application/pdf
2036-461X
19145
2
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Phantom of the Relationship, the Poverty of Cinema and the Excesses of Hypnosis
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
2
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2003-03-01
2022-11-28
2003-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Ruggero Eugeni
2003/03/01
Università Cattolica
2036-461X
2
en
The Phantom of the Relationship, the Poverty of Cinema and the Excesses of Hypnosis
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19145/16950
2
THE PHANTOM OF THE RELATIONSHIP,
THE POVERTY OF CINEMA AND THE EXCESSES OF HYPNOSIS
Ruggero Eugeni, Università Cattolica - Brescia




The darkness of the cinema. The light of hypnosis

  Inside, at the back of a pitch-black room with a low ceiling, the six-foot high screen, no big-
  ger than a man, shines on a monstrous audience, a mesmerized mass glued to the seats by
  this white eye with its fixed gaze. Lovers sit in a corner, embracing tightly, but what they see
  takes them far away […] People […] stare until their eyes almost pop out of their heads.1

  By 1909 the metaphor of hypnosis had already been cast on the viewing of films,
enlightening those excesses of the gaze that the darkness of the movie theater tends to
hide. This was a metaphor that was destined to become clearer and clearer, and more
pressing. At the beginning of the Twenties Epstein would speak of a “much more vio-
lent hunger for hypnosis than the habit of literature used to produce, because this one
modifies the nervous system much less;”2 while Fritz Lang would realize a vivid cine-
matic mise-en-scène as a hypnotic device during the second part of Dr. Mabuse, der
Spieler (1922).
  Here, it is not our purpose to draw an outline of the relationship between cinema and
hypnosis, but rather to ask two related questions. Firstly, how can viewing a film be
seen as a state of hypnosis, even if no hypnotist is actually present in the cinema?
Secondly, what are the effects of the overlap between film and hypnosis as far as the
social perception of the act of seeing a film is concerned?3 I will finish with a brief anno-
tation about the models of an “excessive” cinema – and therefore merely imaginary and
utopian – which the metaphor of the hypnosis has nourished to feed.


Archaeology of a metaphor

   From the end of the eighteenth century up to about the 1880s, magnetism and hyp-
nosis were practised in fixed and recurrent scenes, even though articulated from inside.
We can describe a classical magnetic scene. In the middle of the scene, there is the pair
magnetized – magnetizer; around them there is an audience which may be large or
small. This scene is ambiguous. On one hand it represents an excessively intense and
hierarchical relationship: the magnetizer assumes the control of the magnetized’s
actions and perceptions. On the other hand, we are dealing with a scene of a particular
epiphany: entering in a state of clear-mind, the magnetized-regains gets back control
over his perceptions, but in a wider and more powerful way. The magnetic somnambu-
list can look into his body, he can look at the scene he is living with his eyes closed, he

CINEMA & Cie, no. 2, Spring 2003                                                                 ­47
RUGGERO EUGENI

