Embodied Encounters

New approaches to psychoanalysis and cinema

Agnieszka Piotrowska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138795259
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317636489
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What is the role of the unconscious in our visceral approaches to cinema?

Embodied Encounters offers a unique collection of essays written by leading thinkers and writers in film studies, with a guiding principle that embodied and material existence can, and perhaps ought to, also allow for the unconscious. The contributors embrace work which has brought 'the body' back into film theory and question why psychoanalysis has been excluded from more recent interrogations.

The chapters included here engage with Jung and Freud, Lacan and Bion, and Klein and Winnicott in their interrogations of contemporary cinema and the moving image. In three parts the book presents examinations of both classic and contemporary films including Black Swan, Zero Dark Thirty and The Dybbuk:

Part 1 – The Desire, the Body and the Unconscious

Part 2 – Psychoanalytical Theories and the Cinema

Part 3 – Reflections and Destructions, Mirrors and Transgressions

Embodied Encounters is an eclectic volume which presents in one book the voices of those who work with different psychoanalytical paradigms. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, scholars and students of film and culture studies and film makers.

Part I

The desire, the body and the unconscious

Chapter 1

Catherine Breillat and Courbet’s L’origine du monde [The origin of the world] (1866)

Emma Wilson

(i)

In her volume, Catherine Breillat: Indécence et pureté, Claire Clouzot writes that Breillat has always refused psychoanalysis. In Clouzot’s argument, film itself is Breillat’s couch, fiction her transference: ‘Son divan est la pellicule. La fiction son transfert’.¹ For Clouzot, indeed: ‘The subject of her work is her unconscious’.² I note that she uses here the French word ‘pellicule’, that signifier for film and film stock that carries with it a memory of skin, of diaphanous surface as well as filmy acetate. Sarah Cooper offers an account of this very skin-like, layered impressionability of Breillat’s works, their unconscious form and force. In her brilliant article, ‘Breillat’s Time’, she argues that in these films: ‘[l]inearity is dilated through the presence of memory, the imaginary and fantasy, or disrupted, in favour of cyclical movement or myth’.³ Cooper’s analysis of this wishful, dilated form in Breillat’s works, their approach to a psychical reality, inspires and underlies my attempt here to understand a meeting of the sensory and the unconscious in her films. I offer a complicit response to Breillat, a sensory, imaginative investigation, as I feel my way into her works.

(ii)

Breillat’s are inchoate, ravishing films. For me their wager is to touch some membrane, some limit, between the unconscious and the sensate world. Breillat dramatizes and reflects on that peculiarity of filmmaking where living others, vulnerable, luminous, opaque, are choreographed, directed, moved, exposed, held in filming.⁴ The lush, impressionable surfaces of bodies, their poses, responses, colouration, inflection, are organized into moving image art, massed, stilled, treasured in fictions which reach towards an untouchable, an unspeakable.

Critics concur that this aim, pursued across ten films from the 1980s forwards, reaches its acme in Anatomie de l’enfer [Anatomy of Hell] from 2004.⁵ Here an unnamed woman (Amira Casar) pays an unknown man (Rocco Siffredi) to come for four nights to look at her sex, her hair, and the lips of her vulva. In this one scenario, first developed by Breillat in the novel Pornocratie,⁶ and borrowed in part from Marguerite Duras’s La Maladie de la mort [The Malady of Death],⁷ the filmmaker finds in perfect dramatic form, infinite, timeless, the compulsion of her films with the unconscious in sensory material, with an image, and viewing scenario, thick with sensuality, ravishment, opacity, unknowing.

