Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#101 Post by Mr Sausage » Sat Aug 10, 2013 6:19 pm

This is where something like Bayard's book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read makes a good contrast, because of course we all do it, and there's a certain tongue-in-cheek humour to be derived from promoting it. But with Zizek I can't get behind his honesty because it's the honesty of a criminal who brags about a crime he knows he'll never be prosecuted for. It's a sheer display of power, not a commendable honesty.

Academics are a funny bunch. The increasing narrowness of academic specialization makes wide reading across disciplines near impossible, yet academics rarely want to admit how extremely focalized their reading is. So you get all this fronting. We're long past the days of academics like Ernst Robert Curtius or Erich Auerbach or Northrop Frye or Frank Kermode, scholars who genuinely had read pretty much everything.

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gcgiles1dollarbin
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#102 Post by gcgiles1dollarbin » Sat Aug 10, 2013 8:51 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:> the potential for Žižek to write an extremely valuable chapter on Rossellini without having seen
> a single film by Rossellini--something I believe is entirely possible

With all due respect, I don't think this is even remotely possible.
I understand why you say that, but I not only think that it's possible, I also believe we cite authors' work all the time in which this has been the case: work that fudges the research, work that uses secondary sources in lieu of putting in the hours with primary texts. In fact, I'm willing to wager that if you have read a ton of film criticism, a portion of what seemed of value contains pronouncements upon books or films that were not exhaustively read or watched. And that's putting aside the assertions made by authors about films they have no memory of viewing. Very few authors aside from Žižek would be willing to admit this (because very few could do that with impunity), but having spent years slogging away in academia--reading the good, the bad, and the ugly in academic prose--I'm pretty confident it happens all the time. For example, I read what I thought was a valuable article written by Jameson about Syberberg's Hitler, and while I enjoyed it, it became obvious toward the end of it that he had either not watched the entire film, or had completely forgotten large parts of it. I only caught this because I had just seen the film in its entirety. And yet it didn't negate the points he was making; the overarching ideas were sound, compelling, even if the details were occasionally dodgy. The article helped me process the experience of watching an ideologically dense film. It could be he was making "honest" mistakes; that is, he simply forgot. It's more likely that he just didn't care that much.

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repeat
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#103 Post by repeat » Sun Aug 11, 2013 12:59 am

Just a couple of random thoughts -

First of all, as the detractors' beef with him seems to be largely political - you're criticizing him for abuse of a position of power - we'll have to ask: who put him in that position? You're talking like he's performed some sort of a bloody military coup of the academia and now towers dictatorial over everyone else. You're accusing him of committing a crime by accepting money for writing off the top of his head; but why is he being paid? Is he extorting this money in some way from his employers? It's your responsibility if you're paying for it. Also I don't think you can hang it on him if his acolytes behave like the crowd in Life of Brian ("you've got to think for yourselves!" "yes! we've got to think for ourselves!")

Second, this business of "different rulers" just smacks like sour grapes or even vested interest to me. I can understand why another scholar might feel that, but not a disinterested observer. It reminds me of a young debutante poet, reviewing the maybe 25th collection by a senior writer, and bitching about why he "can get away" with copy-pasting his diary entries and shopping lists into a poem, while "everyone else" has to exhibit "rigor" (another cancerous concept). To the grad student who cries why he can't get away with similar bullshitting, I say: because you're not Slavoj fucking Žižek, deal with it.
Gregory wrote:Those for whom Zizek is just an imp or a gadly may reply that criticizing his intellectual rigor misses the point of how Zizek works, but I think it's fairly clear that he does want his thoughts to be taken seriously.
I think he wants his propositions to be taken seriously, as possibilities. I don't get the impression that he wants to ram a system or a worldview down everyone's throats, because you couldn't even pin down what that system is for all his self-contradiction and lack of "rigor".
Mr Sausage wrote:The increasing narrowness of academic specialization makes wide reading across disciplines near impossible, yet academics rarely want to admit how extremely focalized their reading is
This is such a funny point to bring up because Žižek stands exactly for the wide-ranging and self-contradicting erudition that is missing from the academic institution. You should try to view him more as a catalyst who generates stimulating collisions that others might not even come up with.

