Film After Jung

Post-Jungian Approaches to Film Theory

Greg Singh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317723943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Popular film as a medium of communication, expression and storytelling has proved one of the most durable and fascinating cultural forms to emerge during the twentieth century, and has long been the object of debate, discussion and interpretation. Film After Jung provides the reader with an overview of the history of film theory and delves into analytical psychology to consider the reaction that popular film can evoke through emotional and empathetic engagement with its audience.

This book includes:

• an introduction to film scholarship
• discussions of key Jungian concepts
• Post-Jungian film studies beyond film.

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It also considers the potential for post-Jungian contributions to film studies, and the ways in which these can help to enrich the lives of those undergoing clinical analysis.

Film After Jung encourages students of film and psychology to explore the insights and experiences of everyday life that film has to offer by applying Post-Jungian concepts to film, image construction, narrative, and issues in cultural theory. It will enhance the film student's knowledge of film engagement as well as introducing the Jungian analyst to previously unexplored traditions in film theory.

Part I Film theory: A critical historiography

1 Film matters, but how, and why?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315787589-2

I am not a Jungian. I realize that this is quite a controversial statement to make at the beginning of a book that, in its subject matter, tackles the possibility of a post-Jungian approach to film theory. I would like to qualify this statement by invoking a number of points that are relevant to the subject matter of this book, one of which has special importance: namely, the study of film through a properly materialist analytical psychology. Firstly, however, it is worth bearing in mind the approach taken by Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Carl Jung's immediate and most important followers, to the subject of ‘Jungianism’. In Chuck Swartz's (1998: 107) memoriam to von Franz in Harvest, he states that:

She always advised that it would be wrong to become a ‘Jungian’. If you do that, you miss the whole point of his psychology, which was to become the one unique individual you are meant to be.

Thus, Von Franz both identified and condemned the theological strand perceived to be inherent in much Jungian-inflected thinking considered from outside its practice, and also helped to reveal an inner teleological narrative that classical Jungian thinkers seem to have embraced wholeheartedly. These are issues that I hope to address intermittently throughout this book, as they underpin many of the presumptions about analytical psychology as well as the presuppositions that may be said to exist in psychological thinking in general.

This is not the raison d'etre of this book — it is, however, one of a number of key concerns for thinking about the usefulness of analytical psychology in film scholarship. That said, we may now take a fuller account of my opening statement, ‘I am not a Jungian’. I am, first and foremost, a film scholar. I am interested in film and the reaction that film invokes through emotional and empathic engagement from, and with, audiences. I am interested in the power film has to move people. I am interested in how film, as a medium of communication, expression and storytelling has proved one of the most durable and fascinating cultural forms to emerge during the 20th century. It occurs to me that all these concerns find common ground in analytical psychology in one form or another. Throughout my studies, I have found a certain warmth and compassion in the Jungian tradition that is centred around questions of emotion and empathy: There seems to be an inherent lack of warmth in the cognitive tradition, for example, despite its direct and tenacious engagement with questions of emotion. I am moved by the infamous synchronistic tale of Monsieur Fortgibu and the plum pudding every bit as much as I have been moved by The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, De Sica, It, 1948). The means by which our patterns of communication and collective thinking are informed by the cultural practices of storytelling have been illuminated by Jungian thought. Analytical psychology provides for us fascinating models of typology and meaningfulness that are consistently being rethought, elaborated and shared in sophisticated debate across many scholarly disciplines.

As a result of the durability of film as a popular medium (in particular, the ubiquitous narrative form of the feature film), I would argue that it has become crucial for the film academic to consider the evolution of film as a media form in particular, within the context of a substantial growth of associated media practices during the past 30 years or so. So-called ‘home cinema’ technologies, for example, are beginning to transform the way that many people watch films. Broadband Internet developments have enabled the remote sharing of movies. Increasingly, it seems to matter less whether films come in the form of mainstream Hollywood fare projected in a theatre, pirated DVDs found on file-sharing platforms, or the latest antics of kids in a skate park captured on a video phone and uploaded onto YouTube. Whatever the format, these developments in exhibition practice have led to DIY cultures of production and consumption that, less than a decade ago, were nothing more than a technophile's dream. What matters more, it seems, is the form the engagement with film takes, particularly within popular youth culture; it matters less that films are restricted to the narrow definition of projected film viewed in theatres.

