avocets
Avocets
rss 2.0 subscribe to this page
search


related to movies+gwpabst+closeup
2 + 1920s
2 + bryher
3 + film
1 + freud
3 + hd
2 + poolfilms
3 + psychoanalysis
1 + psychology
1 + women
view all
•  projects
•  owners
•  tags
"Writing about Cinema: Close Up 1927-1933" Dissertation Abstracts International [0419-4209] 44.12 (1984). 3522A-. [Request through ILL]
 
Anne Friedberg argues for the importance of Close Up as an early film journal. The journal's purpose was to "interrogate cinema's formal potential" in order to promote better films and filmmaking (325) . Close up did not present one monolithic view of cinema but rather created a forum for debate about the "stylistic, technological, educational, and psychoanalytic potentials of the cinema" (328). Friedberg also argues that as a periodical, Close Up circulated more easily than the films it covered, thus it "served as a more practical way to transmit theoretical ideas about cinema than did the viewing of films themselves" (325). Friedberg includes chapters on Writing about Cinema; 'The Editorial Three'; POOL books and films; Close Up as international journal and salon; and the focal distance of reading. The very useful "Appendix III: A Chronology of Close Up in Context" is reprinted in the Close Up anthology edited by Donald, Friedberg, and Marcus [see entry in my Film and Psychoanalysis project].
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1998.3.P34 F5 1990
 

Friedberg, Anne.  “An Unheimlich Maneuver between Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Secrets of the Soul (1926).” The Films of G.W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema.  Ed. Eric Rentschler.  New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1990.

Friedberg introduces her article with a look at the twin birth of psychoanalysis and cinema and argues that "Freud's theory of the unconscious. . .was, from the start, a theory in search of an apparatus. Yet the cinema, an apparatus which could reproduce and project specular images, from its beginnings, an apparatus in search of a theory" (41). Drawing on Chodorkoff and Baxter, Friedberg offers a reading of the history of the making of Secrets of the Soul, including Freud's rejection of the project. She calls the film the first 'that directly tried to represent psychoanalytic descriptions of the etiology of a phobia and the method of psychoanalytic treatment" (45). Friedberg points to the various ironic name puns having to do with Freud's lack of involvment in the film: that Pabst, the director of Joyless Street--Die FREUDlose Gasse (my emphasis) was asked to direct a film "mit Freud," when Freud refused to be involved; and that the actor who plays the pshychoanalyst in Secrets, Pavel Pavlov, shares his name with "Freud's mightiest theoretical opponent, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov" (46). Friedman goes on to describe and analyze the film, which she notes is separated into five parts: Pre-Dream; The Dream; Post-Dream; Analysis; and Cure. She notes that the happy ending of the film works as a kind of advertisement for psychoanalysis, arguing that Abraham and Sachs in consulting on the film, intented to "extol its curative virtues" (51).

tagged 1920s closeup hd film movies psychoanalysis gwpabst POOLfilms bryher by aliki ...on 21-APR-06