I'm not really even interested to defend him, although that's where I seem to have put myself for the sake of conversation - really I'm just always fascinated by the psychology behind extremely divided reactions to artists or artworks. Maybe I can't get with the hostility as personally I have little patience for the "rigorous scholarship" you wish to protect from Žižek's corroding influence. From where I stand, he is definitely not to be measured with the same stick; he's the joker in the deck, whose self-proclaimed mission is to "short-circuit" contradictory ideas to produce possibilities for new ones. I think he stands for more entropy and less rigor, and criticizing him for lack of rigor just seems to me to miss the point entirely, as Gregory suggested.

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FerdinandGriffon
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#104 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Aug 11, 2013 1:38 am

I don't know anyone, even amongst those who take Zizek very seriously indeed, who takes him seriously as a film critic/theorist/scholar. It's so patently obvious that the references to films in his writing are completely utilitarian; the film, or its synopsis, or his fantasy version of the film is just fodder or a starting point for his ideas about ideology or theory or whatever else he wants to talk about at that particular moment. The movie itself, as it really exists, doesn't enter into it. It's just a jumping off point, a convenient complex of ideas his readers are already familiar with that he can then play with or tear apart as he pleases. Under ordinary circumstances I have less than zero interest in reading about The Matrix or Avatar or Titanic, but I'm happy to read Zizek's commentaries as their subjects are not actually the terrible movies he's ostensibly talking about. As I see it, it's as absurd to claim he's a bad film critic as to claim he's a good one. He's not a film critic at all.

Also, Zizek's fantasy versions of films aren't plucked from the ether, they're based on prevailing cultural attitudes or ideas of the films and what they represent in the public discourse. When he wrote about Avatar it was only after several months of previous commentary and general hype-machinery. I think this ideal Avatar (or avatar-Avatar) is just as worthy of study and analysis, if not more so, than the real thing.

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FerdinandGriffon
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#105 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Sun Aug 11, 2013 1:47 am


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knives
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#106 Post by knives » Sun Aug 11, 2013 1:51 am

Is that where the clip of him talking naked is from?

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#107 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Aug 11, 2013 1:53 am

repeat wrote:This is such a funny point to bring up because Žižek stands exactly for the wide-ranging and self-contradicting erudition that is missing from the academic institution. You should try to view him more as a catalyst who generates stimulating collisions that others might not even come up with.
This probably comes down to a matter of taste. Some are really taken by theorists who say a lot of interesting sounding things, many times without regard to the intrinsic value of the statements themselves, because said things might open up interesting avenues of thought. While this has never done much for me, I can see why it does something for others. For me the model of the playful, inventive, erudite critic is William Empson, because he managed to be all of those things without pretense or sloppiness.
repeat wrote:Maybe I can't get with the hostility as personally I have little patience for the "rigorous scholarship" you wish to protect from Žižek's corroding influence.
Is this directed at me? I ask because you put 'rigorous scholarship' into quotes as tho' I had said that exact phrase even tho' haven't (no one besides you has). Also: you've said the word "rigor" more times in this very post than in the entire rest of this conversation (five times vs Gregory's two). What a peculiar bug-bear.

To me, rigorous means: precise, exact, highly-detailed, accurate, and thorough. If these are the qualities you have little patience for, that's just fine. You won't be the first person won over by fuzzy thinkers with pleasing mannerisms.

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repeat
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#108 Post by repeat » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:02 am

FerdinandGriffon wrote:the film, or its synopsis, or his fantasy version of the film is just fodder or a starting point for his ideas about ideology or theory or whatever else he wants to talk about at that particular moment
Totally, totally. Like everything else; low culture, high theory, everything is just material for him. His value is exactly in that he pays attention to things that more seriously inclined scholars don't consider worthy of any.
Mr Sausage wrote:
repeat wrote:Maybe I can't get with the hostility as personally I have little patience for the "rigorous scholarship" you wish to protect from Žižek's corroding influence.
Is this directed at me?
Not directed at anyone in particular, but I suspect it's a key concept here - that what's at work here is just a conflict between two types of temperament: people who think that only things that are executed in a rigorous fashion are worthy or being taken seriously (or being paid for), and those to whom "there is nothing silly about being silly", to quote a great artist. I wouldn't say bugbear but perhaps a bit of a hobby-horse - I do view it a potentially very dangerous concept, even in the definition you give there. Precision, exactitude or even accuracy hold no intrinsic value for me, and consequently I can't get worked up against someone like Žižek.