(iii)

A precursor for this viewing scenario, this display of the female sex, comes in Gustave Courbet’s 1866 L’Origine du monde, painted for the collector Khalil Bey (Ottoman ambassador to Athens and St Petersburg) and later owned by Jacques Lacan, apparently purchased for his wife Sylvia Bataille.⁸ Speaking about meaning versus eroticism, Breillat herself has facilitated and anticipated comparison between her films and the painting, saying: ‘What I love in art and in love is The Origin of the World’.⁹ And critics have commented on the connection between the painting and Breillat’s sex shots. Sarah Cooper writes:

even when the film does fetishize body parts, it is not complicit with the ways in which this dissection has worked against the representation of women in film. Its more provocative focal points (the pubis or anus) take us to a different visual source, more resonant with Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866), and this trajectory works utterly in keeping with Breillat’s project to film what is usually left outside of filmic representation.¹⁰

Douglas Keesey continues more affirmatively:

Breillat modeled the close-up of Amira’s sex on Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting […] which has both naturalistic detail and mythic power in its magnified view of a woman’s vagina. Breillat’s close-up is not the ‘beaver shot’ of pornography that belittles and objectifies the female sex for male consumption, but a shot of woman as goddess with awesome creative and destructive power.¹¹

My reading is in line with Cooper’s and Keesey’s; both attend to that paradox of Breillat’s filmmaking where, for Cooper, she mounts feminist critique and approaches what is outside representation and, for Keesey, she marries sensory realism and unconscious force. Both create a further imaginary gallery of pictorial reference alluding between them too to Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814).¹² These other images are certainly highly resonant for Breillat, in her attention to flesh and surface, but I want to pause here over what I take to be further determined significance of Courbet to Breillat, signalled most pressingly in the example of L’Origine du monde, but extending beyond it too.

(iv)

In his book on the painting Thierry Savatier singles out L’Origine du monde saying it:

is not a painting like any other, it has a unique place in Western art because it represents without concession, or historical or mythological alibi, not only a woman’s sex, but THE sex of Woman [LA Femme] and, beyond that, of every woman, lovers and mothers.¹³

At the end of his book, Savatier imagines the painting as a representation of Eve, of the eternal feminine. In a chapter about possible models for the painting, he wonders whether this may be the unseen body of Joanna Heffernan, Whistler’s mistress also painted by Courbet, or indeed the dark-haired model in Le Sommeil [Sleep] (1866). He also raises the question of whether the painting may have been inspired by a photograph. He pauses over coloured photographic images taken by Auguste Belloc now held in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s enfer; several of these represent a woman’s torso, cut off, and her displayed vulva.¹⁴

Courbet’s image L’Origine du monde and his realist aesthetic date from that fold of the nineteenth century where photography and painting are held in parallel, in live interaction in their aim to touch, to catch the real.¹⁵ If Courbet’s image is realized from a photograph, a new layering, a tissue of relations between imprint on light-sensitive paper and brushstroke in viscous paint, is secured. If Belloc’s images are copied, and aggrandized in paint by Courbet, a token that is erotic and illicit, the pornographic photograph underlies the epochal image of hair and flesh. L’Origine du monde is no secret tribute to an adored woman, to the intimacy of facing her tenderest parts, but an all-but mechanical reproduction of a pre-existing image. As Savatier details, there are explicit similarities between Courbet’s painting and Belloc’s images: an equivalent framing, a comparable presence of cloth or petticoat hiding the model’s face, an almost identical pose.¹⁶ The photographs are made possible because a woman shows her vulva and as we look at it we know this was actual flesh and skin. Yet the register of the images, their reference points and affect seem, as Savatier points out, largely clinical rather than intimate. The photographs look out to traditions in anatomical drawing that bring with them the coolness of scientific inquiry and the morbidity of post mortem dissection. If Courbet had already lingered at that meeting point of Eros and Thanatos in his ambiguous, and repainted, La Toilette de la morte [Preparation of the Dead Girl] (1850–1855),¹⁷ in L’Origine du monde, in implicit contest with the photographer, he further closes this divide. Oil, the touch of the brush, apparently conjures sentient life. For Savatier, in Courbet’s painting the woman’s skin seems velvety, soft and supple to the touch.¹⁸ Yet the photographic intertext, the chop of the framing and foreshortening in both, the shadow of the cloth, a mortuary sheet drawn back, make the image grave, more gravid (pregnant) too. The pall of photography has fallen over the painting.