This has necessitated that film scholars think about the impact of technologies and forms of cinema, film, video, and so on, as interrelated phenomena, intimately connected with the practices and attitudes of both mass audiences and individuals. The need to ‘capture’ the audience's imagination has provided the impetus for the development of these technologies, and their popularity in everyday life. Whether one articulates that need as economic in character or something rather more noble and expressive, it is a reality that we must deal with as film scholars. The counterpart to this reality is, of course, the impact that these technologies and consumption patterns have on audiences, and John Izod's recent work (2006) approaches this question from a specifically audience-oriented post-Jungian position. In theoretical terms, however, the consumption of film as either a public or a private experience is, I would argue, primarily one of pleasure. Emotional responses and personal idiosyncratic notions of the films themselves are most often articulated in the most basic of terms, but in ways with which most of us are very familiar. As Gibbs and Pye suggest in the introduction to their recent book Style and Meaning (2005), when we leave a movie theatre with a group of friends, we tend to recall events that happened in the film in a highly narrativized way. This is partly due to the proliferation of narrative film, partly due to the way that film is talked and written about in both academic and popular film reviews, and most importantly perhaps, partly due to the way that we most readily ‘make sense’ of the world of the film. That is, we make the story a figural centrepiece, with a beginning, middle and an end, in which characters act and interact in a specific setting. Part of the power and pleasure comes from the story's retelling, and of course this includes the playful telling of the tale through the real-world filter of production knowledge, the star system, and how we felt while watching the film. This adds to the ‘making sense’ of the film and gives it, and the experience of watching it, meaning.

The sense of ‘making sense’, that most comforting experience of resolutions and play with non-resolution when telling and retelling stories, is an important part of the negotiation of everyday life. It is also an important part of Jungian high-concepts such as the individuation process. However, one might argue that this process is an articulation of metanarrative, a summation of the way individuals make sense of their world and their place within it, filtered through architectonics of both signification and emotion. It need not be the subject of totalizing abstractions such as stone archetypes (see von Franz, ‘The Process of Individuation’, 1964) or monomyths (see Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 1993). Here, we may concern ourselves, for the moment, with the tension involved in the play of resolution and non-resolution in the act of telling itself. As Frank Kermode famously stated, ‘the sense of an ending’, established at the conclusion of tensions and pleasures afforded teller and told alike in the story-telling process, may come about only in the same figural structure as the ambiguous experience of being ‘in the middest’ (2000: 4). That is, the resolution is contingent on the journey towards the resolution itself. One may argue that, in retelling the story, one re-experiences the journey itself as much as the resolution, hence the commonplace saying that ‘the journey is as important as the destination’. There is, following Paul Ricoeur in his three-volume Time and Narrative, a mimesis involved in the construction and deconstruction of texts (even, one might say, at an unconscious level), upon which we might map out enunciative and emotional cues that the audience chooses (or not) to follow. Why this is a vital element of pleasurable spectatorship is as obvious to the casual filmgoer as it is to the clinician. It is also a key question in the negotiation of audiences in film studies, but it should be noted that it is given different emphasis and importance depending on the particular approach that the film student takes.

