In Defense of Psychoanalytic Film Theory

Abstract The cinema—whose technological capacity to document reality is often said to form its “ontology”—is just as fundamentally an art (and technology) of fantasy. For this reason, this chapter argues that cinema as a historically specific technical medium—indeed, the dominant cultural medium of the twentieth century—requires a psychoanalytic theory: not only because cinema and psychoanalysis emerge concurrently at the end of the nineteenth century, as part of the same techno-historical-economic assemblage, but also because psychoanalysis offers the most robust theory of fantasy, in both its conscious and unconscious dimensions. In the decades since its advent, psychoanalytic film theory has been repeatedly dismissed as dogmatic and self-fulfilling, allegedly knowing in advance what it is going to find. Against this view, the chapter argues that psychoanalysis remains a critical lens through which to consider the cinema as apparatus, even at the moment of its technological transformation. Through examples from early and recent cinema, the chapter examines the mechanics of how cinema technologizes fantasy, showing why it is important to move beyond empiricist accounts (whether of infrastructures, aesthetics, or affects). It is no surprise that psychoanalytic film theory has been so closely conjoined with feminist and queer film theory from the outset. Indeed, the chapter ultimately argues that a theory of cinematic fantasy is a queer theory of cinema.