Teach Yourself: Modernism

This was the intro to a paper on Bergman’s Persona that I recently submitted, trying to grasp a structural appreciation of cinema’s psychic events which register outside of representation, using Lacan, and the wonderful work of Jacqueline Rose in Sexuality in the Field of Vision:

In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, conscious, unconscious, and other non-visual affective and psychic forces act both within and upon the diegesis and materiality of the cinematic object. Oblique references to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic discourse appear in Persona in the structure of the film’s plot and catharsis, and as a quoted system of institutionalized inter-subjectivity that theorises in parallel to the cinema’s own specific negotiations of representation and the boundaries of the subject. The way in which Bergman aesthetically riffs upon various concepts from the modern psychoanalytic domain in this film however—what I will call the film’s ‘clinical’ frame, heeding the looseness of Bergman’s recorded engagement with psychoanalysis proper—is of course far from straightforward. Susan Sontag in her seminal essay on Persona published in Styles of Radical Will, famously asserted that Persona “introduces the psychological, and the erotic, only to dispose of it, or to transcend those planes of explanation”, and that the film instead “does something else: introduces a subject, a body of material, the function of which is to achieve multiplicity” (104). Other critics generally uphold Sontag’s claims: Persona’s resistance to interpretation is deemed to rest on some inherent aspect of the film’s composition and visuality that encourages multiple readings, even, one critic declares, a kind of “free association” on behalf of the audience, and hence “whatever the critic wishes” (Veridan 2). Given this resistance to interpretation seems paradoxically informed by an anxiety about the exact nature of Bergman’s engagement with and proximity to psychoanalytic concepts, what I want to do here is unpack this notion of Persona’s apparent indeterminacy in direct dialogue with psychoanalytic film theory. While avoiding falling prey to the recognized limitations of these 70s psychoanalytic film theoretical references, the aim will be to arrive at interpetation of Persona as a singular and determined aesthetic argument about psychic activity, representation, and the cinematic object, applying psychoanalytic notions of ‘interpretation’ to an optical theory of the unconscious. Due to issues of length, readers are assumed to be familiar with the film already; partial summaries of the film’s narrative and key events are however included so as to avoid straightforward mnemonic and interpretative errors supposedly prone in critical recollections of one of Bergman’s key works.

I was originally fascinated with the dream politics of dramatic film, the cinematic dream scene’s relation to diegetic space in cinema, which is generally portayed very differently to the politics of the dream work in Freudian psychoanalysis (i.e. it is not often that cinema’s dreams ask us to make them into determinate items with determinate relations to other spaces, in cinema). Schwab outlines what is at stake in psychoanlysis’ taking seriously this relationality of the dream space:

Apart from their classification in psychology, phantasies also carry the popular connotation of an activity outside the boundaries of reality; the suggest the work of imagination and fiction. In English, the distinction between psychoanalytic and popluar uses of the word is often marked by a homonymic shift in spelling from ‘f’to ph. A difference: the graphic difference itself vanishes” says Derrida, “into the night, can never be sensed as a full term, but rather extends an invisible relationship, the mark of an inapparent relationship between two spectacles”. Into the night, an inapparent relatinoship between two spectacles. At work in a thinking of ph/fantasy is a dialectic between the structure of the dream, Freud’s figure for and point of entry into the psychical apparatus and the unconscious, and a mode of rumination, “daydreaming”, that leads to nothing, is itself of no consequence, represents the antithesis of action and meaningful thought. A thinking of two spectacles, two forms of spectacular thinking (or wishing, or representing) that eludes both vision and hearing.  In psychoanlaysis, everything is at stake; in the popular idiom, nothing. In psychoanalysis, fantasy represents the very possibility of a politics of the unconscious. Outside of psychoanlysis, there is no politics to proper fantasy. To fantasise does not in itself constitute a political act. (Schwab, in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)

But avant gard film is a whole other plane of argument, in so far as it’s phantasy-effect is always already simulated, and informed by rather eclectic disorganised ‘modernisms’ in which mentation itself is constantly being turned inside and outside of culture. I didn’t realise until it was too late (and the title of Bergman’s autobiography should have perhaps pointed out this later excursion as compulsory) that I needed a better apparatus theory that accounted for the paradox of spectral experiences of vision, in the modernist approach to fictional visuality. i.e. Bergman as phantasmagoric (as with Lynch, etc). I’ve signed myself up to consecutive presentation weeks to deal with my disaffection about this, and marked up writing weekends in the future so that I can process a resubmission (apparently standard practice here, though I am not sure what is meant by standard really).