can cast himself into other spaces and times till he speaks with spirits and angel-like
creatures.
   The clear gaze is an absolute gaze, one reason being that it overcomes all the other
senses, parting from them and, overall, turning the somnambulist’s body into a big
sensitive surface. Another reason is that, being a form of optical touch, it can explore
each dimension in the universe, visible or invisible, near or far, past, present or
future.
   The magnetic setting therefore presents itself as a device composed of viewing and
excessive gazes. The main point is that this sort of viewing power is not born of a tech-
nological device (on the contrary, it is historically based on Mesmer’s refusal to adopt
electrical and magnetic devices), but rather through a relational expedient: it is the
meeting of gazes between magnetiser and magnetized, the tool of the subject’s projec-
tion towards other worlds and dimensions.
   At the end of the eighteenth century this scene loses its definition and internal coher-
ence: it is decomposed, reassembled, and disseminated into the social tissue. Hypnosis
is no longer practiced on clearly determined subjects and in clearly determined places:
it is to be found everywhere. The leading term is now “suggestion.” Suggestion presents
two dimensions. On one hand it spreads in a mutual relationship among the compo-
nents of the society: each member of the society can hypnotize another, either with
criminal intentions or in terms of the phenomenon of mental contagion typical of psy-
chic epidemics. So one can speak of a horizontal dimension of suggestion relationship.
On the other hand, suggestion is characterized by the direct relationship between the
magnetizer and the audience: the hypnotist’s magnetic gaze rotates 90 degrees and
turns to the audience. Therefore, a vertical dimension of the hypnotic relationship can
be spoken of.
   The visionary component of hypnosis is notably present in the vertical dimension.
The orchestra director who keeps the orchestra players clinging, the famous actor or
the speaker who dominates his or her audience, the political leader who gives stirring
speeches, or simply the stage hypnotist of the turn of the century who can mesmerize
whole groups of people, all these actually project images directly into the audience’s
mind. And that’s not all. A similar image-projection happens when the magnetizer
and the audience are not simultaneously present, when the contact is through the
medium of a text. This is particularly true in the novel: reading is intended as a direct
transmission of images from the page to the brain. The physiological mechanist the-
ories of the second half of the century, especially those of neurological reflexes,
restore, in the new context, the motif – typical of the classical magnetic scene – of the
clear, excessive and absolute gaze: the feeling infected by the magnetizer to the mag-
netized audience is a pure one, it is freed from perceptive senses, it penetrates direct-
ly into the subject and only at this point can it present itself to the subject as images
or narration.
   But note the basic ambiguity that is produced. The classical setting clearly distin-
guished between the magnetized’s hallucinatory visions – provided and guided by the
magnetizer – and clear visions, which are produced directly by the magnetized, without
the aid of a magnetizer. Modern forms of the hypnotic scene match the two kinds of
visions: the hallucinatory scene is excessive because it is directed by another. In the
relationship with the hypnotist, the members of the crowd choose to offer their gazes
to the hypnotist so as to get them back serialized (all of them see the same things) and

­48
                                                                THE PHANTOM OF THE RELATIONSHIP

strengthened (all of them see more and better than a subjective, organic and individual
gaze would allow).
  It is interesting to notice that on some occasions this specific kind of visionary rela-
tionship is enlightened by a peculiar metaphor: the magic lantern metaphor. I hereby
report only two quotations. The first one is by a little known philosopher, Paul Souriau.4
Souriau identifies the experience of the fruition of a work of art with the hypnotic ecsta-
sy: the author speaks of an admiring and contemplative ecstasy. As for the description of
a similar state, Souriau’s words in the passage dedicated to poetry are reported directly:

  Let’s try […] to recover, through memories, the dreaming dimension to which the poetic
  rhythm can take us, when one gives in to its influence. Amazing phantasmagory! It really is
  the show from an armchair. The darkness is in the room and the wait for the mystery, excit-
  ing my imagination, induces me to see the as yet unprojected images on the white screen.
  What is about to be performed? For instance Le Crépuscule. The performance starts. I see a
  roaring pond in the evening breeze, a deep forest; and all of a sudden a star appears through
  the shady branches which rises and lights up, radiant, resplendant in the sky. And as vague-
  ly seen in a pale light, the shots appear one after the other, melt into each other, while an
  invisible orchestra accompanies these visions. […] How sweet these visions are! How lulled
  are we by this slow music! Sleep, it tells us, dream! After a while we sink more deeply into
  hypnosis. We don’t imagine any more: we see, listen, hear; we are delighted by this evening
  breeze, by the beautiful summer nights, this pure air, whose freshness seems to be coming
  from the sky with the brightness of the stars.
  […] The passage is over. These magic lantern images fade away. I thus find myself in my arm-
  chair, with a book in my hands, and these little black characters on this white page are the
  ones that led me to this hallucination: I was reading the Contemplations.5

  The second quotation is posed by the better known scholar Gustave Le Bon. One of
the main ideas of Le Bon’s famous book on the psychology of crowds is that the crowds’
ideas are images and that their sequence is merely paratactic. The crowds think – and
are made to think by their leaders – as if they were watching a magic lantern show:

  Whatever the ideas suggested to the crowds may be, they cannot become dominant unless
  they are in a very simple form and are represented through images. These idea-images are
  not connected by any logical - analogical or subsequent – link, so that each one can replace
  the other, just like the magic lantern plates that the operator takes, one by one, from the box
  they were laid one upon another.6

  The metaphor of the magic lantern seems to extend implicitly in Le Bon’s following
reasoning step: what the crowds’ reasoning loses in logical coherence is then recovered
in the intensity of their interior perception, that is to say, in their hallucinatory power:

  The crowds’ representative imagination, like that of people who do not possess the faculty
  of reasoning, can be profoundly impressed. The images produced in their minds by a char-
  acter, an event or an accident are as vivid as the real thing[...].