It is this play between photography and painting that makes Courbet’s image of further interest as intertext in Anatomie de l’enfer. Breillat is working with moving images, created from photographic frames set in motion through optical illusion. Her visual style, the lighting and framing of her films, their stillness, is often pictorial, and her set pieces are often embellished, rendered the more resonant, through connection to painted art. In Anatomie de l’enfer, in her reference to L’Origine du monde, she takes us to the heart of issues about her medium, the moving image, and its sensory and unconscious possibilities.

(v)

An advantage of the moving image, over painting or still photography, is that it can simulate movement itself, a living trigger or ripple of feeling that reminds us of the sensation and animation of the other, of her living and breathing. This quality of cinema and its prehensile, immersive possibility, is brought out sensuously in recent work on cinema and the senses. In the chapter on ‘Skin’ in her book The Tactile Eye Jennifer Barker thinks through the eroticism of film viewing. She writes:

In the palpable tactility of the contact between the film’s skin and viewer’s skin, and in the extent to which that contact challenges traditional notions of film and viewer as distant and distinct from one another, the tactile relationship between the film and the viewer is fundamentally erotic. Film and viewer come together in a mutual exchange between two bodies who communicate their desire, not only for the other but for themselves, in the act of touching.¹⁹

Barker’s argument about film viewing emphasizes mutuality and realization. She writes of the relation between film and viewer:

In the mutual contact of one another’s skins, each recognizes the other as a perceptive, expressive, and desiring subject. Not only do we perceive the other, as we make contact with it, as a ‘real’ and tangible subject, but we also perceive ourselves more tangibly as well.²⁰

This mutuality in film viewing, calqued from erotic exchange, offers an ideal of involved, enraptured, apprehensive, embodied spectatorship. This is mutual, for Barker, and it is blossoming, world giving; ‘In some sense’, she says, ‘the touch of our skin upon the world and that of the world on our skin is what brings us into being’.²¹ She moves on to claim: ‘The erotic touch is not about ownership or complete knowledge of the other, but is truly intersubjective’.²² The work of Barker, Beugnet, Marks, Sobchack, Quinlivan and others has done so much to attend to film viewing as a living, breathing experience, as involved in a relay of sensations across our skin, even in our viscera.²³ And this is in part in order to dismantle the theoretical apparatus that has constructed film viewing as psychic exclusively and geared towards mastery. Yet it is evident too that this embrace of fleshy viewing need not disregard some of the hesitations and uncertainties to which psychoanalysis has been so peculiarly attuned.

Indeed it is bringing these different modes of thinking about spectatorship into contact that may allow some closer, more proximate approach to the dispossession and rapture cinema such as Breillat’s allows. In her preface to the screenplay of Romance she contends that emotion is the written texture subliminal in cinema.²⁴ We think we see what isn’t present, because of all that we are made to feel, or we see, and deny what we are seeing, in the face of engulfing emotion. If Breillat’s filmmaking is so attuned to these vicissitudes, these convulsions of viewing, it is also radical and attentive, ethical,²⁵ in its embrace of different investments. Her films extend very differing invitations to different viewers. In their extremism, in their approach to unconscious desires and fantasies they allow highly cathected, subjective responses, releasing different possibilities. Because the encounter with film, its touching our skin, our psyche, happens so variously (as is acknowledged in the subjective modes of some phenomenological accounts of film), thinking sensuous theory and psychoanalysis in contact may open still more sensitive ways of reckoning with these variations, with the infinite, sometimes unspeakable pleasures that Breillat’s films may release.

(vi)

In her coruscating volume Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Laura Mulvey attends to cinema in a way that registers its chimerical qualities, its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The desire, the body and the unconscious
• PART II Psychoanalytical theories and the cinema
• PART III Reflections and destructions, mirrors and transgressions
• Index