Click Here to Read: A Review of the movie, “A Dry White Season” by Bertram Rosen.
Category: Movies
E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial: Advent of the Absent Father
by Gershon Reiter From Fathers and Sons in Cinema © 2008 Gershon Reiter by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www. Excerpt from “Fathers and Sons in Cinema,” by Gershon Reiter, coming out this June. The book addresses the father-son relationship in American cinema by re-examining ancient dragon-slaying myths, showing how they apply to movies, or to what the book calls filmmyths, that deal with fathers and sons. Continue reading E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial: Advent of the Absent Father
Review of the Movie “Eyes Wide Shut” by Bertram Rosen
“The Conformist”: An Unconscious Scene Hidden in the Imagery
Over the past 3 months, I have published film essays with a particular focus on the Primal Scene. I began with the recent film, The Lives of Others (February), using Arlow’s paper, “The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene” as my primary text. In the following months, in commentaries on LA Confidental (March) and the two films, The Crying Game and Mona Lisa (April), I have continued to focus on a sense of exclusion and a wish for revenge as an important dynamic in understanding the primal scene as it is represented in those films. This examination of Bertolucci’s The Conformist continues those themes. In doing so, I have ignored other important themes in this complex work in order to focus on a peculiar aspect of the film as I see it.
The Conformist was the first film that I ever “analyzed”, and doing that got me interested in thinking and writing about unconscious fantasy in film. I would like to point the reader to two extraordinary (to me) features of this film: 1. An unprecedented concentration of primal scene imagery; and, 2. A configuration of imagery that allows us to “reconstruct” a very specific, detailed primal scene fantasy. I have written about this in a much more condensed version in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1997: vol. 78:1031-1033). This expanded version was published in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film (Herbert H. Stein, M.D.; 2002, Ereads).
Continue reading “The Conformist”: An Unconscious Scene Hidden in the Imagery
A Review of Erin Brokovich By Paul Palvan and Bertram Rosen
Review of the Movie: The Mask by Leni Lourenço de Oliveira
“The Crying Game” and “Mona Lisa”: Who’s Got the Penis?
The opening credits of Neil Jordan’s film, The Crying Game, are accompanied by the song, “When a Man Loves a Woman”. The song tells us that a man’s love for a woman will cause him to lose all judgment, to give up his money, his friends, even his life. If she is bad, he will not see it. The film’s first scene confirms the song’s philosophy. Continue reading “The Crying Game” and “Mona Lisa”: Who’s Got the Penis?
“LA Confidential”: The Primal Betrayal
I believe that it is generally best, in understanding a patient or a film, to start at the surface, to understand that surface and use it as our guide as we go deeper. L.A. Confidential gives us a very clear and readable surface with the opening credits, a surface that, we shall see, resonates with deeper, more personal meanings. Continue reading “LA Confidential”: The Primal Betrayal
Watching The Lives of Others: Primal Scene Envy in the GDR
“The filmmakers use the dynamics of the primal scene, presumably without conscious awareness of those dynamics, to exact upon the agents of the East German government (GDR) exactly the forms of revenge that Arlow’s patients exact in fantasy upon their parents.” Continue reading Watching The Lives of Others: Primal Scene Envy in the GDR
How to Make an American (Womb) Quilt
This morning (Thursday) at the Oral History Workshop of the American Psychoanalytic Association Meeting, Nellie Thompson, in discussing the life and contributions of Bertram Lewin mentioned his 1935 paper on “Claustrophobia”, reminding me that I had come across it years ago while preparing a discussion of the film, How to Make an American Quilt.
In his paper, Lewin tells of a young woman who had “ordered her life in general so as to escape marriage and the male sex.” From her arrangement of her room, her dreams, and her associations, Lewin convincingly concluded that “the patient was imagining herself a foetus in the maternal body—but this idea did not cause anxiety. Indeed, on the contrary, this was an idea of safety or defense. The anxiety arose when the defensive wall was threatened, that is to say, when the penis entered or threatened to touch her . . . The intrauterine fantasy is one of defense (flight) and relief from anxiety; the anxiety arises with the idea of being disturbed or dislodged by the father or father’s penis.” The other fear that disturbed the patient’s fantasy of being in the womb was of being born. Finn, the young woman who is the center of How to Make an American Quilt, has a similar problem. Continue reading How to Make an American (Womb) Quilt