Jacques Lacan Talks About Psychoanalysis with Panache (1973)

Both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy act only through words. Yet they are in conflict. How so? There we have the question posed to psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and world-famous public intellectual Jacques Lacan in the video above, a clip from a scripted quasi-interview called Television whose answers play like his famous lectures. Watch it, or watch our previously featured video of Lacan giving a talk, and you’ll experience one quality that made him world-famous. Few others could combine such high-flown subject matter with such theatrically emphatic oratorical ability — an ability you can sense even if you don’t understand French. Fortunately, subtitles have been provided, offering Anglophones a chance to understand what connections the man saw between the unconscious, language, Freud, sexual relations, and comedy.

“There are, insofar as the unconscious is implicated, two sides presented by the structure, the structure which is language,” Lacan begins. “The side of meaning, the first side, the side we would identify as that of analysis, which pours out a flood of meaning to float the sexual boat.” These remarks come pre-written in the script of Television, something between a conversation and a play that grew out of Jacques-Alain Miller’s failed attempt to film a traditional interview of the psychoanalytic luminary. “After every cut, when it was time to start up again, Lacan shifted a bit in his discourse,” Miller wrote in Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of Television. “Each time he gave an additional twist to his reflections which were unfolding there, under the spotlights, thwarting any chance of bridge-building. We stopped after two hours; I gave him in writing a list of questions; and he wrote [Television] in about two weeks’ time. I saw him every evening and he gave me the day’s manuscript pages; then he read or acted out — with a few improvised variations — the written text. He made a spring-board of this false start.”

Source: openculture.com

'Fight Club': Psychoanalytical Perspectives

This paper (click on image) will outline and describe the main aspects of psychoanalytical film theory as well as provide relevant examples through Fincher's (1998) adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's 'Fight Club'.

Issues of spectatorship and identification will be addressed in accordance with the filmic apparatus theory as well through acknowledging Lacanian psychoanalysis as an extension of Freud's original theories.

Freudian Psychoanalysis

New Wave Timeline 1960’s

1960

• Federico Fellini's La dolce vita, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura, and Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers spearhead the European art cinema's modern turn.
• Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature
• Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, is one of a cycle of British "Kitchen Sink" films dealing with everyday working-class life.
• Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom break new ground for representations of violence and criminal pathology.
• First ruby laser is built by Theodore Maiman.
• First successful hologram is produced.
• EG&G develops an extreme depth underwater camera for U.S. Navy.

1960s

• American drive-in theatre attendance peaks, then begins to decline as a new exhibition trend makes its appearance in the latter half of the decade: the shopping mall multiplex.
• Cinema, youth, and political cultures meet to produce several "new waves" around the world, most notably in Brazil, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latin America, Poland, and Yugoslavia.
• Commercial colour film is perfected.

1961

• Eastman Kodak introduces faster Kodachrome II colour film.
• Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, is a touchstone of reflexive, cerebral art cinema.
• Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, an experiment in collaborative ethnography and cinéma verité techniques.
• New York premiere of John Cassavetes's Shadows, a gritty, improvisational film exploring the theme of "passing for white" against the backdrop of white racism.
• In Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers (Shaoshi) builds Movietown, a 46-acre complex of studios, sets, laboratory facilities, and dormitories.
• Notable films include Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story.
• Also in History: First manned space flight.

1962

• Terence Young's Dr. No, stars Sean Connery as Cold War superspy James Bond.
• Glauber Rocha's Barravento, is a foundation work for Brazil's Cinema Nôvo movement.
• New York Filmmaker's Co-op is organized by Jonas Mekas to support the production, distribution, and exhibition of experimental and avant-garde film.
• After a decade as Hollywood's reigning starlet, Marilyn Monroe dies of a drug overdose.
• David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia stars Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.

1962-64

• Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, emblematic of a cycle of lyric films aiming to record the act of seeing, the flow of imagination, and the sensation of emotion.

1962-69

• The major Hollywood studios are bought by and become subsidiaries of American conglomerates.

