The Couch and the Silver Screen

Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema

Andrea Sabbadini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781583919514
• eBook ISBN: 9781135444518
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Couch and the Silver Screen is a collection of original contributions which explore European cinema from psychoanalytic perspectives. Both classic and contemporary films are presented and analysed by a variety of authors, including leading cinema historians and theorists, psychoanalysts with a specific expertise in the interpretation of films, as well as the filmmakers themselves. This composite approach offers a fascinating insight into the world of cinema.

The Couch and the Silver Screen is illustrated with stills throughout and Andrea Sabbadini's introduction provides a theoretical and historical context for the current state of psychoanalytic studies of films. The book is organised into four clear sections - Set and Stage, Working Through Trauma, Horror Perspectives and Documenting Internal Worlds - which form the basis for engaging chapters including:

• easily readable and jargon-free film reviews.
• essays on specific subjects such as perspectives on the horror film genre and adolescent development.
• transcripts of live debates among film directors including Bernardo Bertolucci, actors, critics and psychoanalysts discussing films.

The cultural richness of the material presented, combined with the originality of multidisciplinary dialogues on European cinema, makes this book appealing not only to film buffs, but also to professionals, academics and students interested in the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the arts.

Documenting internal worlds

12
NARRATIVES AND
DOCUMENTARIES
An encounter with Michael Apted and his films

Michael Apted and Helen Taylor Robinson

Helen Taylor Robinson (HTR) Michael Apted’s career of nearly forty years as a film director has earned him British Academy Awards for his work in television, a British Academy Award, the International EMI and the International Documentary Award for his remarkable documentary series Seven Up (1964) through to Forty-two Up (1998), a study of the developing lives of a small group of children followed through to adulthood. It is a series which Michael replicated as executive producer with children in the USA and also children in Russia. It has been a most influential and significant film. Michael’s feature film The Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), the story of country-and-western singer Loretta Lynn, won the Best Actress Award for his star, Sissy Spacek, and received seven Academy Award nominations. His film Gorillas in the Mist (1988) received a further five Academy Award nominations. Michael’s documentary film, Moving the Mountain (1994), an account of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, took the Grand Prize at the Heartland Film Festival, together with an International Documentary Award. In 1999 Michael Apted won the Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association for his work in the documentary field.

Michael has worked with many great figures in British and American television and cinema. He has made documentary films that examine the creative process both in science and the arts. He is probably most recently familiar to you as the director of the James Bond movie, The World is not Enough (1999), as well as his latest film Enigma (2001), a story set in Britain during the Second World War at Bletchley Park where the enigma codes of the Germans were broken, with consequences for the outcome of the war for the Allies.

Michael Apted’s career cannot be summed up in these brief words, as he has made over twenty major full-length films in twenty years, of which I have made no mention. Rather, we are privileged to look today with him at some of the images he has created in his direction of real and imaginary lives, and the way fiction and non-fiction, feature and documentary, and their interrelations have been used by him.

Michael Apted (MA) I suppose the biggest adventure, challenge of this event is to see if there is any common ground between what the professional psychoanalysts in the audience do, and what I do. I suppose we are both interested in authenticity, in the truthfulness of the characters we deal with, whether it is in a documentary film or a character that is being created by a writer and an actor. We all have our little tricks, our agendas, our processes, and what I would like to do is describe my process to you. When I joined Granada in the Sixties I remember two pieces of advice that were given to me. One is that there is no right way to do anything, to direct a film or a movie.You have to figure it out for yourself, you have to find who you are and then how best to communicate who you are; there are no lessons, there is no template, no book about it, you just have to figure it out; and you can only figure it out, I was told, not by learning, but by doing it.

The other thing that I was told was that you have to own the material.Now, I never write my own movies, and so I get my authorship ‘buzz’ out of doing documentaries. But whatever I am doing – and this advice was given to me in my early days doing drama, when I was directing Coronation Street for Granada (I will never forget it!) – is you have to take a grip of the material, own it, make it your own, put your own personality, whatever that might be, in it.

My thesis here, then, is that I have learnt this through doing documentaries and I have applied the lessons of documentaries to all my narrative work and all my fictional work. My career has been a sort of two-pronged attack on that – I have managed to keep documentaries going while making movies.

