantly of people in the mental health field, as well as film scholars and others interested in film.

Basseches: Through the Forum's activities, I understand that you have become friends with Bertolucci, and that he has invited you onto the set of his films. What did you team?

Sklarew: I was invited by Bertolucci to the set of The Sheltering Sky in Morocco. I felt like I was in the midst of a magnificent primal scene experience: The set was a relatively small room, and I was cramped in a dark comer to get out of the way not only of the camera and the lights, but also out of the line-of-sight of the actors—Debra Winger and John Malkovich. It was like hiding and watching the world being created. Last November I spent two weeks in Katmandu, Nepal, and then a week in Seattle on the set of the not yet released Little Buddha. Part of the movie was shot around the supposed Bodhi tree, where Buddha experienced his enlightenment. In reality it is a tree about twenty feet in circumference, with a branch span of over a hundred feet. The tree was growing at the edge of a cliff, but since the director wanted space on all sides, they erected scaffolding that was about seventy-five feet high and put in about twenty-five feet of fill dirt solid enough to hold thirty or forty people. So they literally remade the earth.

I noticed an unusual daily rhythmic tension on the set. The morning started very slowly, with the director and crew seeming to meander around, mainly adjusting the lighting. The tension accelerated over the next hour or two, as they got closer to doing the first shot, and then repeating it over and over again with small variances of camera angle, lighting, and positioning. The tension would build and build until the shot was finished, followed by a huge sense of relaxation. Of course, there might be two minutes of actual film used in the whole day of shooting.

Basseches: You were impressed.

Sklarew: Yes. Bertolucci does his own research, is very erudite, mostly self-educated, and fluent in French and English. He sets up his own scenes. He's very much in control, yet very casual, accessible, and creative. It is well known that he has had extensive experience with psychoanalysis, and he reads Freud. He speaks of cinema as made from raw materials woven on a dream loom and has said that “psychoanalysis is another lens of my camera.” In seeming contrast to his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, however, he once said to me, “You biopsy my films,” a most overdetermined idea.

Basseches: You remind me of an article I read about the filming of Casablanca. It suggested that the filmmakers were deciding and writing what was going to happen right on the set. The actors were expected to play their roles when they did not know the outcome, yet it worked.

Sklarew: Yes. Ingrid Bergman wanted to know with whom she was leaving Casablanca. The director, Michael Curtiz, said, “We don't know and you don't need to know.” So film can be created in a helter-skelter way and still come out well.

Basseches: I know that you have collaborated with film scholars who use psychoanalytic ideas. Tell me how that works.

Sklarew: Such film scholars as Jeff Kline, who wrote a magnificent book, Bertolucci's Dream Loom, that I reviewed in the Quarterly, Krin Gabbard, the brother of Glen, and Ira Konigsberg at the University of Michigan have a good sense of applied analysis and have discussed films for the Forum and The American. We usually include film scholars so each discipline can inform the other. Because the ideas and language are used in disparate ways, the Forum tries to bridge the interdisciplinary gap. Film scholars usually do not have an historical sense of the development of psychoanalysis. For example, at one meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies, a scholar referred to the 1895 Project as if it were the last word in psychoanalysis. In another instance, I was approached by a scholar who had been reading oedipal interpretations in the literature on King Kong. But he had heard something about preoedipal issues that he didn't quite comprehend, yet thought might apply. He really wanted to check it out with an analyst.

Basseches: You have mentioned The American. You have a project going there as well. Is the Forum cosponsor?

Sklarew: The forum has no official function at The American, although it has presented three films in collaboration with the International. The American has a long tradition of showing a film and discussing it on Thursday nights at the meetings. In 1987 I proposed a more elaborate film program. We now have a two-or three-part workshop of viewings and discussions. For the past four years we have also had a discussion group on the same theme as the workshop. Themes have included the works of Bertolucci and Bergman, Images of Mothers and Daughters in the Maternal Melodrama, Film and Dreams, Voyeurism and Film, Surrealism and Film, Cinematic Projection/Psychotic Projection, Sadism and Masochism, Jewish Identity, Political Extremism, Gay/Lesbian Representations, Psychoanalysts in Film, and the Phallic Woman.