1963

• The film director as superstar: Federico Fellini's 8½
•  Senegalese writer/director Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret is the first indigenous black African film.
• William Asher's Beach Party, is the first in a series of teen-oriented beach films starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
• Foundation of the Swedish Film Institute, revolutionary in its system of awards to quality films.
• Alfred Hitchock’s The Birds
• President Kennedy is shot to death in Dallas by a sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald.
• Also in History: Racial clashes, civil rights demonstrations, mass march in Washington
• Civil Right Demonstration, Birmingham by Charles Moore
• 126 Cartridge / Instamatic Cameras are introduced.
• Polaroid introduces instant color film.

1964

• Police arrest theatre owners on obscenity charges in Los Angeles and New York City for screening Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, two scandalous works of the American underground.
• Popular films: Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins, George Cukor’s My Fair Lady, Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther.

1965

• Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, is a stylised science-fiction adventure set in the future and shot entirely on location in Paris.
• Introduction of Super 8, a new amateur format.
• David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago
• Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music. 

1965-73

•  Also in History: Vietnam War. 

1966

• Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, emblematic of pop art cinema and of "Swinging London". 
• Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers relocates neorealism in Third World struggles.
• Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, a two-screen film with random reel order, is the first mainstream success of the American underground.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the first American film released with a rating ("SM"–Suggested for Mature Audience).

1967

• Mike Nichols's The Graduate and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde garner huge ticket sales by appealing to young anti-establishment audiences.
• Wavelength, a famous Structural film by Canadian Michael Snow.
• Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn star in the last of nine films they made together in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
• Also in History: Protests over Vietnam reach climax when 35,000 demonstrate outside the Pentagon.

1967-73

• European art films link social with sexual revolutions: Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious–Yellow, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema, Dušan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

1968

• Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a science fiction film of great technical accomplishment and a visionary quality without precedent.
• Argentinean filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's Hour of the Furnaces and Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, key works of the New Latin American cinema.
• The Motion Picture Producers of America (MPPA, formerly MPPDA) introduces a new four-point ratings system ranging from "G" to "X" to replace the now defunct Production Code.
• Student demonstrations in Czechoslovakia, France, Japan, Spain, the United States, and West Germany generate a wave of politically engaged collective filmmaking.
• Launching of the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, an important festival for Arab cinema held biennially in Tunis.
• Also in History: Assassination of Martin Luther King.
• Also in History: Tet offensive staggers Vietnam.
• Vietnam Execution by Eddie Adams (Viet Cong officer killed).
• Robert Kennedy Moments After He Was Shot by Bill Eppridge.
• Photograph of Earth from the moon. 

1969

• Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider criticise the American myth of individual freedom and appeal to a growing anti-Vietnam War protest movement; John Schlesinger's X-rated Midnight Cowboy wins the Academy Award for Best Picture.
• Launching of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival (FESPACO) in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.
• Also in History: Woodstock Festival.
• Man’s First Moon Walk by Neil Armstrong. 

New Wave Cinematography

The cinematic stylings of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that go beyond the common 180° axis. The camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but to play with the expectations of cinema. The techniques used to shock and awe the audience out of submission and were so bold and direct that Jean-Luc Godard has been accused of having contempt for his audience. His stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer's supposed naivety. Either way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects that now seem either trite or commonplace, such as a character stepping out of their role in order to address the audience directly, were radically innovative at the time.

Classic French cinema adhered to the principles of strong narrative, creating what Godard described as an oppressive and deterministic aesthetic of plot. In contrast, New Wave filmmakers made no attempts to suspend the viewer's disbelief; in fact, they took steps to constantly remind the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images, no matter how clever the use of light and shadow. The result is a set of oddly disjointed scenes without attempt at unity; or an actor whose character changes from one scene to the next; or sets in which onlookers accidentally make their way onto camera along with extras, who in fact were hired to do just the same.

French New Wave: Key Works

Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) is a 1965 black-and-white French science fiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.

Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. There are no special effects or elaborate sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (in 1965 they were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. The film is set in a futuristic alternative present. The characters refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.

Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.

