Lacan and Contemporary Film

Lacan and Contemporary Film PDF

Author: Todd Mcgowan

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1635421063

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This unique volume collects a series of essays that link new developments in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and recent trends in contemporary cinema. Though Lacanian theory has long had a privileged place in the analysis of film, film theory has tended to ignore some of Lacan's most important ideas. As a result, Lacanian film theory has never properly integrated the disruptive and troubling aspects of the filmic experience that result from the encounter with the Real that this experience makes possible. Many contemporary theorists emphasize the importance of the encounter with the Real in Lacan's thought, but rarely in discussions of film. By bringing the encounter with the Real into the dialogue of film theory, the contributors to this volume present a new version of Lacan to the world of film studies. These essays bring this rediscovered Lacan to bear on contemporary cinema through analysis of a wide variety of films, including Memento, Eyes Wide Shut, Breaking the Waves, and Fight Club. The films discussed here demand a turn to Lacanian theory because they emphasize the disruptive role of the Real and of jouissance in the experience of the human subject. There is a growing number of films in contemporary cinema that speak to film's power to challenge and disturb the complacency of spectators, and the essays in Lacan and Contemporary Film analyze some of these films and bring their power to light. Because of its dual focus on developments in Lacanian theory and in contemporary film, this collection serves as both an accessible introduction to current Lacanian film theory and an introduction to the study of contemporary cinema. Each essay provides an accessible, jargon-free analysis of one or more important films, and at the same time, each explains and utilizes key concepts of Lacanian theory. The collection stages an encounter between Lacanian theory and contemporary cinema, and the result is the enrichment of both.

Psychoanalyzing Cinema

Psychoanalyzing Cinema PDF

Author: j. jagodzinski

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1137116943

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The essays within this collection explore the possibilities and potentialities of all three positions, presenting encounters that are, at times contradictory, at other times supportive, as well as complementary. The collection thereby enriches the questions that are being raised within contemporary cinematic studies.

The Real Gaze

The Real Gaze PDF

Author: Todd McGowan

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0791480364

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Winner of the 2008 Gradiva Award, Theoretical Category, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis The Real Gaze develops a new theory of the cinema by rethinking the concept of the gaze, which has long been central in film theory. Historically film scholars have located the gaze on the side of the spectator; however, Todd McGowan positions it within the filmic image, where it has the radical potential to disrupt the spectator's sense of identity and challenge the foundations of ideology. This book demonstrates several distinct cinematic forms that vary in terms of how the gaze functions within the films. Through a detailed investigation of directors such as Orson Welles, Claire Denis, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Federico Fellini, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and David Lynch, McGowan explores the political, cultural, and existential ramifications of these differing roles of the gaze.

Contemporary Film Theory

Contemporary Film Theory PDF

Author: Antony Easthope

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-22

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1317895673

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During the twentieth century, the medium of film has developed as a means of understanding the complexity of modern life. Since 1968, film theory has concentrated not so much on theme or content but on the deeper question of how the medium works on its viewer. Film theory has been profoundly influenced by the writings of such modern thinkers as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Anthusser, Derrida and Kristeva. It combines modes of textual analysis relating to linguistics and semiology, a Marxist reading of ideology, and theories of subjectivity, the spectator and gender redefined by psychoanalysis. This judicious selection from key work by Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doanne and others, represents some of the most important contemporary writing about film. It provides a consistent and developing analysis that will be of interest to students concerned with film and film studies, as well as students of cultural, media and communication studies.

Amorous Acts

Amorous Acts PDF

Author: Frances L. Restuccia

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780804751827

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Amorous Acts uses psychoanalytic concepts to show how queer theory is operating to put in place a non-heterosexist social order.

Out of Time

Out of Time PDF

Author: Todd McGowan

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0816669953

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A new temporal aesthetic in films such as "Memento," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "2046," and "The Hangover."

The Blue Box

The Blue Box PDF

Author: Frances Restuccia

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1441127739

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Informed by the theory of Julia Kristeva, Frances Restuccia analyzes a variety of contemporary films replete with psychoanalytic subject matter and styles. She examines films that present elaborate fantasies and, through them, prompt the viewer to cut across a crippling fundamental fantasy-by enabling a mapping of his or her private fantasy onto the one being played out on the screen. Such absorption is a function of the semiotic dimension of the film, which offers the spectator an experience of intimacy, negativity, the gaze, and death. Kristeva stresses that cinema has the power to bestow desiring subjectivity as a way of resisting the society of the spectacle through the specular. Through analyses of complex films such as Streitfeld's Female Perversions, Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Almodóvar's Volver, and Haneke's Caché, The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Film demonstrates Julia Kristeva's concept of the "thought specular," from her fascinating chapter "Fantasy and Cinema" in Intimate Revolt. Kristeva deserves our full attention as a film theorist.

Cinema of Confinement

Cinema of Confinement PDF

Author: Thomas J. Connelly

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2019-02-15

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0810139235

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In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess. Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.

Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game

Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game PDF

Author: Todd McGowan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 162892084X

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"Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game offers a concise introduction to psychoanalytic film theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Jean Renoir's classic film"--

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan PDF

Author: Sean Homer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-11-04

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 113452000X

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Jacques Lacan is one of the most challenging and controversial of contemporary thinkers, as well as the most influential psychoanalyst since Freud. Lacanian theory has reached far beyond the consulting room to engage with such diverse disciplines as literature, film, gender and social theory. This book covers the full extent of Lacan's career and provides an accessible guide to Lacanian concepts and his writing on: the imaginary and the symbolic; the Oedipus Complex and the meaning of the phallus; the subject and the unconscious; the real; sexual difference. Locating Lacan's work in the context of contemporary French thought and the history of psychoanalysis, Sean Homer's Jacques Lacan is the ideal introduction to this influential theorist.