Through an analogy between film and the dream state, which serves as an

unconscious process of transformation, psychoanalysis has provided a useful way of

discussing the relationship between cinema and it’s audience (Allen, 1992, p. 203).

Psychoanalytic theory draws its basis from psychoanalysis, a branch of psychology that

aims to treat mental disorders by investigating the relationship between conscious and

unconscious realms of the mind. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, Surrealism drew inspiration

from psychoanalysis, praising the countless similarities between film and the dream state.

It wasn’t, however, until the 1970’s that psychoanalytic theory took a leap and became a

key component in film studies by developing cinema as an institution or apparatus, as

well as explaining the relationship between screen and spectator.

Key to 1970’s psychoanalytic theory is the concept of cinema as an apparatus

developed by French theorists Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz. Baudry and Metz

were contributors to the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, a publication that was

vital in influencing what we now consider modern film criticism. Within this modern

sphere of film criticism and analysis lies psychoanalytic theory. Baudry and Metz drew

from Cahiers di cinéma’s editor Jean-Louis Comolli and his concept of film as a product

of a certain society. Due to film’s merchandisable quality Comolli was very critical of

communist and Marxist theory in relation to cinema. In his 1969 article, written alongside

fellow Cahiers du cinéma editor Paul Narboni, Comolli explains that since film is a

material product “manufactured within a given system of economic relations” it also

represents an ideological commodity of said system (1969, p. 29). As a result of Cahiers

du cinéma’s influence on film theory, Metz and Baudry’s apparatus theory is developed

on both the pillars of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories as well

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as Marxist values. Because of this foundation, Metz and Baudry were led to conclude that

cinema’s role was, as a product, aimed at providing entertainment for its spectators. They

saw both the institution of cinema and the film industry itself, as a mental machinery

(Metz, 1982, p. 7). The Apparatus theory they proposed was that cinema’s popularity as

an art form, as well as an entertainment source, lay in its potential of being a reflection of

reality accessible to all, as well as a method to enter an unconscious dream state. In other

words, film is an ideological construct and projects representations based on a set of

inherent beliefs; therefore, film can be a manipulative resource to shape and mold a

particular audience’s perception of reality.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) James Stewart’s character L.B.

Jefferies, is portrayed as an “ideal,” white male with a respectable job, high social status

and beautiful girlfriend in the form of Grace Kelly. However, as he witnesses events

unfold from his window, his mental state begins to change, much as his physical

constraints reshape his perception. According to psychoanalytic theorists, film shapes the

viewer’s perspective much like society molds individuals into their own image. Baudry

drew a lot on the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, particularly Lacan’s

theory of the mirror stage. Lacan’s mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego. This

formation occurs through identification of external objects. From birth to eighteen

months an infant’s reflection will therefore work as a gestalt of his emerging perception

of selfhood. The infant, on seeing himself as an independent person, separate from the

mother’s doting and nurturing hand, reaches a sort of self-fulfillment recognizing his

reflection as his ideal self. This realization plays a crucial role in the mental development

of the child (Lacan, 2004, p. 311). The infant will therefore subconsciously strive

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throughout his life to become the personification of the reflection he once saw. Therefore,

according to Lacan, within the first eighteen months of one’s life, an infant is able to

reach self-realization by identifying his reflection as his ideal self.

Baudry drew a similarity between Lacan’s mirror stage with that of the

spectator’s experience in the cinema. Baudry claims that since cinema is dominated by

the visual sense, the spectator identifies an on screen character as his own ideal self by

absorbing the character’s image and mirroring their traits. Metz drew further on this by

introducing Freud’s concept of scopophilia. Scopophilia is the derived pleasure attributed

to watching someone’s actions anonymously. Metz attributed the desire to view without

being seen to the cinematic experience, since as spectators we see the life unfolding on

screen without the characters being able to peer back at us. In Hitchcock’s Rear Window

(1954) scopophilia is the central premise for the film, since the narrative is based on the

act of observing the surrounding occurrences. Metz also drew on the voyeuristic nature of

the spectator who, according to Freud’s theories, will find pleasure and often-sexual

desire in the act of watching others. Many enjoy the cinema due to its quality of

anonymity. When viewing a film the spectator is able to witness and understand the

events without needing to take action towards the outcome. Because of this, cinema

allows an audience to derive vicarious entertainment from the human experience without

the need to interact thus offering a sense of emotional fulfillment within a safe

environment.

British theorist Laura Mulvey expanded these ideas of psychoanalytic theory to

construct feminist film theory. Feminist theory criticizes how the apparatus theory

assumes an ideal male spectator. In her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

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Mulvey drew a concrete division between genders within the cinematic institution. She

drew on the notion of an active male protagonist set against a passive female character

looked at in a sexual and erotic light by adopting Freud’s theories of scopophilia and

castration as well as Lacan’s theory of subjectivity (1975, p. 441). By doing so Mulvey

developed the concept of male gaze in the context of cinema. Mulvey’s notion of male

gaze relied on the fetishization of a female character through the eyes of a male

protagonist. This can be seen in many Classical Hollywood films including Billy

Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1959) starring Marilyn Monroe, as well as in Hitchcock’s

Rear Window (1945) where, in the opening scene, L.B. Jefferies watches a young

neighbor dance around her kitchen scantily clad. Mulvey also argued that, based on

Freud’s theory of castration, women in film were seen as sexual threats sent to

emotionally castrate the male protagonists.