  Only images, the only element their thought is fed by, can impress, frighten or seduce
the crowds, becoming the motive of any of their actions.7

                                                                                                ­49
RUGGERO EUGENI

   It seems as if all the elements to answering the first of our questions are present: the
metaphor of hypnosis is applied to the situation of fruition on the background of the
transformations that the hypnotic scene has undergone in modern times; in particular,
it is relevant to stress the “vertical” dimension it has taken and the possibility for the
magnetizer not to be present, physically, but rather symbolically, through the text.
However, one further phenomenon seems to be interesting: the overlap between cine-
ma and hypnosis only fully occurs at the beginning of the Twenties, at the very
moment of a twofold recomposition: of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the
social hypnosis on one side; of the social and inter-individual on the other. This organ-
ic composition is completed with Freud: the leader’s hypnosis of the single subject, seen
as a displacement of the subject’s ideal of the Ego onto an external object, implies a
mutual identification among hypnotized subjects. This reconnection is where the new
modern magnetic scene comes from: it is embodied in the imaginary and removed
scene in which

  the father’s gaze – the feared father of the [primordial] horde – the master of life and death in
  everybody, produced the same paralyzing effect on all the members of the horde and all their
  life long, the same limitation of every self-sufficient activity and personal intellectual
  impulse, that today the hypnotist’s gaze still produces in his “medium.” 8

  The Father-hypnotist watches, the hypnotized subjects look at him spellbound, iso-
lated from the external world, completely mesmerized. Good and evil, the world itself,
and the watching subject himself, do not exist but in connection with the Father and
his gaze. The stage model of hypnosis is embedded in the origins of every other scene of
hypnosis: from now on, the individual magnetic scene will exist only as an adaptation
of that scene. In other words, every hypnotized subject is part of an audience, even
when he is the only member.
  A powerful, mesmerizing eye. An entrapped, isolated, subdued audience. The new
hypnotic scene, just recomposed, is ready to enter the darkness of the movie theatre
straightaway. Maybe it is not merely a coincidence that Massenpsychologie und Ich-
Analyse was published in 1921: the same year when Epstein published the essay
Grossissement and Fritz Lang filmed Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.


The rule of metaphor

  We now come to the second question introduced at the beginning of this chapter –
what are the consequences of the overlap between the modern hypnotic setting and the
scene of a group of spectators absorbed in the vision of a film?
  First of all, it can be observed that the retrieval of the hypnotic scene allows what
would otherwise be invisible and unthinkable to be a scene which is thought of and
seen because it is entirely new: the scene of film’s fruition. In other words, the metaphor
of hypnosis helps build a social visibility of the film viewing scene and of the film
fruition experience, thanks to the restoration and overlap of categories well known in
this period, such as the hypnosis of crowds.
  Secondly, and as a consequence, once restored, the hypnotic metaphor produces a sit-
uation of film fruition: it selects some of its aspects, such as the state of concentration,

