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Vicky Lebeau; Wallflower Press, London, 2001; Cover price: £12.99; ISBN 1-903364-19-1 (pbk)
In this short but insightful book, Lebeau explores the related origins of psychoanalysis and cinema, while also offering a survey of key issues in the last 30 years of psychoanalytic film theory: "Very quickly, cinema becomes a way of talking about, of picturing, the mind for psychoanalysis - just as the mind becomes one way to consider the mechanism, and fascination, of cinema" (p. 2). Lebeau gives a very good summary of the most prominent psychoanalytic insights in film studies, including the Lacanian influences in French "apparatus" theory of the 1970 s, in feminists critiques of the "male gaze," and in recent re-evaluations of both (led by Slavoj Zizek and Joan Copjec) moving from the imaginary and symbolic to the Real. She attempts, she says, with each of her five chapters, "to make the field of psychoanalytic film theory readable by tracking its concepts back into psychoanalysis" (p. 9). And she mostly succeeds, which is quite an achievement in little more than 100 pages (for Wallflower's Short Cuts series on film studies), though with several shortcomings.
Lebeau begins with the specific cinematic aspects of hallucination, hypnosis, wish, and dream, regarding Charcot's theatre of hysteria and Freud's evolving theories - while mentioning ties to recent film theorists and present issues. She also quotes Freud, in a letter of 1885 to Martha Bernays, recalling Charcot's exhibition of female hysterics: "My brain is sated as after an evening in the theatre" (qtd. in Lebeau p. 20). Like Stephen Heath (whom she cites), Lebeau makes a crucial distinction between the theatres of Charcot and Freud. Charcot demonstrated the spectacle of hysteria, reproducing his patients' hallucinations through hypnosis. But Freud explored the meaning behind the symptoms, discovering a link between the spectacle and "the thoughts and feelings which support it" (p. 21). Freud moved beyond the temptation of voyeurism and sadism in spectatorship, becoming attuned to the words behind the body's performance (pp. 18-21).
Working with Breuer, Freud investigated the systematic daydreaming of Anna O., her "private theatre" as she called it. Lebeau connects this type of "theatre," as well as Charcot's, directly to cinema, without considering the live stage as a reference point - or cinema's...