Planning is in full swing for a three-part program on Cinema and Psychoanalysis for IPAC '95. The newly formed Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies (IPS) in North America, the Local Arrangements Committee, and the IPA have been working together on the program, which will open in San Francisco with two film events and conclude with a weekend Post-Congress in Los Angeles. To honor California as the film capital of the world, the program has been designated the official cultural event of the San Francisco Congress. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, August 1 and 3, two film classics shot in San Francisco will each be screened twice at the stunning new 700-seat theater of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Both of the films, Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo and Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Conversation, are rich in psychoanalytic meaning. The screenings, open to all Congress participants, will be offered on a first come, first served basis.
Vertigo depicts the unfolding drama around the obsession of an agoraphobic (James Stewart) with the idealized, fantasied, and elusive other woman (Kim Novak). The Conversation reveals a Rashomon-like narrative, unfolding in quasi-analytic style with layerings, contradictions, and reworkings via the repetitive replaying of a conversation audiotaped by a professional wiretapper (Gene Hackman), who has been hired by investigator Harrison Ford and baited by femme noire Teri Garr. The latter, like Hitchcock's Kim Novak character, invites regression and precipitates the male hero's downfall. Guests at the screenings will receive Vertigo and Conversation “maps” to locations around San Francisco where the films were shot, many within easy walking distance of the convention center. Walking tours will enable visitors to contrast their own firsthand experience of the locations with the directors' cinematic interpretation and construction of these sites to convey the “psychic reality” of their films.
On Friday afternoon, as part of the IPA scientific program, a panel will address the topic “Psychic Reality: Unconscious Projections of Gender and Power on the American Screen.” The panel, which includes analysts Glen Gabbard of Topeka, Antoine Corel of France, Emanuel Berman of Israel, and Waldemar Zusman of Brazil, as well as The Conversation's Oscar-winning sound editor, Walter Murch, will be chaired by Harriet Kimble Wrye of Los Angeles. The discussion will provide an opportunity to converse with the panelists on psychoanalytic aspects of the two films. One avenue for exploration starts from the fact that both film and psychoanalysis are impacted by, deal with, and shape psychic reality. Terms like projection and screen, though tantalizingly common to both, have different meanings for each, creating a need for language that will allow greater dialogue between the disciplines. The panel will work at developing a more adequate vocabulary while discussing film as text, film as unconscious representation of psychic reality, and film as dream screen, all within the unifying themes of gender and power.
On Saturday morning, August 5, after Friday's Gala Farewell at the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Post-Congress participants will fly to Los Angeles to convene at Shutters-on-the-Beach Resort in Santa Monica. The weekend begins with opening remarks by cochair Deborah Stem and a luncheon panel featuring Stephen Farber, film critic and coauthor of Hollywood on the Couch (see TAP 28/4), on the historical relationship between film and psychoanalysis. Post-Congress participants will then be guests at a Sony Pictures screening room for a preview of a major motion picture, followed by discussion with the filmmakers. A Saturday night reception at Shutters, a Sunday brunch panel, and a number of small group discussions will allow more in-depth individual and group interaction with filmmakers. Although Hollywood schedules are understandably quite fluid, Michael Apted, Ron Bass, Martha Coolidge, Bill Friedkin, Henry Jaglom, Sherry Lansing, Barry Levinson, Dan Melnick, Rob Reiner, Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, Ron Shelton, Ed Zwick, and other distinguished filmmakers have indicated an interest in participating. The Post-Congress thus affords analysts and film scholars a unique opportunity to meet major American filmmakers in an intimate setting to discuss their work, the process of bringing psychic reality to life in a collaborative medium, and the provocative issues of power and gender in films. The intent is not to psychoanalyze filmmakers, but to converse with them about psychoanalytic issues relevant to their work.
Post-Congress enrollment is limited to 225. A blue enrollment form picturing Freud in a directors chair is included in the green IPA Provisional Programme mailed to all IPA members in November. Enrollment forms must be received by April 15. Filmmakers' names, filmographies, and questions for discussion will be mailed in advance to enrollees. Participants are asked to preview selected films using these study questions in preparation for the small group discussions.
The planning committee expresses the hope that this ambitious three-part project will generate positive dialogue on many fronts. The program carries considerable meaning in terms of historical markers and bridge building, as it marks the centennial (roughly) of both film and psychoanalysis, and is set at the first American IPA congress sponsored jointly by the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies (IPS) in North America. The IPS initiated the project to celebrate its membership in the IPA and to develop a presence in the American and international psychoanalytic communities by organizing the first thematically integrated cultural event, scientific panel, and Post-Congress in IPA history. The bicoastal planning committee, chaired by Harriet Kimble Wrye and cochaired by Deborah Stern, both of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS) includes representatives from each of the four new IPA groups and The American. Committee members include Shirley Feltman, Mildred Forrell, and Nancy Goodman of the New York Freudian Society; Bennett Roth and Isaac Tylim of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR); Sylvia Hirsch Jones, Anne Marie Kelley, Susan Krevoy, Maggie Magee, Dixie Noble, Alan Spivak, and Judith Welles of LAISPS; and Diane Garcia, Shirley Gooch, Julie McCaig, and Jane Van Buren of the Psychoanalytic Center of California.
The American is represented by Martin Wasserman of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Benjamin Kilborne of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, Arthur Hoffman of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and Bruce Sklarew of the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film. Film critic and teacher Stephen Farber, Janet Bergstrom of the Cinema Studies Department of UCLA, and Diane Borden of the Department of Film Studies at University of the Pacific in San Francisco, are also on the committee. Inquiries may be directed to the Program Planning Committee on Film and Psychoanalysis c/o Harriet Kimble Wrye, Ph.D., 17711 Porto Marina Way, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 (310–454–0687; Fax: 310–454–9464).