Movie, Psychosis and Act. Film seminar in a psychoanalytic setting

Welcome to the seminar "Movie, Psychosis and Act", a film seminar in a psychoanalytic setting.

Guest lecturers:
France Jaigu psychoanalyst, Associate Professor at Sorbonne III, Paris
René Rasmussen, psychoanalyst, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen

Convenor:
Kjell Soleim, Faculty of Humanities, University of Bergen    

PROGRAM

THURSDAY 20 0CTOBER
09.15 – 09.30
Introduction by Kjell Soleim

09.30 – 10.45
Session 1, by France Jaigu
Hans Namuth: Jackson Pollock 51   

11.00 – 12.15
Session 2, by France Jaigu
Ed Harris: Pollock

14.15 – 16.00
Session 3, by France Jaigu
Julian Schnabel: Basquiat

FRIDAY 21 OCTOBER

09.15 – 10.45
Session 1, by René Rasmussen
Stanley Kubrick: The Shining

11.00 – 12.15 
Session 2, by René Rasmussen
Lars von Trier: Anti-Christ 

14.15-15.30
Session 3, Summing up and conclusions

Synopsis, France Jaigu

Jacques Lacan developed his theory of the act in the 1960s, both in Seminar 10, 'Anxiety' and in Seminar 15, 'The Psychoanalytic Act' (yet to be published). Drawing on Freud's concept of "bungled actions" (introduced in 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life'), Lacan opposed the act (among which we count creative and political acts) to "acting out" and "passage to the act" which are both pathological. The real act, Lacan will argue, is that which is most in tune to the subject's desire. In that respect, the act is always "bungled", insofar as it expresses the part of our desire we cannot speak.

In keeping with Lacan's statement that the artist is always preceding the analyst (which we find in Lacan's 1965 tribute to Marguerite Duras), we hope to illustrate the psychoanalytical conception of the act by discussing various filmmakers’ interpretations of the creative act.

What is an act? What is the stuff real acts are made of? Such is the question that lies behind the setbacks suffered by some of the filmmakers that attempted to film the creative act. And psychoanalysis, thanks to the teachings of Freud and Lacan, help us understand what went wrong when one Hans Namuth, for instance, attempted to shoot his second film of Jackson Pollock, the new star of the American avant-garde, painting a picture in 1951. The making of the film indeed precipitated Pollock in a considerable personal crisis: not only did he resume drinking, but his artistic production was profoundly affected in the last five years of his life (Pollock died in a car accident while driving drunk on a Long Island road in 1956).

It could be argued that Namuth’s chronological framing of the Pollockian creative act is what effectively triggered the artist’s crisis. Before Namuth’s 1951 film, Pollock’s production had been interpreted as the ‘heroic breakthrough’ that was rooted in an almost mythical conception of time. After Namuth, the Pollockian act ceased to be revolutionary: it had become the act of a man with a biography, the act of an artist playing his part in the historical development of American art.

Ed Harris’s Pollock (2000), quotes the encounter between Namuth and Pollock abundantly. It too adopts a chronological reading of the Pollock phenomenon but, in so doing, reveals the aftermath of the Namuth film’s shooting: in keeping with what has been abundantly documented since in biographies, Pollock, at the end of the last day of the shooting, verbally abused Namuth at a dinner party that had been organized by Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife. The painter helped himself to large amounts of whisky before overturning the dinner table around which his guests were already seated. This scene, which, in its demonstrative nature, can be interpreted as an acting-out (as Lacan defined the acting-out in Seminar 11), testifies that something was definitely amiss in the relation of transference that no doubt linked Pollock to Namuth.

Opposed to Namuth’s chronological treatment of the act, is Julian Schnabel’s experience converted in his movie about his departed friend, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Schnabel being also a painter, has a completely different reading of the creative act. Although Basquiat (1996), like Pollock, has elements in it of the biopic, Schnabel considers filmmaking as an opportunity to play with history, a way to make different events coexist in a framework which, akin to the unconscious, eludes the issues of time, contradiction and death.

Drawing on the experiences of Hans Namuth, Julian Schnabel and, to a lesser extent, Ed Harris, we will attempt to show how the (creative) act, in tune with the unconscious, needs to be dissociated with the concept of intent. It follows that the act cannot be comprehended within traditional patterns of linearity or chronology (even if we are accustomed to having academics and critics interpret artists in movements or schools). The Pollockian acting out in the wake of the Namuth film dramatically testifies to the filmmaker’s misreading of the act.

Synopsis, René Rasmussen

A movie or a person in a movie neither constitutes a psychosis nor a neurosis or a perversion. However, some movies or persons in movies represent traces, which can tell us something about psychosis. Psychoanalysis can learn from such movies, in so far they can tell us something about psychosis. An essential element connected to psychosis is the lack of the position of the father or of, what Lacan calls the Name of the Father. Or when, the father supposed to incarnate this position or the name of the father is psychotic, then it creates huge problems to the son (or daughter).

This is the case in The Shining by Kubrick, even though it is not possible to say, what really destabilises the universe of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and of his family. However, it is very clear, that Jack has to act according to his paranoiac vision of the hotel and his family. Hence Jack has to kill his wife and son, Wendy and Danny. This movie manifests how a psychotic subject could act.

In Anti-Christ by Lars Von Trier we are confronted with a dual relationship between a man and a woman or a therapist and a client (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg). This relationship has a psychotic, paranoiac character, and here the acts of the psychotic subjects are not only an attempt to kill the other, but also an attempt to diminish too much jouissance, and the anxiety, which accompanies too much jouissance.

However the movie not only shows us how this or how jouissance is a road to the death of the subject and how this paranoiac relationship functions, and why the act of the subject imposes itself. It also stresses that cognitive therapy fundamentally is imaginary and contains the same imaginary dead end.

The seminar is organized by:
Department of Comparative Literature & Centre for Women’s and Gender Research, (SKOK), University of Bergen