The British Trauma Film

Psychoanalysis and Popular British Cinema in the Immediate Aftermath of the Second World War

Adam Plummer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9798765100479
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765100486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

While the historical influence of psychoanalysis on Hollywood cinema has received considerable attention, the same cannot be said for its influence on British cinema. This book examines the central position that psychoanalysis occupies in British cinema in the years immediately following the Second World War.

Plummer uses a critical theory framework to understand the role that psychoanalysis plays in British culture at this time as an historical discourse, and in British cinema as a narrative, a cultural, and an ideological discourse. He defines these as arising within various areas of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking related to traumatic wartime experience, sexual difference, and the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. He analyzes six British films of the period: The Halfway House, Dead of Night, The Seventh Veil, Madonna of the Seven Moons, They Made Me a Fugitive, and Mine Own Executioner and demonstrates how psychoanalysis operates within them as a narrative and formal structuring mechanism. He argues that this engagement enables these films to begin to address the emotional fallout of the war by creating safe representational spaces where contemporary audiences could engage with their own traumatic experiences.

While The British Trauma Film defines psychoanalysis as providing a language for British cinema at this time to confront the effects of wartime trauma, it finds that it also operates within a normalizing ideological system designed to reproduce dominant pre-war relations of political, social, and sexual power. However, in this group of films, this system is often countered by subversive discursive forces that seem to be immanent to the films themselves.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Althusser and Foucault, Psychoanalysis as Ideology and Discourse, and the Place of the British Trauma Film in British Immediate Post-War Cinema
• 2 “Broken Attachments and Traumatic Repetition”: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Loss, Trauma, Anxiety, and the Fragmentation of the Family Unit in The Halfway House
• 3 “The Perpetual Recurrence of the Same Thing”: The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma ad Infinitum, Male Anxiety, Sexual Difference and Motherhood, and the Interplay between Subjectivity and Objectivity in Dead of Night
• 4 “What Does a Woman Want?”: Childhood Trauma, Female Desire, and Female Subjectivity in The Seventh Veil and Madonna of the Seven Moons
• 5 “The World Is Full of Neurotics”: The Traumatized Serviceman, the Collapse of Maternal and Paternal Functions, and the Effects of Post-War Cultural Malaise in They Made Me a Fugitive and Mine Own Executioner
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• The British Trauma Film—a Filmography
• General Filmography
• Index
• Imprint