I wouldn't say I'm exactly won over by him, but I'm willing to cut him more slack than the detractors are, and I like the way he seems to serve an autocritical function within the academy - like a pop band that uses the mechanisms of pop but at the same time draws attention to how those mechanisms work. After all he is basically a pop star. I'm unfamiliar with Empson but will put him on my reading list...

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#109 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:18 am

To me, a strict attention to maintaining intellectual rigor is more appropriate when one approaches all conversation as though it were a debate; it can be maddening to talk to someone who seems to be pulling everything out of their ass, but I think there are times and places where allowing someone leaps of ideas and intellect, meeting them halfway instead of challenging them at every step, can lead to fascinating places- places that are often unreachable if one's ideas have to be put forward as though a mathematical proof, with a citation for each.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#110 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:18 am

repeat wrote:I do view it a potentially very dangerous concept, even in the definition you give there. Precision, exactitude or even accuracy hold no intrinsic value for me.
It's probably not worth my while to ask for a clarification if you don't see the point in being accurate or precise. I wouldn't be surprised if you were true to your word and have not bothered to get a clear idea either of how any of these concepts are pernicious or which ideas and thinkers would've been better off being more obscure and less precise (tho' I suspect you have a list of the thinkers who'd be less well off if you did start to value precision and accuracy).

I don't need a qualifier: obscurity isn't simply potentially dangerous, it is dangerous, it is one of the chief ways people have sought authority and power for themselves and their ideas and it is how people are kept in thrall (from mystery cults, soothsayers, and fortune tellers all the way down). Obscurity is how people hide things, and it's also how the lazy do their thinking, not having to bother with the difficult work rigour demands.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#111 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:26 am

matrixschmatrix wrote: places that are often unreachable if one's ideas have to be put forward as though a mathematical proof, with a citation for each.
This is a unfortunate caricature of actual intellectual rigour. And I don't know where you got this impression that the only people to reach interesting ideas are those not doing the hard work of being rigorous. It's almost like you've broken this down to the loveable free-thinkers and the boring ink-horns or something silly. There's this bizarre idea you put forward that intellectual leaps are the domain of the non-rigorous, which is plainly false. You'll find that rigor doesn't exist just in how a thinker comes to his ideas, but also how he treats them afterwards. I almost want to challenge people to come up with a list of excellent ideas that can only be arrived at by dropping all precision and accuracy.

I also don't know why you're arguing about the place of it in general conversation.

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repeat
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#112 Post by repeat » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:26 am

Well, basically what matrixschmatrix says above - it's desirable to devalue rigor in order to open paths to those other places. It's pernicious because it's potentially stifling. I don't have a list, but blindingly obvious examples of the two temperaments would be, say, Adorno and Lichtenberg.

Also no one's advocating abandoning all precision and accuracy! Or is that what Žižek has done in your opinion?

If it's not clear from what I've said, I'm only willing to give these liberties to highly erudite and intelligent writers, I'm definitely not saying anything said by anyone at all is worthy of serious attention. You have to know the rules before you can break them, and all those clichés.
Last edited by repeat on Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:32 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#113 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:32 am

What "other places"? The rate at which the rhetoric is descending into the mystical and psedo-religious is telling. Abandon high intellectual rigour, get to wondrous "other places".

EDIT:
repeat wrote:If it's not clear from what I've said, I'm only willing to give these liberties to highly erudite and intelligent writers, I'm definitely not saying anything said by anyone at all is worthy of serious attention. You have to know the rules before you can break them, and all those clichés.
I'm not. Fuzzy thinking is fuzzy thinking no matter how many books you've read. I don't buy into arguments from authority and I don't feel like allowing people intellectual liberties just because someone thinks they're authoritative. Come up with all the crazy ideas you want, but treat them rigorously.

