Mental Images in Cinema: Flashback, Imagined Voices, Fantasy, Dream, Hallucination and Madness in Film
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DOCTORAL THESIS Mental Images in Cinema Flashback, Imagined Voices, Fantasy, Dream, Hallucination and Madness in Film Luchoomun, Lawrence Award date: 2012 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 Mental Images in Cinema: Flashback, Imagined Voices, Fantasy, Dream, Hallucination and Madness in Film by Lawrence Luchoomun BA, MA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of Media, Culture and Language University of Roehampton 2012 Abstract In this thesis we consider cinema’s representations of mental images. Our central concerns are the formal aspects of the presentation of memory and imagination, and the various functions which the different types of mental images perform. While along the way we engage with a number of expedient theories, on the whole the argument is free of any over- arching theoretical approach, instead focusing largely on the evidence of the wide range of films — from different eras, genres and national cinemas — with which we engage. We begin with a consideration of filmic representations of memory, tackling such questions as: What exactly is a flashback? What different functions do flashbacks perform? What is the relationship between flashback and the mental images of memory? Identifying an inadequacy in current terminology, we here introduce the concept of ‘act of memory’ in order to distinguish between representations of the past which constitute an analogue of the mental images of memory and more properly subjective representations of mental images. In Part II we develop a taxonomy of the major forms of imagination. Here our discussion of imagination draws on cognitive and phenomenological theories of imagination, and the chapter on dreams draws substantially on Freud. In our consideration of the functions of the various sorts of mental images we establish a series of character types who are prone to experiencing mental images. Throughout Part II we argue that representations of mental images are often closely related to themes of madness — that many representations of mental images can be understood as traces of madness. Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………...1 PART I - MEMORY Chapter1. Flashback………………………………………………….20 Chapter 2. Act of Memory…….……………………………………..65 I. Prompts………………………….…………………………77 II. Bergson and Proust…….………………………………….91 III. Form………………………….…………………………..99 IV. Defining madness……………………………………….127 V. Recalled voices…………….….…………………………131 VI. (Act of Memory) Function….…………………………..152 Conclusion to Part I………………………………………………….170 PART II - IMAGINATION Introduction to Part II……………………………………………….173 Chapter 3. Imagination………………………………………………174 Chapter 4. Imagined voices…….……………………………………204 Chapter 5. Fantasy…………………………………………………...229 Chapter 6. Dream……………….…………………………………...256 Chapter 7. Hallucination…………………………………………….289 Misperception……………………………...…………….289 Form…………………………………….………………..291 Sartre’s phenomenology of hallucination………………..293 Cognitive Theory of Hallucination………………………295 Hallucination in Cinema Symbolic hallucinations……………………………297 Drug-induced hallucinations……………………….300 Recognised hallucinations………………………….305 Virtual reality……………………………………….309 Psychics…………………………………………….313 War neuroses……………………………………….316 Genuine hallucinations and states of madness……...322 The divine…………………………………………..325 Ghosts………………………………………………328 Conclusion to Part II………………………………………………..337 Conclusion…………………………………………………………..340 Bibliography………………………………………………………...348 Filmography…………………….…………………………………...353 Acknowledgements Thanks to my parents for their encouragement and financial support, without which this project would not have been possible. Thanks to Professor Stephen Deutsch for challenging me to stretch myself, for creating an exciting course which fostered creativity, and for his support during my year under his guidance; and thanks to Richard Hall for introducing me to twentieth-century modernist classical music. Thanks most of all to my supervisory team, Dr Michael Witt, Professor Michael Chanan and Dr Paul Sutton, for their guidance and inspiration, and for their boundless patience, generosity, and support. 1 Introduction Each of us carries within us a private world, the confluence of our past experience, our libidinal drives, our intelligence: the mental images of memory and imagination. It can be a place of sanctuary, consolation, escape from the realities of life, it can be a resource which fosters pensiveness or precipitates action, but it can also oppress, torment and tyrannise. By turns an oasis or a prison, the world of imagination and memory is irreducibly subjective. To a large extent, we are responsible for our mental images — our images present to us a mirror, reflecting our past actions, decisions, our drives and passions. But our existence in society, the inevitable and necessary interaction with other people that this entails, means that there is perforce a significant aleatory aspect to our mental images for which we cannot, in all fairness, be responsible. (For instance, we may remember with pain something hurtful that someone once said to us. We did nothing to provoke such an insult and, we feel, we are not responsible for the fact that we have remembered it; we were reminded of it by accident.) Nietzsche has a singularly pessimistic conception of memory. Memory — or ‘historical thinking’ — is pernicious, a ‘dark, invisible burden’.1 Indeed, for Nietzsche, happiness is defined by the ability to forget or […] the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory 1 Nietzsche, F. (2007) ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Rossington, M & A. Whitehead (eds) Theories of Memory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (first published 1874), p.103 2 without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is — worse, he will never do anything to make others happy.2 But, unlike the cows grazing in the field, or the toddler bouncing on her father’s knee — who exist as if immured in a perpetual present, impervious to past and future — man remains in thrall: he ‘clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this chain runs with him’.3 Such mental work as remembering and imagining is in essence a solitary enterprise. While there is, to be sure, a useful function to mental imagery, it generally tends toward the foreclosure of discourse. If not beyond communication, mental images are generally opposed to it. Others remain shut off, excluded from the great majority of our remembering and imaginative work. Our images are, in any case, often of limited interest to others. The raptures, despairs, elations and anxieties of our imagination are enveloped in a carapace of silence. Our mental images are expressions of an inner realm for which we are accountable to no one but ourselves. Topic The subject of this thesis is the representation of mental images in cinema. The idea for the subject of the thesis was conceived after reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27), and Sartre’s L’Imaginaire (1940), and by a viewing of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986). Sartre’s early phenomenological writings will form a key point of reference throughout the thesis. 2 Ibid., Nietzsche’s emphasis 3 Ibid., p.102 3 I became interested in the flashback as a narrational device, and began to ask myself questions. To what extent has the flashback been theorised in film studies? How far back do these studies go and how exhaustive are they? What is the value of a mental image in a film? Is it merely used as a shortcut, to avoid long verbal renderings? What other functions does it perform? Are mental images primarily liberating — as in The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002), when the pianist imagines the music which would issue from the piano were he to play it — or are they fundamentally oppressive — as in Scarlet Street (Fristz Lang, 1945), where Christopher Cross is haunted by the ghosts of his victims, Kitty and Johnny? Do certain situations or character types lend themselves to the experiencing of mental images? These are the core questions which will be addressed in the following chapters. When we consider how cinema has represented memory and imagination, one thing is immediately apparent: though they may prompt speech or action, mental images unfold in a private and subjective sphere, as opposed to the objective world of speech and action. There are some striking and memorable representations of characters in the act of remembering or imagining. The whole second half of Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock), for instance — in which, after discovering Judy, Scotty monomaniacally moulds her to his