Moving Pictures : Films Through a Psychoanalytic Lens

We enter a movie theater, find a seat and recline as best we can, waiting to be transported. Transported not only to another place and time, but to the perspective and sensibility of another person. It might be likened to a form of dissociation or, perhaps more positively framed, to a heightening of empathy. We not only roam the world in space and time, but we do it from a perspective only partly our own. Filmmakers, assigned the task of pulling us in, appeal to our curiosity and our intellect, but also to our emotions, our desires and fears. The premise of the articles in this book is that in doing so they go beyond our conscious, surface desires and fears, finding access to our less conscious fantasies and distant memories. I won't attempt to say how they learn to do it, but hope to demonstrate their cunning in what follows. Who would have thought, for instance, that we could walk into a movie theater and experience subtle reminders outside our awareness of the experience of a parent teaching a baby how to walk? These articles were written individually over the past eleven or twelve years for the Bulletin of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York, the PANY Bulletin, and published on-line at InternationalPsychoanalysis.net. I have loosely assembled them in groups with titles that could probably apply to any of these films, but clearly they can be read in any order as individual pieces, each probably best taken in a single bite. We do not usually think of psychoanalytic ideas as fun or of popular films as educational, but I hope you will find both to be true. Films allow us to see into the workings of our minds; but, above all, these were written to be fun, to tell a good story from an alternate point of view.