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repeat
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#114 Post by repeat » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:38 am

I'm sure you could think of several if you weren't so rigorously committed to a viewpoint ;) The discovery of penicillin?

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#115 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:39 am

Mr Sausage wrote:
matrixschmatrix wrote: places that are often unreachable if one's ideas have to be put forward as though a mathematical proof, with a citation for each.
This is a unfortunate caricature of actual intellectual rigour. And I don't know where you got this impression that the only people to reach interesting ideas are those not doing the hard work of being rigorous. It's almost like you've broken this down to the loveable free-thinkers and the boring ink-horns or something silly. There's this bizarre idea you put forward that intellectual leaps are the domain of the non-rigorous, which is plainly false. You'll find that rigor doesn't exist just in how a thinker comes to his ideas, but also how he treats them afterwards. I almost want to challenge people to come up with a list of excellent ideas that can only be arrived at by dropping all precision and accuracy.

I also don't know why you're arguing about the place of it in general conversation.
Hmm, I think what I've got in my head is the form of 'rigor' that comes specifically from the Socratic method, which seems to be the most common way of enforcing it, and which is pretty precisely something that forces one to justify each step in one's intellectual process independently- I don't think it's really necessary to explain why that can be stultifying.

The critic I was thinking of here is Robin Wood, who reads films in a way that is obviously closely argued and could not happen without actually watching them, but which nonetheless requires that one be willing to accept his ideas even when ungrounded to move forward with his developments of them. The relationship of his ideas to one another is rigorous, but the relationship of his ideas to the texts at hand isn't, necessarily- and I don't see that as being a problem.

edit:
repeat wrote:If it's not clear from what I've said, I'm only willing to give these liberties to highly erudite and intelligent writers, I'm definitely not saying anything said by anyone at all is worthy of serious attention. You have to know the rules before you can break them, and all those clichés.
This actually seems kind of gross and elitist to me- I think it's fair to say that there are writers who earn the right to be read with the assumption that they're writing in good faith and that what they're saying likely has some merit, and others who have forfeited the right to such consideration- but that's a measure of honesty, not of writerly talent or erudition. If anything, Žižek's admission pushes him further into the second category, for me.
Last edited by matrixschmatrix on Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:53 am, edited 2 times in total.

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knives
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#116 Post by knives » Sun Aug 11, 2013 2:47 am

As much as I dislike Zizek I do think he in this case is giving a perfectly good explanation for how his tackling of films fits an ethical rigor (though this doesn't undercut the argument that he is abusing power). He is, as has been pointed out, not making anything in the way of film criticism. Rather he is utilizing the idea of film as a way to make his points more accessible. The film becomes a tool in a way that its material nature doesn't really matter so long as the criticism fits with the public image of the film. It's a criticism of the reflection rather than the mirror. Though how he deals with that reflection is still pretty awful and stinks of similar laziness often enough even if he is a great performer.

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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#117 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Aug 11, 2013 3:04 am

repeat wrote:I'm sure you could think of several if you weren't so rigorously committed to a viewpoint ;) The discovery of penicillin?
It's not how you come up with the initial idea (most of the great ideas in history were the result of induction and creative thinking), it's how you treat it afterwards. Do you put in the leg-work? Do you risk proving the idea wrong in order to see if you're right? Do you approach it systematically? Do you invite criticism and refutation? Or do you just fall in love with your idea and become too afraid to do any of that hard work for fear you'll have to give it up?
matrixschmatrix wrote:Hmm, I think what I've got in my head is the form of 'rigor' that comes specifically from the Socratic method, which seems to be the most common way of enforcing it, and which is pretty precisely something that forces one to justify each step in one's intellectual process independently- I don't think it's really necessary to explain why that can be stultifying.
Anything can be stultifying, including pulling stuff out of your ass, like you said. Socrates was never popular, but then who likes being forced to admit that they don't know what they're talking about?
matrixschmatrix wrote:The critic I was thinking of here is Robin Wood, who reads films in a way that is obviously closely argued and could not happen without actually watching them, but which nonetheless requires that one be willing to accept his ideas even when ungrounded to move forward with his developments of them. The relationship of his ideas to one another is rigorous, but the relationship of his ideas to the texts at hand isn't, necessarily- and I don't see that as being a problem.
So what you're saying is: he works through an idea rigorously, but what lead him to the initial idea is often fanciful. If so, Robin Wood is not someone who abandons precision, accuracy, clear thinking, ect., but rather someone who embraces them and whose ideas and their relationship to their subject are always clearly explained. No leaps of logic papered over by obscurity. The fact that he has nothing to hide allows you to see all the more whether his ideas have a strong relationship to the actual film or not.