Because of this Mulvey later concluded that women in cinema had two fates; they

would either be punished for their sexuality or overtly sexualized and denied emotional

development in order to conquer the impending threat that women and their sexuality

imposed. Janet Leigh’s character Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, was

punished for her sexuality by being stabbed in the shower by Anthony Perkins’ Norman

Bates, just as Tippi Hedren’s Melanie Daniels was attacked by crows in Hitchcock’s The

Birds (1963). Mulvey arrived at a possible female gaze in which a female spectator has

two options when viewing a film; either to identify with the female character and feel

guilty for her sexuality and power of castration or view the film from a man’s perspective

(Creed, 1998, p. 12).

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 Many post-structuralist feminist theorists such as Joan Copjec and Tania

Modleski elaborated on Mulvey’s points and argued that the dismissal of gender within

the cinematic apparatus was due to the Western tradition of a patriarchal society and the

denied place of women within it. Joan Copjec (1989, p. 54) saw that Mulvey’s latter

female identification with the male gaze as a variation of the panoptic gaze, the idea of a

silent overseer that controls all aspects of life. She also identifies the panoptic gaze as the

perfect definition for “the situation of the women under patriarchy: that is, it is the very

image of the structure which obliges the woman to monitor herself with a patriarchal eye”

(1989, p. 54). Copjec’s notion of a panoptic gaze therefore means a female viewer is

drawn to view the audio-visual material with a male gaze, fetishizing the female

characters and identifying with the male characters.

Tania Modleski however found that a possible fourth gaze could exist while

analyzing Hitchcock’s films in her 1988 book The Women Who Knew Too Much:

Hitchcock and Feminist Theory; the bisexual gaze. The concept of a bisexual gaze is

attributed to a fluctuation of identification between a male and female character taking on

aspects both of a male mind and that of a female psyche. Freud’s concept of bisexuality

was that the sexual identity of a person “combines the characters of both sexes” (Freud,

1962, p. 10) and that it was more dominant in female children than in male. As a result of

this concept, psychoanalytic film theory considers the bisexual gaze to be a fluctuation of

identification between a male and female character when dealing with a female audience.

According to the bisexual gaze constructed by Modleski, a female viewer is therefore

likely to equally identify with the male and female characters.

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 Psychoanalytic film theory has been heavily debated and criticized, particularly

for the concept of “viewer” it has established. The most controversial trait of

psychoanalytic theory is the construction of a monolithic viewer (Creed, 1998, p. 16)

both with Baudry’s passive male spectator and Mulvey’s active male gaze. Certain

theorists, such as David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, were more interested in establishing

the spectator’s reaction to the material viewed, rather than constructing the ideal witness,

driven by a theory in cognitive psychology that praises the “real” viewer over an

ideological one.

Another main criticism of psychoanalytic theory’s is it’s ahistorical nature, not

taking into account the social context and issues in place, both in the film’s setting as

well as during the film’s production (Creed, 1998, p. 17). Psychoanalytic theory also

doesn’t take into account social factors such as race, class, sexual orientation and

geographic location which risks constructing the “ideal” spectator as a white,

heterosexual male such as James Stewart’s character in Rear Window. However, the

biggest controversy to the theory is the fact that, to many, psychoanalysis is considered a

string of theories without evident scientific proof and therefore, both the practice and the

theory, are dependent on ideas and not solid evidence which deletes the possibility of

validity within a film’s analysis.

In my opinion, psychoanalytic film theory is a fantastic way of understanding the

motivations and incentives behind the character’s actions. With Freud’s concepts of Id,

Ego and Super-Ego the possibilities of following a certain character, and therefore the

actor’s thought process, are limitless. I also agree and find a sad reality in the

fetishization of women in the media whether it be cinema, television or music and see a

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diminished possibility of viewing female characters from an empowered female

perspective. However, due to psychoanalysis’s ahistorical nature, many films,

particularly those from a time in which the reality of racism and sexism was all too real

and frequent, it is hard to apply the theory. Many films, particularly those of the

Hollywood Golden Age on which psychoanalytic theory focuses, can’t be critiqued for

being projected onto those with a “male gaze” or excluding people of a different race

from the cinemas, because at the time, psychoanalytic theory’s “ideal” spectator of the

white, heterosexual, middle class man was the reality.

According to both psychoanalytic film theory of the gaze and cinema as an

institution and apparatus, films construct us as spectators by manipulating the audience to

identify with the characters on screen through a gaze. Each individual spectator must

identify solely with one gaze, whether it is the apparatus’s male gaze, Mulvey’s female

gaze, the bisexual gaze or the possible panoptic gaze. Due to this identification, a

complete audience will experience the film differently dependent on how they identify

with the on screen characters. Despite the controversy surrounding it, psychoanalytic film

criticism has become central to modern film theory. It is curious to see how

psychoanalytic film theory will fare in a future global cinematic institution since, in

essence, it analyzes classical Hollywood cinema without taking into account international

film industries such as India’s Bollywood, European cinema and the newer pan-African

motion pictures.

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 Works Cited

Allen, R. C. 1992. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled. Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press.

Comolli, J. and Narboni, P. 1969. Cinema/Ideology/Criticism. Cahiers di cinéma, (216),

p. 29. Available at:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic235120.files/CdC_CIC.pdf [Accessed: 20th
Nov 2013].

Copjec, J. 1989. The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of
Lacan. October, 49 pp. 53--71.

Creed, B. 1998. Film and Psychoanalysis. In: Hill, J. and Church Gibson, P. eds.
1998. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freud, S. and Strachey, J. 1975. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York:
Basic Books.

Lacan, J. 2004. Some Reflections on the Ego. Journal for Lacanian Studies, 2 (2), pp.
306--317.

Metz, C. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mulvey, L. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, (16), p. 441.