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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Luke HockleySomatic Cinema: The Relationship between Body and Screen – a Jungian Perspective Routledge, London 2014, pp. 192
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2015-03-01
2021-09-21
2015-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Bianchi Pietro
2015/03/01
Duke University
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en
Luke HockleySomatic Cinema: The Relationship between Body and Screen – a Jungian Perspective Routledge, London 2014, pp. 192
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16416/17048
15
Luke Hockley
Somatic Cinema: The Relationship between Body and Screen –
a Jungian Perspective
Routledge, London 2014, pp. 192




   How can psychoanalysis contribute to the study of cinema? How can the dis-
covery of the unconscious cast new light on the subjective experience of watch-
ing a film? Those questions might seem naïve, especially since the relationship
between psychoanalysis and film can be traced back to several decades ago. And
still, it is precisely when the most simple and seemingly predictable questions
that allow us to look at something apparently familiar from a completely differ-
ent perspective. There is in fact something that stays at the forefront of the expe-
rience of psychoanalysis that seems to have been completely overlooked by the
discipline of film studies: the unconscious is always experience individually. For
example, if we have a symptom, it is always inscribed in our own particular body.
   It is with such a premise that Luke Hockley starts his defense of a Jungian
approach to the film experience. A premise that cannot but recall a classical
phenomenological assumption: an experience of vision concerns the entirety of
our own body and not just our eyes. The emphasis should be put on ‘our own’
as well as on ‘body,’ meaning that an experience of vision is at the same time a
bodily sensuous experience and an eminently personal one.
   Hockley seems to be particularly discomforted by a certain use of psychoa-
nalysis in Film Studies that according to him has overemphasized the linguistic
– and somehow objective – dimension of cinema “prescribing the role of the indi-
vidual [and overlooking] the individual relationship we have with films [through
which] they become personally meaningful to us” (p. 3). The concept of ‘feeling’
and the Jungian alphabet of ‘affect’ seems to play a crucial role in this regard, lim-
iting any objective pretension to create a direct causal relationship between the
image and the viewer, and adopting a more individually-oriented point of view:
“the activation of personal unconscious material is so strong that it overwrites the
inscribed, consensual and collective sense of the film’s narrative” (p. 84).
   Jungian psychoanalysis and the whole tradition of psychodynamic psychother-
apy have emphasized a clinical practice where a strong emphasis is put on the
dyad analyst-patient, conceived as a relation where both parties give a necessary
contribution to the progress of the therapy. This position “challenges the ubiq-
uity of the Lacanian-inflected psychoanalytic model of film theory, along with
its suggestions of decentred subjects, fragmented bodies and inherently fragile
                                               Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 24, Spring 2015
                               Reviews / Comptes-rendus


concept of self” (p. 1), among which there is also the asymmetrical dimension of
transference that is on the contrary seen in a much more disjunctive way. Such a
dialogical view, which serves more than an analogical purpose, allows Hockley
to give a relational account of the relationship between the viewer and the filmic
image. The concept of the ‘third image,’ which plays a very important role in
the book, is coined by the author precisely in order to describe a space that is
not reducible to the subject of vision nor to the neutral objectivity of the screen,
but that is constructed through the contribution of both. This interstitial space
– which exists in a sort of limbo between objectivity an subjectivity – has a status
similar to the ‘transitional’ object of Winnicott, positioned halfway between out-
side and inside the individual psyche (p. 44). The interplay between the film and
the viewer “provides a rich environment for the unconscious material to flourish”
and “what arises from these two elements is something new and fresh: not just
an image from the unconscious of the viewer, not just the image on the screen,
but something new that comes into being as a result of their interaction” (p. 84).
   Film Studies according to Hockley should thus learn to deal with this affec-
tive and meaningful dimension of the cinematic experience, even at the cost of
sacrificing the more celebrated emphasis of ‘a universal language.’
   The concept of image is therefore defined in this book without any recourse to em-
pirical or objective properties, but rather relying on C.G. Jung’s definition according
to which, “an idea of image [is] something closer to a metaphor – something that is
felt or experienced, and which contains an important psychological meaning” (p. 55).
   While Hockley’s argument is elegantly developed, it can become convincing
only for those who already share his theoretical premise. At time his recourse to
a theoretical sparring-partner – which is an understandable and respectable rhe-
torical strategy in order to clarify one’s own position – cannot but sound slightly
misplaced. For example: in his recurring references to Lacanian psychoanalysis
as an opposite approach than his own, he risks to give an inaccurate account of
a theoretical position that I believe, despite some evident differences, could have
been in many ways (at least in the field of Film Studies) one of his allies. There is
hardly any doubt that a Lacanian approach would not have put at least an equal
emphasis on the singularity of the unconscious, or on the bodily dimension of vi-
sion (with the concept of gaze), or on the impossibility to reduce the study of film
to an objective and prescriptive model (with the concept of the not-all). It seemed
that in this case the problem for Hockley did not come so much from Lacan him-
self, but rather from the Lacan-influenced Film Studies literature that constitutes
his exclusive point of reference in this work. The references to Lacan by Christian
Metz, Jean-Pierre Oudart, Jean-Louis Baudry or Laura Mulvey, for several histori-
cal reasons, are limited almost exclusive to early texts such as The Mirror Stage or
the Ecrits where the French psychoanalyst had not yet developed his most innova-
tive and original reflection on the gaze or on the Real of vision.


                                                  [Pietro Bianchi, Duke University]

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