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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#118 Post by Kirkinson » Sun Aug 11, 2013 3:08 am


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repeat
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#119 Post by repeat » Sun Aug 11, 2013 5:20 am

matrixschmatrix wrote:
repeat wrote:If it's not clear from what I've said, I'm only willing to give these liberties to highly erudite and intelligent writers, I'm definitely not saying anything said by anyone at all is worthy of serious attention. You have to know the rules before you can break them, and all those clichés.
This actually seems kind of gross and elitist to me- I think it's fair to say that there are writers who earn the right to be read with the assumption that they're writing in good faith and that what they're saying likely has some merit
Yeah you're right, that came out wrong. I guess I meant to say that I'm willing to cut Žižek some slack because he's erudite and intelligent and knows what he's doing (even if it amounts to admitting I've indeed fallen prey to his wily ways exactly like Mr Sausage describes!). I certainly didn't mean to say that nothing of value can come from uneducated minds, in fact I often find myself of quite the opposite opinion.

I also don't wish to seem I'm condoning obscuring lazy or messy thinking with rhetorical smokescreens - it's just that that's not my impression of what Žižek is up to. But to debate that further we'd have to start cutting up some specific case in point. (On second thought that might demand a level of rigor I'm not prepared to commit myself to so maybe better forget about it ;))

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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#120 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Aug 11, 2013 8:29 am

FerdinandGriffon wrote:Also, Zizek's fantasy versions of films aren't plucked from the ether, they're based on prevailing cultural attitudes or ideas of the films and what they represent in the public discourse. When he wrote about Avatar it was only after several months of previous commentary and general hype-machinery. I think this ideal Avatar (or avatar-Avatar) is just as worthy of study and analysis, if not more so, than the real thing.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I wonder if 'the idea' of Avatar (and especially what it stands for in terms of 3D, ways of filming and so on) is just as important, if not more so, than the film itself because of just how pervasive a cultural object it has become. There are a lot of objects in the culture that people are not responding to through actual encounters with, but more through the way that such products are being marketed (the latest ads for a blockbuster film) or being folded into a cultural conversation about a subject or societal group whether it is wanted or not (Lena Dunham perhaps? 8-[ ), or how they are succeeding as capitalist, monetary objects than as artistic ones (the recent troubled Disney movies such as John Carter or this week's newly released in the UK Lone Ranger, which I have almost entirely encountered so far through stories about how much money they have lost).

How many people never encounter a particular film (OK Avatar might be a problematic example! But then I have not actually seen Avatar yet either!) but still have a picture of the film in their heads due to all of the hoopla surrounding it, and the cultural (financial, political, etc) uses to which that hoopla has been put?

In a way, I think it is just as valid (and interesting) to critique those ideas and assumptions surrounding the film as it is the final product itself. I'm not saying that is what Zizek did with his Avatar piece, but it does sound as if he used the idea of what Avatar was representing as his jumping off point for a wider discussion. Perhaps the problem here is that he should have been more open at the time of his initial work that he had not seen the film rather than letting it slip later on.