The 400 Blows (French: Les quatre cents coups) is a 1959 French drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Albert Rémy, and Claire Maurier. One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. Written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, the film is about a misunderstood adolescent in Paris who is thought by his parents and teachers to be a troublemaker. Filmed on location in Paris and Honfleur, The 400 Blows received numerous awards and nominations, including the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director, the OCIC Award, and a Palme d'Or nomination in 1959.

The film’s most famous shot is the closing freeze-frame, in which the boy is caught with his back to the sea. Simultaneously both sad and defiant, it remains one of the most famous endings in film history.

Jules and Jim (French: Jules et Jim) is a 1962 French film directed by François Truffaut based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund.

One of the seminal products of the French New Wave, Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight cameras to create an extremely fluid film style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles.

Jeanne Moreau incarnates the style of the Nouvelle Vague actress. The critic Ginette Vincindeau has defined this as, "beautiful, but in a kind of natural way; sexy, but intellectual at the same time, a kind of cerebral sexuality, — this was the hallmark of the nouvelle vague woman." Though she isn't in the film's title Catherine is "the structuring absence. She reconciles two completely opposed ideas of femininity".

Video Editing Structure: Guidance

Introduction:

• Outline the principles and context of your 'new wave' study
• What did they oppose/achieve? - techniques/social/break from tradition

Brief summary of the period

• Historical context
• What you will be focussing upon - era/directors/films?

Examples

• Films/Directors/Actor
• Techniques - more detail
• Issues - more detail

Impact

• On audience?
• On industry?
• On other 'new waves' ?

Conclusions

• Summary
• Implications and legacy

What Makes a Video Essay Great? from Fandor Keyframe on Vimeo.

American New Wave: Documentary

Video Essay: The New Wave and the Left Bank, or A Certain Tendency in Modern French Cinema

 

A Certain Tendency in Modern French Cinema from Jose Gallegos on Vimeo.

“I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.”

– Agnès Varda

This video was a labor of love. Made for an undergraduate course on Avant-Garde movements in France, it attempts, as Madame Varda suggests, to use images in order to recreate reality. In this case, that reality is modern French cinema from the late 1950s to the late 1960s. Using Jean-Luc Godard’s trailer for Masculin Féminin (1966) as a template, this montage of French films, which date from 1958 to 1967, gives a visual and aural understanding of modern French cinema. Having stated this, it is important that the reader not confuse the umbrella term of “modern French cinema” to solely mean the French New Wave. While the New Wave was influential, and is a popular term to use for filmmakers of that time, it was one of two movements that coexisted in France at the time.

La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave)

The French New Wave was an idiosyncratic movement that sought to revolutionize narrative structures, genres, characters, plots and film techniques.François Truffaut, one of the founding members of the New Wave, foreshadowed the arrival of this movement in 1954 when he wrote “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” a manifesto published in the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Truffaut argued that French films lacked individuality and self-expression. Citing such directors as Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock and Roberto Rossellini, Truffaut called for a new group of directors to take the reins and follow in these men’s footsteps by creating films that unmistakably belonged to their respective director. Five years after the publication of Truffaut’s article, the Cannes Film Festival awarded Truffaut Best Director for his feature film debut, The 400 Blows(1959), which told the story of a hopeless boy named Antoine Doinel (Truffaut’s doppelgänger). The premiere of this work was an important event that introduced the first ripples of the New Wave.

A year later, Jean-Luc Godard, a fellow critic at Cahiers du Cinéma, premiered his own debut feature, Breathless (1960), that recounted the adventures of a Bogart-loving criminal and his American girlfriend. Cinema would never be the same. Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette joined Truffaut and Godard in creating a slew of iconic films. The New Wave directors, like Charles Baudelaire, who a century before them invented the “poem in prose,” created works that crossed artistic boundaries by incorporating philosophy, theater, linguistics, journalism and painting into films. This band of cinephiles opened the door for the potential of cinema.