Let us start where I began, which is with this ‘Up’ series of films (Seven Up through to Forty-two Up and beyond). It started in 1964 as an examination of England in that year. England was going through a lot of cultural changes, the Rock’n’Roll fashion, the Swinging Sixties, and whatever.We wanted to look at England and see whether England was in fact changing or whether this cultural movement was just cosmetic. So, rather than drag in a load of psychologists, politicians, educationalists, whatever you want, we had the idea of bringing in some 7-year-old children and asking them what they thought about England, what they thought about themselves, what they thought about money, race, sex and all that. It was only ever intended to be one film, one snapshot of England at that time. Anyway, the film was incredibly successful and out of it grew this whole series of films.We decided seven years later to go back and visit these characters, which was pretty chilling – the 14-year-old spotted interviewee is not the most eloquent of creatures, it tends to be more or less monosyllabic, yes and no – but nonetheless, when we put it together we could see that we had the beginnings of a very powerful idea. And then we went on and I think that it really came good at about Twenty-eight Up (1985), and I had an epiphany then when I realized that I was not actually making the film I was making. I took the film to America, I was persuaded to take it to film festivals there. I did not want to take it as I did not think that anyone could understand it there, because so much of it was about social class, with lots of reference to public schools, private schools, comprehensives, and I thought Americans are not going to figure this out at all. Frankly, at the time, we all thought that we were making a political film about the state of the class system.The class system was alive and well (even though Rock’n’Rollers could own the world) and your average person, who was not born into opportunity, had much less of a chance of getting what he wanted out of life.Anyway, in the end I took Twenty-eight Up to America and they all got it!

It then occurred to me that maybe I had not been making a political film all this time, but that I had been making a humanistic document, I had been making a film about things that we all go through, all over the world: growing up, having children, having jobs, and all of that.And then I realized what I had really been doing, which I suppose encouraged me to keep going.We have now got up to 42 and we will keep going, as long as I am above ground and enough of them (the featured documentary children/adults) will do it.

I am now going to show you clips from the Up series which really lays my territory on the ground, as it were.This is the kind of bookend of my career, the first thing I ever did. Initially I was only a modest researcher on Seven Up, but it stayed with me my whole working life and probably will be the thing that is the most lasting of anything that I have done. Here we will see one of the characters called Neil, from Liverpool, and this is a little excerpt from Forty-two Up (1998) which shows the way that we integrated the different generations of his life from 7 years old to 42 years old.

Clips from the Seven Up series (1964, 1970, 1977, 1985, 1991, 1998)

Neil (N), age 7 Well, we pretend we’ve got a sword and we make the noises of the sword fighting and we go: aaaaaagh. . . .

Background voice (BV) Neil grew up in a Liverpool suburb.

N, age 7 In the winter if you live in the country, well, it was just all wet and there wouldn’t be anything for miles around and you get soaked if you try to go out, and there is no shelter anywhere except in your own house. But in the town you can go out on wet wintry days because you can always find somewhere to shelter, ’cos there’s lots of places.

BV At 14 Neil was at a local comprehensive school.

N, age 14 I think it’s a very good idea to have competition. Otherwise you might start to relax and not try hard enough. Being in set one is very very hard to keep up with the others. I never have the time to relax at all.

BV Neil had dreams of going to Oxford but he did not get in. Instead he went to Aberdeen University but dropped out after a term. At 21 he was working on a building site and living in a squat.

N, age 21 I came to London and I contacted an agency for squatters and they were able to give me the address of somebody who was able to help people who were looking for accommodation in the London area.

Background voice/Michael Apted (MA) You kicked against the stability.

N, age 21 I don’t think I ever had any stability, to be quite honest. I can’t think of any time in my life when I ever did. I don’t think I have been kicking against anything, I think I have been kicking in mid-air the whole of my life.

BV/MA At 28 Neil was homeless, wandering around the west coast of Scotland.

N, age 28 If the state didn’t give us any money it would probably just mean crime and I’m glad I don’t have to steal to keep myself alive. If the money runs out, well, then for a few days there’s nowhere to go to and that’s all you can do. I simply have to find the warmest shed I can find.

BV/MA How do people regard you here?

N, age 28 Well, I’m still known as an eccentric, as I have been since, umm, back to the age of 16 or so. I am not claiming that I feel as though I am in some sort of nirvana, but I’m claiming that if I was living in a bed-sit in suburbia, I’d be so miserable I’d feel like cutting my throat.