I think this ties in with the importance of having an initial reaction to a trailer or reviews that we get on this forum, which are just as valid as the reviews that come after seeing the film later on. The reviews after actually seeing and assessing the work have a lot of weight and validity (more, since they are not being produced based on assumption! Although we all know that even some finished films can leave viewers with different interpretations of what they actually saw! Or at the very least different views of whether the film was good or bad!), but the initial response to a poster or trailer might help to set up preconceptions and assumptions that can later be challenged. And in some ways be closer to how the vast majority of people in the society who never actually go on to see the film itself will respond to it (and then use it for their own ends in conversations)!

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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#121 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Aug 11, 2013 1:40 pm

colin wrote:In a way, I think it is just as valid (and interesting) to critique those ideas and assumptions surrounding the film as it is the final product itself. I'm not saying that is what Zizek did with his Avatar piece, but it does sound as if he used the idea of what Avatar was representing as his jumping off point for a wider discussion. Perhaps the problem here is that he should have been more open at the time of his initial work that he had not seen the film rather than letting it slip later on.
Aside from the telling fact he spends as much time talking about Titanic as Avatar, his piece on the film does very little "jumping off." It contains long passages that critique the film, down to accusing its visual construction of hiding its conservatism and other things Zizek cannot know and therefore takes for granted. The fact that he can do all this is not because he doesn't really talk about Avatar, or because he talks about how other people talk about Avatar: he can do it because he just makes the most banal, obvious criticisms of it, the kind that you can make just from having heard the premise. He basically just uses the Dances with Wolves criticism and calls Avatar racist.

If a criticism is so easy you can make it without seeing the movie, it's probably not worth making (certainly not in a published piece in the New Statesman). There is, I think, a much more interesting, less politically obvious analysis to be done on the issue of the outsider-as-saviour that I adumbrate here. Indeed, I would add to my post that the hero of Avatar is a Hercules type, neither human nor god but an uneasy mixture of the two: he is of the world of man but alienated from it because of his disability; similarly, his avatar lets him exist in the Navvi world without fully being a part of it. That in-between status allows him to do what neither side is able do on their own and therebye solve the conflict. His reward is losing his in-between status.

Zizek also tries to link Avatar to The Matrix and Who Framed Roger Rabbit as films in which a hero has to choose between fantasy and our ordinary reality, a point which seems to contradict the basic details of Avatar's story (the colonialist's world is as fantastic as the native's) but aside from that is rather interesting. Of course Zizek goes nowhere with it because of the obvious limitation of not having seen the movie.

He ends with a really galling straw man where he accuses those who like Avatar of also hating (potentially) real natives fighting for their survival before concluding that the film substitutes fantasy for reality, which is another totally banal criticism, one you can lob at the genre of fantasy as a whole, and sight unseen at that. He makes no remark on the idea that generalizing a story into an archetype usually results in a more naive, less realistic world than our social reality. Fantasy is simplistically opposed to political reality in his piece.

Zizek also persistently confuses our social reality for the reality posited in this or that film, ie. implicitly accepting a premise that could never happen in our reality, but then holding any possible conclusion to that premise to the rules of our reality without seeming to acknowledge that there is a gap, that no part of the film could take place in our reality. Lazy.

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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#122 Post by bamwc2 » Wed Sep 04, 2013 2:17 pm

Not to beat a dead topic, but I'm now joining my new university's film studies minor. If all goes right with my course proposal, I'll be teaching a philosophy of film course next fall. I'm going to review texts from Noël Carroll, Irving Singer, and Robert Sinnerbrink. Are there any other books (or film suggestions for such a broad topic) that anyone might recommend?

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knives
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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#123 Post by knives » Wed Sep 04, 2013 2:36 pm

Deleuze's two Cinema books strike me as essential if you're willing to go in the deep end.

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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#124 Post by bamwc2 » Wed Sep 04, 2013 8:02 pm

knives wrote:Deleuze's two Cinema books strike me as essential if you're willing to go in the deep end.
Thanks. I'll definitely check them out. I'd love to include an anthology. I'd also be interested in hearing recommendations for films that forum members think might go well with certain topics (i.e. realism v. formalism, emotional responses to cinema, documentary ethics, etc.).

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Re: Psychoanalytic Film Criticism

#125 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Wed Sep 04, 2013 10:19 pm

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film is a great anthology if you haven't consulted it yet.

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