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Endless Night

University of California Press

The title of this book is taken from a line spoken in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man: "Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night." Endless night, that modality of timeless dark wandering, evokes the remarkably material dreamlike search for intelligibility sustained throughout Dead Man without ever being thematized as such or, indeed, as any identifiable state. Endless Night seems to me an appropriate designation for this collection of essays, since psychoanalysis and film theory, both, are drawn to the darkness in their quest for logics of meaning.

The idea for this volume goes back to a conference called "Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Parallel Histories," which was sponsored by UCLA's Center for Critical Studies and the Human Sciences in November 1993 to mark the hundred-year anniversaries of these two endeavors that have exercised such a profound influence on our century. The event brought together practicing psychoanalysts with film theorists working from a psychoanalytic perspective and provided a forum for an exchange of views between these two disciplines that have encountered each other all too rarely. Crossing disciplines is never easy, but in this case, dialogue between constituencies seemed blocked to a surprising degree; in fact, one came away from the conference with the strong impression of nonconvergence, on the whole, of lines of inquiry and frames of reference, the sense that these "parallel histories" of cinema and of psychoanalysis were very far apart indeed and were likely to remain so for some time to come. The reasons that psychoanalysts reflect on the cinema are not the same as those that motivate film theorists to draw on psychoanalysis. It follows that the concepts from the cinema and from

psychoanalysis that enter into dialogue within each field are not the same either. We are nowhere near being able to provide a comparative overview which would explain the impasse between these two fields usefully, which might elucidate, for instance, how the history of psychoanalytic concepts has come to operate within each one. This task is all the more difficult because of the complex splitting and proliferation of psychoanalytic institutions within the United States and internationally, which involves but is by no means reducible to adherence to differing schools of theory and/or clinical practice. Even today, a cursory review of psychoanalytic journals turns up significant writings by psychoanalysts on literature and art, but not on the cinema.

Yet, I believe that psychoanalysts and film scholars should be able to speak together productively on a whole range of issues. I hope, therefore, that this collection of essays, which consists mainly of the writings of film scholars, will also find its way to psychoanalysts who may be drawn to the perspectives on cinematic representation to be found here. This, in turn, might help bring concepts and data from current psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice into discussions within Cinema Studies and encourage cross-disciplinary projects even as the two disciplines continue to evolve, producing their own internal countertendencies and subspecializations. The essays by psychoanalysts David James Fisher and Alain de Mijolla, M.D., in this collection represent avenues toward a future collaboration.

The "Parallel Histories" event did succeed in inspiring an impressive group of film scholars to present work-in-progress that demonstrated the current form of their engagement with "psychoanalysis and cinema" and, by that very fact, showed how much this field of study has changed since the hugely influential works of the early 1970s which initiated it during those same polemical years when Cinema Studies became an academic discipline. This volume is not a record of the conference proceedings, but all the contributors were participants in that event (either as presenters or as part of the audience) and all of the essays have been marked by the spirit that uniting these writers made possible. While several of the essays were delivered at the conference in draft form, to be reworked and extended later in the light of questions and discussions, the rest were conceived and written subsequently. As an amalgam, they testify to a shift from the 1970s to the 1990s in what we can call "psychoanalytic film theory." They demonstrate how this vein of film theory has renewed itself over time and remains one of the most vital areas within contemporary film theory. For this project, then, the hundred-year parallel histories of psychoanalysis and of cinema operate as the "felt background" against which authors chart new directions in the much younger field of psychoanalysis and film theory.

The authors represented in this collection share a particular history of theory which they are trying to push ahead or test in this way or that.1 Moreover, they are signaling "unfinished business" that needs to be addressed.

Synoptically, in order to provide a context for the new essays, we should recall the generative matrix from the 1970s that made this work possible, beginning with "Psychanalyse et cinima," the thick, groundbreaking special issue of the French journal Communications, published in May 1975, edited by Raymond Bellour, Thierry Kuntzel and Christian Metz. Almost immediately, in the summer of 1975, Metz's lead essay, "The Imaginary Signifier," was presented not simply published in the British journal Screen . Although Communications 23 was not the first to introduce psychoanalytic concepts into contemporary film theory the Cahiers du Cinima had been publishing articles for some years written from Lacanian and Freudian perspectives; Screen 's own commitment to psychoanalytic theory dated from its publication in 1972 of the Cahiers du Cinima 's 1970 collective reading of Young Mr. Lincoln; Jean-Louis Baudry's essay "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" had been published in Cinithique in 19702 it constituted a strong statement that the field of psychoanalytic semiotics had been established as such. In "The Imaginary Signifier," Metz outlined categories within which psychoanalysis and film theory might come together, mapping the field, as it were, before proceeding to the motivating question of his own essay: "What contribution can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier?"3 (Those who assume that Metz was thoroughly Lacanian should take note of the way he worded this question.) The issue also contained Bellour's "Le blocage symbolique," a magisterial demonstration of multi-layered textual analysis through a 115-page study of North by Northwest; Kuntzel's "The Film-Work, 2," a somewhat different mode of textual analysis more directly inspired by Barthes's S/Z and its model, The Interpretation of Dreams (hence the echo of Sigmund Freud's theory of the dream-work in Kuntzel's title); Metz's "The Fiction Film and Its Spectator"; and a host of other essays which have had lasting significance.

These essays and many others written from within the same circles of French debate were quickly published in translation in Screen, Camera Obscura and other journals, often in conjunction with American and British contributions inspired by the French essays but filtered through their own highly debated and evolving editorial positions. The crucial "Milwaukee Conferences" on film...