Basseches: Do you find that you've been getting a good response?

Sklarew: We've had a strong response, nearly thirty in the discussion group in San Francisco on analysts and therapists in film, and often fifty at the workshops.

Basseches: I heard on PBS that the film industry is going to be doubling its output in the coming year. Rather than people being less interested in going to the movies because of videos and TV, movies have been doing a booming business.

Sklarew: There are several reasons for that. First, watching a video at home is a very different, much less intense experience. It's easily interrupted or you can interrupt yourself, lessening the regression. The TV screen is small, rather than being lifesize or larger. The resolution is never as sharp, and on a TV screen the original film is incomplete because of the film/TV aspect ratio.

Moreover, film viewing has a greater immediate visual and auditory impact; it resonates more directly with unconscious processes. It places us in close contact with the primary process and affects, as in dreaming, and stimulates a range of fantasies. We imagine that early idealized love-objects still exist for us in the form of movie stars. Reality testing is in abeyance. The desire for cinema is like the curiosity for a forbidden primal scene experience as the viewer sits in a darkened theater riveted on exiting and often puzzling sights and sounds. Robert Eberwein, in Film and the Dream Screen, described a temporary dissolution of the ego that results in a merger of viewer and object. Michelline Frank and Ira Konigsberg have discussed viewing film as an intermediate zone between internal and external experience that functions as a transitional phenomenon. Arlow writes that art forms—including film—give us a vicarious opportunity to act out our sexual and aggressive impulses with exculpation from superego censorship. Further, film can inspire us to try on different roles, identify and find ego ideals in the characters, and “do the right thing.” Hollywood has been described as “the ultimate dream factory. It allows us to have the dreams we've never had, the dream we yet await.”

Basseches: I know there are many ways one can think about the relation of psychoanalysis to film. What does the psychoanalyst bring to our understanding of films, and, alternatively, what does film have to offer of value to the psychoanalyst? Would you address that reciprocity?

Sklarew: Historically, this popular visual medium originated at the same time Freud explored the transformation of thought into visual representations in The Interpretation of Dreams. Film continued as the new art form of the twentieth century, just as psychoanalysis became the science of the mind. It is speculative to suggest that studying film will teach us about psychoanalysis, but there are parallels between “film work” and dream work. We use our psychoanalytic skills to illuminate the many levels of motivation and conflict in the characters and their interactions as if it were all condensed clinical material. We approach film as an assemblage or montage of manifest dreams projected onto a dream screen. Of course, we do not have the transferences or associations as we do from patients, but we are alert to juxtapositions, symbolizations, and other demonstrations of the workings of the unconscious of the director, the screen writer, and sometimes the novelist. Bob Winer speaks of the voyeurism common to both watching film and listening to patients, a voyeurism that is sublimated in the interest of understanding. In both film and clinical work we attend to thoughts and feelings stirred up in us, in order to learn more. Our clarifications and interpretations of film to lay audiences can convey psychoanalytic ideas in an acceptable, palatable way.

Basseches: The representation of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in film is not very positive.

Sklarew: Irv Schneider wrote that moviemakers thought they invented a profession they called “psychiatry.” He characterized film therapists starting with the 1906 sanatorium superintendent, Dr. Dippy. There are a few Dr. Wonderfuls and an increasing number of Dr. Evils. This is also clear in the excellent book written by the Gabbards, Psychiatry in the Cinema. Therapists are often presented showing unethical and bizarre behavior, personal problems, or using strange and naive methods making them easy to ridicule. We are represented in these ways for various defensive reasons. Transference to therapists as authorities, parents, mind readers, noxious controllers—modern forms of witch doctors, demons, Greek or Roman gods—leads people to want to make us seem less powerful. Like the voyeur, the filmgoer reverses the patient's point of view, observing the life of the therapist from the shadows and thus feeling some defensive power over the therapist. In addition, the film viewer can project his or her conflicts onto the therapist, who becomes a repository for issues that can then be avoided.