This is one of the key problems that this book aims to tackle in Part I: an evaluation of the various approaches to screen studies in film scholarship through a post-Jungian lens. It seems to me that, in addressing the pleasures and displeasures afforded the spectator in textual negotiation, the context of production and consumption of film is always a given historical and material question. This is a question to which we need to add that the embodied experience of watching film is felt to be a highly subjective (and classical Jungians might say of attending the cinema theatre, numinous) experience. This complex of embodied and material relations between production and consumption, text and context, film and viewer, reveals a dialectical tension that is too often overlooked in Jungian film analysis. Far from being an element of analysis alien to Jungian psychology, this dialectical tension is not only a good fit here, but lies comfortably with Jung's play with the concepts of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. This is the grounding of subject matter that I tackle in some depth in my discussion of identification in this book but also has its antecedents in Hugo Miinsterberg's early formalist approach to film, discussed in Chapter 3. This is why I have chosen to position my consideration of post-Jungian film criticism within the critical forum of phenomenological and historical materialist approaches to cultural production. Essential to advocating an approach that uses the fantastical magnitude of such a notion as the collective unconscious as one of its central tenets, a robust post-Jungian account of film and its popular consumption needs to be grounded in the historical circumstance, social ontology and embodied experience of film and its forms.

A note on methodology

Methodologically speaking, this book is not interested in pursuing empirical research, at least in its quantitative form. Empirical research in the most general sense tends to give credence to the notion of empiricism as a scientific method with more validity than other methods: other methods which, while ‘observing’ real effects of cinema in real bodies, rely on abstractions that are frequently derided as unscientific, and therefore unusable. Of course, empirical approaches should not be the concern of a book motivated by the notion that post-Jungian ideas are useful for the negotiation of film form at the theoretical level. As Nitzan Ben-Shaul has recently noted, ‘Differing from film history, film criticism or filmmaking … film theory strives to offer general ideas on the nature of film and models for film analysis, presumably applicable to every film irrespective of its specific context of production’ (2007: 1). While I would not necessarily support this presumption, Ben-Shaul is making a very important distinction here, and one that I will address specifically in relation to recent post-Jungian film scholarship momentarily. However, this generalized approach to film theory — an approach that quite rightly invokes film theory as a potentially enriching resource for historians, critics and filmmakers — nevertheless invites a separation between the various disciplinary strands within film studies. This invitation is, to my mind, an extension of the tension between theory and empiricism within the humanities in general and always-already negates the necessity to bear in mind the historical and material conditions within which, a film is made. Inevitably, these shape the production choices that filmmakers have to make (which may be grounded in both theory and practice).

The main problem that I see empirical research as presenting to the film scholar is related to the very notion of its usefulness. Quantitative research may provide us with hard data and qualitative research may provide very detailed accounts of everyday engagements with film, but this kind of audience research cannot by itself explain, or indeed even describe with any meaningful outcome, the phenomenon of film spectatorship. The interviewed subject may recall the feeling of experiences in great detail, but the experience of those feelings, actually feeling about film is, in my opinion, almost impossible to articulate in verbal terms (although this is, as Gibbs and Pye (2005) point out, the very thing that we frequently attempt to do). Feelings are not necessarily linguistic in nature and it follows that their articulation in language could only ever be partial. Therefore, a theoretical refit is in order.

I shall phrase this refit in a central question: Film matters, but how, and why? Such an important question, one would have thought, is absolutely crucial to an academic discipline that, as one of its central conceits, attempts to unravel the importance of the medium of film within (especially) Western cultures, through analysis of texts, institutions, and audiences. Indeed, the attempts at formulating methods of critical discussion of the production of meaning have formed the basis of a canonical body of work throughout the history of the discipline. However, to quote Victor Perkins, ‘Must we say what they mean?’ (1990: 1). To put it another way, can we ever say for certain what films mean? Can we say, for example, why Forrest Gump ‘just kept on running’ with any certainty? We may have a good idea as to why Forrest feels this urge to run: He wants to escape, to meditate and to long for a return to the unobtainable; hearth, home and his beloved Jenny. In that last sentence, I have already placed emphasis on certain verbs that are not explicit in the film text at all. These verbs articulate a meaning that is not necessarily a part of the film's narrative project. I have inferred these based on presuppositions of a personal experience of modernity which, if I am not careful, might lead to generalizations of meaning in the text. It is this reductive kind of interpretation that John Hollwitz (2001) is critical of in his evaluation of straightforward applications of analytical constructs to literary processes. Jung himself and many psychoanalytic critics are guilty of this direct appropriation of assumptions drawn straight from clinical practice and used for critical purposes. Hollowitz cites three criticisms of this, which I elaborate as follows:

1. It is a reductive method. Films may be argued to be like dreams, but they are not dreams; they are films, and cannot be analysed in the same fashion. In fact, I would argue that narrative films are only like dreams insofar as their assemblage is prototypical of the way that people often recount dreams in a narrative way. We do not necessarily dream like narrative films, but we certainly tell stories verbally in a similar fashion, often evoking imagery in order to elaborate our tales.
2. So what? For example, Obi Wan Kenobi is like the Wise Old Man archetype. Perhaps, but so what if he is? What are we to do with this information?
3. This method is inconsistent with empirical psychological fact. Often using Jungian typology (a system that Jung hardly utilized after the 1920s), criticism along these lines, itself based on outdated models, will inevitably be outdated in its own right.

The meaning I give to the film will inevitably be based on what I think of the film, the characters and the plot, and where I was/what I was doing/ what my life was like in general when I watched the film. It may even be contingent on the number of times that I have watched the film. It is this problematic of presupposition that binds the film scholar to the question of meaning, and this, more than anything perhaps, is the central problematic of film form, particularly as a storytelling medium. More recent Jungian film criticism, as we shall see, has taken account of context as an important determining principle, and the reasoning behind much post-Jungian thinking, particularly as a theoretical paradigm, centres on a regeneration of analytical constructs within production and reception contexts. More often in Jungian approaches, we are seeing interaction between different levels of consumption and interpretation as key to understanding the films themselves as cultural products.

Notes on materiality

In establishing a post-Jungian position on film, the Jungian film scholar encounters a number of problems in terms of conflict with persuasive arguments already prevalent in the field. Classical Jungian psychology is often treated with utter suspicion by historical materialists, as a collection of superstitious and irrelevant meditations on the modern ‘mind’. It is a model that is based on fantasy and overwhelmingly bourgeois concerns rather than historical class struggle within cultural and social production contexts. However, a brief scan of the literature in the discussion of Jungian approaches to materiality suggests that the relationship between psychological processes and their material counterparts is rather more complex. As Roger Brooke has pointed out, ‘If one recalls Jung's analysis of the body's carbon as “simply carbon”, it seems possible that Jung some-times thought of the self as a kind of entity, or linked to material continuity through space’ (1991: 99).

What we often think of as ‘our selves’ is linked to the body as a possible carrier of that ‘self’, and sometimes more specifically linked to the head/ brain/mind as a centre of self. But here, we see that even Jung, who was a fundamental Cartesian/Kantian, thought of this ‘self thinking’ as an articulation of the continuity of world and body. This is a fundamental point, as the Cartesian dualism of mind and body infiltrates and underpins the assumption of the difference between self and other, and the meanings that are wrought through that split. If there is a seed of existential doubt in Jung's frame of thought here, it is necessarily sown onto other fields of clinical investigatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Christopher Hauke
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘The Image and the Material’
• PART I Film theory: A critical historiography
• 1 Film matters, but how, and why?
• 2 Film as film; film as art; film as authored artefact
• 3 Film and audience, a ‘felt’ relation: The politics of cine-subjectivity
• 4 The film as political: Phenomenology and the material world of the film
• PART II Applying key Jungian concepts in film theory
• 5 Refitting the notion of the gaze: The ‘I’ that sees and the ‘eye’ that is seen
• 6 Contrasexuality and identification: Difference, sameness and gender in film
• 7 Narrative and myth, heroes and villains, film and television
• 8 Synchronicity and space-time transgression in film and video: Case studies in time sculpture and capture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index