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Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film

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Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film Agnieszka Piotrowska BA MA A thesis submitted in partial requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Birkbeck College, University of London September 2012 1 DECLARATION I hereby declare that, except where explicit attribution is made, the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. Agnieszka Piotrowska September 2012 2 ABSTRACT Psychoanalysis has been used extensively in film studies from the late 1960s and 1970s onwards. Inspired by Jacques Lacan, the work of Metz and Baudry in France and Mulvey and McCabe in the United Kingdom laid the foundations for film theory that explored the relationship between cinematic systems such as the apparatus and the screen on the one hand and the spectator on the other. The objects of these examinations were exclusively fictional texts. I use psychoanalysis differently through an interrogation of a largely untheorised embodied relationship between the documentary filmmaker and the subject of her or his film from a psychoanalytical perspective. There are many types of documentary film. I focus in this work on films in which a testimony, sometimes dealing with trauma, or an autobiographical account of the other, is gathered by the filmmaker. To this end I work with a number of documentary texts, including my own practice. I look at the potential tensions that these encounters might create between the need to gain as full a disclosure as possible, often fuelled by the filmmaker’s unconscious desire (which may or may not coincide with the consciously stated aim), and the ethical responsibility for the subject of the film. I suggest that a variety of unconscious mechanisms known from clinical psychoanalytical practice might be operating in the process of documentary filmmaking. These unconscious ‘hidden’ factors, notably transference, have a major influence on the decisions made in the creation of the final texts and therefore also have an impact on the future audiences of these films, which is why it is important to bring them to light. The thesis deals also with ethics of the documentary encounter. Apart from mainly Lacanian psychoanalytical thought, I draw on post-Second World War philosophy dealing with the relationship of the ‘I’ to the Other, led by Emmanuel Lévinas, but including Althusser, Badiou, Butler, Derrida and others. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I wish to give my heartfelt thanks to Stephen Frosh without whom this adventure would not have happened. He has been my harshest critic and most generous supporter. Whilst I rummaged freely in the Big Forest of Knowledge, Professor Frosh never got tired of sending out search parties when I got lost. I have learnt so much thanks to him and from him during the last three years. I am also grateful to Laura Mulvey for keeping an eye on my film theory and for encouraging me to explore transference outside the clinic, and to Amber Jacobs for her productive challenges. I must say ‘thank you’ to Bernard Burgoyne, Denise Riley, Noga Wine, Elizabeth Cowie for their generous encouragement and probing discussions, and last but not least, to Mladen Dolar, who somehow has become a friend through the debates about his work and mine. My studies have been supported by a Birkbeck College Scholarship for which I am indebted. The extraordinary intellectual opportunities at the College and at the Department of Psychosocial Studies have been an important invaluable resource. In particular, I am grateful to Lisa Baraitser, Sasha Roseneil and Lynne Segal as well as Anna Strhan for their kind and wise words at key moments. I am also thankful to Polona Curk for her friendship and insightful comments on an earlier draft of the thesis. I wish to acknowledge the generosity and tolerance of my new institution, University of Bedfordshire, and in particular that of Peter Dean, in allowing me the time necessary to complete this work. My family, my husband Stewart Cornes and my son Leo Michelmore in particular, and friends all over the world, have endured the three long years of my obsessing about this work with humour and affection. It is probably unfair to single out anybody and yet I would like to say how grateful I am for the support and love of my two great women friends – not just throughout this research but over the decades of my life, namely to Ania Libertowska and Clare Riley. 4 CONTENTS DECLARATION .................................................................................................... 2 ABSTRACT............................................................................................................ 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 8 1. Preface: Patchworks and Quotes..................................................................... 8 1.1 Desire? .................................................................................................... 10 2. Methodology ................................................................................................. 11 2.1 Psychoanalysis and Love ........................................................................ 13 2.2 Psychoanalysis under Communism ........................................................ 15 2.3 The Objects of my Interrogations: Documentary on Trauma and Loss.. 17 2.4 Theory and Practice ................................................................................ 20 3. Modes of Autobiography .............................................................................. 22 3.1 Autoethnography and the Change of Scholarly Voice............................ 24 3.2 Female Autobiography as a Gesture of Subversion................................ 27 4. The Organization of this Thesis.................................................................... 28 5. Finally ........................................................................................................... 31 CHAPTER 1 ......................................................................................................... 32 Cinema and Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis and Documentary .................... 32 1. Introduction................................................................................................... 32 1.1 Psychoanalysis in Fiction and Documentary .......................................... 32 1.2 Why Psychoanalysis in the Late 60s?..................................................... 33 2. Influences and Definitions ............................................................................ 35 2.1 Structuralism and Psychoanalysis........................................................... 35 2.2 Lacan’s Basic Topology and the Mirror Stage ....................................... 37 2.3 The Phallus.............................................................................................. 39 3. Althusser ....................................................................................................... 40 4. Cahiers du cinéma......................................................................................... 41 5. The Development of Psychoanalytical Film Theory .................................... 42 6. Feminist Film Theory in a Dialogue with Psychoanalysis ........................... 46 7. Copjec, Žižek and Silverman – Different Perspectives ................................ 49 8. Psychoanalysis and Documentary................................................................. 51 8.1 Documentary Identification .................................................................... 51 8.2 Psychoanalysis ‘Inside’ Documentary.................................................... 53 8.3 Transference............................................................................................ 54 9. Conclusion .................................................................................................... 58 CHAPTER 2 ......................................................................................................... 61 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and Documentary Film ............. 61 1. Introduction................................................................................................... 61 2. The Unconscious........................................................................................... 63 2.1 The Unconscious in Seminar XI ............................................................. 65 3. Repetition...................................................................................................... 67 3.1 Repetition through Sublimation.............................................................. 67 3.2 Sublimation in Lacan .............................................................................. 70 5. Transference Outside the Clinic.................................................................... 75 5.1 Transference in Literature....................................................................... 77 5 5.2 Transference in Education ...................................................................... 80 6. The Drive and the Gaze ................................................................................ 81 7. Structure of Story Telling in Lacan............................................................... 84 8. Concluding Remarks..................................................................................... 86 CHAPTER 3 ........................................................................................................
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