From a psychoanalysis perspective, cinema is the art that has a compensatory nature. In the words of Christian Metz, cinema as an anonymous and pleasurable observation or the voyeurism is the keyhole to our psyche’s labyrinth. The most ambiguous conclusions about human nature, we seal away and guard behind a lock. The ability to see the hide-and-seek rhythm disassembled on the screen, in which this concealed content is elegantly cracked open, vibrates our sensory system and the air of our subconsciousness corridors. The Latin phrase ‘sub rosa’ or ‘under the roses’ is used to seal away things that we do not want to speak of or things of confidential nature. In this lecture we will try to take a look at the parallels and meeting points of cinema and psychoanalysis, focusing on the untold stories of outsiders. The concept of the lecture is similar to a walk through the hallway, with a passionate or examining look peeking into the door's small keyholes.
In a way this will be a psychoanalysis session that begins with Gaspar Noe's aesthetical gem of extreme cinema Meat (1991), parallelly studying the father's absolute love for daughter and incest. Moving forward, the gaze phenomenon recorded by Ruben Ostlund's criminal humour sketch Incident by a Bank (2009) and Nice Coloured Girls (Tracey Moffatt, 1987), which looks at the side effects of the white man's dominance in Australia during the end of the 80s, as prostitutes of aboriginal descent rebound a historic injustice during one night. At the end of our corridor is the literature’s enfant terrible, Jean-Genet’s only cinematic work – Love Song (1950) - where prisoner communication, divided by the concrete walls, is charged with homoerotic poetry. The film accurately points out that we lock away the unwanted or those beyond the boundaries of the law in the broader sense.
Dārta Ceriņa is a cinema critic, culture journalist and stage art and audiovisual art researcher, who graduated in Cinema and Theater theory from Latvian Academy of Culture (LAC) this summer. In autumn she started masters on semiotics at Tartu University, as well as work as a scientific assistant in LAC’s scientific research centre. She’s also actively published in the press and takes part in an international and local scale master classes and conferences dedicated to the art of cinema and theatre.