La Rive Gauche (the Left Bank)

While the French New Wave directors were making a splash in the international film scene, a second group of directors were making their own movement in France. In 1958, Louis Malle screened his first film, Elevator to the Gallows(1958). Revolutionary for its intricate plot, brilliant acting (especially by Jeanne Moreau) and jazz score by Miles Davis, audiences were introduced to the birth of a new movement: the Left Bank. Unlike the New Wave directors, the Left Bank directors focused on narrative-driven plots, experimentations in time and space on screen and transpositions of literary works, especially those of the Nouveau Roman, onto the screen. A year after Malle’s debut, Alain Resnais' Left Bank masterpiece Hiroshima mon amour(1959) drew praise for its ability to experiment with personal and collective memory, and its boldness in confronting the politics of the Hiroshima bombing. These two films solidified the reputation of the Left Bank as an important movement in cinematic history. Other directors, including Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy and Chris Marker, would join the movement and help the 1960s become a decade for modernization of cinema.

Yet like most artistic movements, the Left Bank, along with the New Wave, would slowly die out.

The “Waves” Begin to Crash

Around 1967, the New Wave and Left Bank had become outdated forms of expression. By May 1968, many of the New Wave and Left Bank directors became politically involved in the student riots. In the aftermath of this political revolution, the band of filmmakers began to disperse and pursue different paths: Truffaut began making commercial films that appealed to the masses; Godard explored the limits of the “film essay” genre and the philosophical potential of film; Malle went on to make films overseas; and Resnais explored other projects beyond his political works of the ’50s and ’60s. Although these two movements were short-lived, the influences of these men and women were (and still are) incalculable. Had it not been for these two movements, the films of Quentin Tarantino, Wim Wenders, Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodóvar, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, John Woo and countless others would be shells, devoid of the influences and energy they attempted to replicate from the two movements.

The images that the New Wave and the Left Bank provided did not just offer an alternative to reality, they created a “modern” reality for future filmmakers and audiences alike. This “modern” reality opened doors that would allow for other movements in other countries. The waves of the two movements may have crashed, but the ripples still linger.

Jose Gallegos is an aspiring filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His student films can be found on YouTube and you can also follow him on Twitter.

Re-posted from: Indiewire

New Wave Editing

While Godard's films stand out for their opposition to cinematic conventions, particularly those that manipulate audience reactions, generalisations about the director's style must acknowledge that "style" is a convention he appears to reject by constantly changing what he does and the way he does it. Breathless offers a comprehensive catalogue of New Wave stylistic traits: rapid movements, use of handheld cameras, unusual camera angles, elliptical editing, direct address to the camera, acting that borders on the improvisational, anarchic politics, and an emphasis on the importance of sound, especially words. In light of Godard's later work, however, Breathless can seem rather more conventional in style than its reputation as an "experimental" film suggests, a paradox that demonstrates the extent to which Godard's language has entered all realms of filmaking, including the mainstream. "What makes Breathless a quintessential New Wave film," Dudley Andrew explains, "is not a particular technique or techniques but the energy with which it speaks." Thus Godard's "style" is characterized primarily by displays of artistic freedom and imagination. Nonmainstream filmmaking allowed (and continues to allow) him a freedom from the "constraints" that come with larger budgets.

An analysis of the opening scene of Breathless confirms that Godard both avoids and uses most of the traditional techniques for establishing a scene and character. Within a conventional film, the first shot might have been a LS (or XLS) of Michel sitting at an outdoor café along a harbor quay. Instead, Godard uses a MCU of the front page of the Paris Flirtnewspaper, which conceals Michel's face and the Marseilles location, offering instead a photograph of a woman in a swimsuit. Despite the lack of a traditional establishing shot, we can recognize from the weather and clothes in the subsequent shots that the time is summer, but we would be hard-pressed to know from any outward signs that the location is the port city Marseilles in southern France. However, the location is not as important as Michel's self-description: "All in all, I'm a dumb bastard. After all, if you've got to do it, you've got to." Next, when a couple get out of a big American car, a woman signals Michel, who hot-wires and steals the Americans' car and drives away. Godard uses a dissolve, that most conventional of devices, to get us from the city to the countryside and the open road.

Edited from: wwnorton.com/college/film/movies2