Janet Bergstrom (ed.),
Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 520 20748 3
305pp
Au $33.95 (pb)

(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Uploaded 30 June 2000

Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories is an anthology of eleven essays emanating from a 1993 UCLA conference. Janet Bergstrom explains in her introduction she chose the title because cinema and psychoanalysis seem to share a “modality of timeless dark wandering . . . in their quest for logics of meaning”. (1) If the title also implies they never meet, Bergstrom intends the collection to form part of a dialogue between film theorists and psychoanalysts. As such, it marks the shift away from that psychoanalytic film theory which focused on spectatorship or sexual difference. Instead, the essays here are “diverse examples of contemporary historiographical inquiry which do not lose sight of cinematic specificity”. (5)

The better essays try to do just that. For example, Bergstrom’s own piece uses the “splitting” common in the attitudes of the children of holocaust survivors towards their parents to explore the different representations of mothers and daughters in Chantal Akerman’s films in the context of Akerman’s relationship to her own mother, a holocaust survivor. However, her omission of Kristeva’s work on motherhood, language and racism is surprising. Janet Walker’s essay connects psychoanalysis’s problems with the seduction theory to the suppression of incest in Freud (1962) and King’s Row (1942). She uses theories of dissociation to argue that sexual trauma became textual trauma insofar as incest was dislocated into Jean-Paul Sartre’s screenplay for Freud and the trailers for King’s Row. Mary Ann Doane compares Sigmund Freud’s theory of a perfect memory machine, the “mystic writing-pad”, to Etienne-Jules Marey’s efforts to photograph the movement of time in order to explore temporality and storage as they pertain to early cinema. Ayako Saito reads Alfred Hitchcock’s trilogy of Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960) in terms of affect. While she issues an overdue challenge to Lacanian film theory’s exclusion of affect, her essay still pathologises the texts while ignoring the reactions of viewers. Unfortunately, Marc Vernet’s piece on the refusal of contemporary cinephiles to search the archives thoroughly suffers from insufficient evidence.

Stephen Heath is the only writer to consider the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema explicitly. He argues that it has often been a missed encounter because each has explored the other reductively. However, since he concentrates on elaborating Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek’s theories, he largely forgets cinema’s specificity. Zizek’s own contribution is on the lure of the fantasmatic, the technological “interface” and the anxieties of virtual reality. While undeniably a “trip”, reading Zizek is a bit like his theory of the Other: in the end it’s much ado about nothing. Joan Copjec also deploys Lacan and Zizek in her stimulating discussion of melodrama and Stella Dallas (1937). She argues the genre is structurally feminine, characterised by the use of free indirect narration which creates an indeterminate or open-ended reality that gives melodrama its excessive quality. Readers will be challenged by her diagnosis of Stella as an hysteric who “makes herself the limit of the world she brings into being – and she does so precisely by subtracting herself from it”, especially in the final scene. (265) Copjec’s preference, though, for structuralism over historicism in her desire to locate the origins of melodrama in the eighteenth century almost results in the French
Revolution being reduced to a baby’s cry for its mother.

Apart from Walker, three other essays touch on Freud and Sartre’s screenplay. Practising analyst Alain de Mijolla reminds us of the extant home movie footage of Freud, while lamenting that, of the fictional portrayals of psychoanalytic therapy, only 19/19 (1985) succeeds because it induces transference in spectators through Freud’s absence on screen. However, examples such as Woody Allen’s films or the popularisation of psychoanalysis in 1940s Hollywood cinema are not discussed. Another analyst, David James Fisher, focuses on Sartre’s depiction of Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis, particularly Freud’s struggle against anti-semitism, the intersubjective nature of analysis, and his bond with his father. Peter Wollen contends that Freud’s adventurous character attracted Huston and Sartre to the project. While Sartre and Huston had restricted access to documentary material, they clearly distorted their evidence in order to present Freud as an “heroic” figure. Given the recent deconstruction of Freud and psychoanalysis, it is odd that Fisher and Wollen chose to return to such historically inaccurate representations, or that Bergstrom even selected these pieces.

Perhaps Heath is right: this book is a catalogue of missed opportunities. Some essays are little more than sketches and lack research. The nexus between cinema, cinema studies and psychoanalysis is not explored in detail, as it was by Shoshana Felman and Peter Brooks in psychoanalytic literary criticism years ago. There are no pieces on queer sexualities or post-colonial subjectivities in the cinema. Hollywood cinema after 1962 is ignored. The absence of any substantive engagement with Julia Kristeva or Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s writings is telling. Can we think of cinema without reference to such things as abjection, melancholia and love? Notwithstanding Saito, this book fails to reckon with how films affect us. As long as psychoanalytic film theory continues to pathologise our enjoyment of the cinema while imagining it as a primarily visual medium, it will remain subjected to the work of Lacan and Zizek. If Endless Night is the state of things, hope for dawn’s early light.

Tim Groves