BV/MA At 35 we found Neil living on a council estate in the most northerly part of Britain, the Shetland Islands.

N, age 35 The nice thing about here is that you can cut yourself off when you want, because there are people living around but they are pretty quiet people. It’s an environment which sustains me, it’s one in which I can survive. I still feel my real place is in the world where people are doing what the majority of people do, and the reason I don’t feel safe is because I’m getting more and more used to this lifestyle which eventually I shall have to give up.

BV/MA And what would you like to be doing, say, in seven years?

N, age 35 I can think of all kinds of things that I’d like to be doing, the real question is what am I likely to be doing?

BV/MA What are you likely to be doing?

N, age 35 That’s a horrible question. I tend to think that the most likely answer is that I will be wandering homeless around the streets of London, but with a bit of luck that won’t happen.

[Sound of car engines and then diplomatic voice of Neil in background speaking about the Borough of Hackney.]

MA/BV At 42 Neil is a Liberal Democrat member of Hackney Council, he was elected two years ago.

So there you go, that’s your politicians for you! This is a story with, at least so far, a very positive conclusion. This illustrates what I like to call the two-way street of what I learn from one area and what I put into another (how documentary work helps me with feature film work): constructing this amount of material into a character, into Neil, who of course is his own character.Yet somehow taking six generations of material, which I have, and trying to make a coherent, if short, synthesis of his life, is something I have had to learn, it has taught me how to put characters in films, and vice versa as well.The structure of a character, the structure of a film, to try and create sympathy for a character before you get into the more tricky areas, I think I have learned through making narrative films with characters created by writers and whatever, and vice versa. The unexpectedness of life is something I try and inject in my movies, into the narrative of my movies, my imagined characters, if you like. But here in the ‘Up’ series we have gigantic amounts of material and the most difficult part of the film is to try and put it together so that it presents, honourably and honestly, who these people are at the seven-year interval I visit them. I don’t see them much between the seven years, but I like to see if I can catch who they are in that seven years. I must say that though I have lost three of the original fourteen participants, none of them have ever moaned about how they are presented – so I take that as a compliment.

I will never forget what Bernardo Bertolucci said about working with actors: that working with actors is in a sense making a documentary about that actor, the way that the actor becomes the character, the rehearsal – I don’t know whether Bernardo likes to rehearse with actors, but I do – and the shooting process is, in a sense, that process.As the actor becomes more and more attuned to the character, he brings what he is to the character and takes what he wants from the character, and it is a sort of documentary experience.When I rehearse films I try and keep it as loose and as ‘documentary’ as I can. Often this means that people who are going to play policemen, or doctors, or nurses go out and do that for a short time. I have always been encouraged to give an actor as much information about the life and time and the world that his character lives in. It is a double-edged sword because when they do that they then begin to have their own ideas about their character which I cannot ignore. If they say, ‘well, the character wouldn’t say this’, I have to pay attention to that.As the actor begins to approach his character, he begins to adopt the voice and so he may want the voice of the character in the imagined piece changed to fit his own speech patterns. Often you get into very tricky situations when actors want rewrites. But I think that if you are going to involve an actor, as Bertolucci says, in becoming the character, you also have to extract from the character the rhythms, the mannerisms, the behaviour that that person has.

So, one of the other things that I like to do is to mix up actors and non-actors, to use both. I find that that adds a real dynamic, a real tension into the process. As long as you cast people – I’ll call them people ‘from the street’ as opposed to trained actors – for who they are and what they can do, and don’t ask them to overreach themselves or overreach you, I think that it can bring an enormous authenticity, not just to a scene, but to the other actors’work because they cannot play tricks, as the people in front of them are offering their own personality, they are delivering who they are.

I am going to now show you a piece from The Coal Miner’s Daughter, which is the intriguing story of the country music singer Loretta Lynn, who grew up in the very poorest part of the Appalachians. She was married at 13, she was a grandmother at 29, and nonetheless she still managed to find a great strength out of her roots to become one of the great country music singers of the twentieth century.What I had learned from England – and I had done twenty years of work in documentaries and drama and television and...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• SET AND STAGE
• WORKING THROUGH TRAUMA
• HORROR PERSPECTIVES
• DOCUMENTING INTERNAL WORLDS