­50
                                                           THE PHANTOM OF THE RELATIONSHIP

fixity and steadiness of gaze required by the screen, the darkness of the movie theater,
the opening of a viewing scene shared by the spectators, the audiences’ emotional state;
at the same time the hypnotic metaphor isolates these elements, highlights them,
recomposes them in a unitary design and purpose. In short, the hypnotic metaphor
builds the film viewing scene, giving it a meaning, an identity, a model, a way. And this
is not all: from these operations, the hypnotic metaphor creates expectations, desires,
willingness in the social bodies. No less than other social situations, film viewing is sub-
ject to such a symbolic efficacy9 that knowledge, learning and social tales determine
role-takings, physical states, and emotional reactions.
  Thirdly, and finally, not only does the hypnotic metaphor highlight and organize ele-
ments present in the film fruition device, it also brings about, through imagination,
what is not present in the device. This imaginary integration occurs, in particular,
through two correlated aspects.
  The first aspect is the spectator’s gaze. The film viewing is destined to receive the
semantic load of the somnambulist’s clear gaze, with all the ambiguities contained
therein in these modern times. Therefore, there is a paradox in the movie spectator’s
gaze which can be defined thus: on the one hand driven by mass produced and released
images; on the other hand exalted in its skills and absolute to the extent that it com-
pletely absorbs the spectator’s body and senses.
  Besides this ambiguous mythology in the spectator’s eyes, there is another ambigu-
ous mythology: that of the relationship between the hypnotized spectator and the hyp-
notist’s gaze. We have seen how, since its origins, hypnosis emerges as a relationship
that awakens images from gazes. Hypnosis is first of all and originally an interpersonal
relationship, a kind of interaction. It is primarily expressed through the gaze: hypnosis
is triggered at the moment when the hypnotist’s gaze becomes absolute to the hypno-
tized, that is to say, it concentrates and re-absorbs the whole world, together with
desires and values, to make render them available again, but only inside oneself and
according to one’s own desires. This concept is not only found throughout the history
of hypnosis it is hypnosis: basically it is to be found from Mesmer to Freud. However,
when applied to the situation of film viewing, it has to face a notable difficulty: there is
no hypnotist in the movie theater, but only a group of spectators and a screen on which
technological equipment projects moving images. The only way to keep the hypnotic
metaphor is then to invent a non-existent relationship. In order for the metaphor to be
effective, and for the fruition scene to consequently have its meaning, it is necessary to
turn the imaginary interpersonal relationship between spectator and screen into a per-
sonal relationship between the spectator and a person who is there, watches him, talks
to him, shows him some images, tells him a story.10


Note: the future of an illusion

  What is left of this metaphor in the history of cinema? What shape has it taken, what
utopias has it fed, what models has it given life to? And what ruins of an unfulfilled
future has it caused? It seems as if the answer were to be searched for according to three
directions. Firstly, the idea that the vision of the film consists of an experience of dis-
possession of the self and of strengthening of one’s own gaze is to be found in many
“total” or “expanded” movie devices in the history of cinema, up to the contemporary

                                                                                         ­51
RUGGERO EUGENI

virtual reality projects. Secondly, the idea that the movie is the place where a hypnotic
relation is set off – in more or less concealed forms – goes through the theories of cine-
ma. It would be interesting in this sense, not only to read anew the most explicit decla-
rations (Barthes, Bellour), but – and more into depth – the “relational” theories of the
cinema as well, in particular a wide range of reflections on the enunciation. Thirdly, the
idea that the movie spectator is absorbed in a hypnotic state goes through the history of
films and of the movie representation, with moments of alternate fortune and with a
discontinuous availability to make the diegetic representation of the hypnotic relation
a model of the relationship between the film and his spectator. Amply simplifying, it is
the German Expressionism and in particular the already mentioned Lang’s Mabuse
that in the Twenties constitutes the starting point for a reflection on the experience of
the spectator as hypnotic state. This is destined to surge in some American horror films
of the Thirties, subsequently followed by a period of drowsiness. It will be the task of
the “psychiatric” and the parapsychiatric movie of the late Fifties to arouse the atten-
tion for hypnosis as an object of representation and as a model of relationship between
the film and the spectator. After a new period of silence (or, better, a period in which the
subject is hidden inside B class horror movies) the theme comes out anew in certain art
movies of the Eighties (Von Trier, Bigas Luna), by the time fully aware of their metafic-
titious implications and consequences.
   To study the way these three projections of the hypnotic metaphor in the movie have
or have not been correlated and synchronized is the concern of a work that still needs
to be done.

                     [Translated from Italian by Antonella Santambrogio and Clive Prest]



1 A. Döblin, “Das Theater der kleinen Leute,” Das Theater, Jg. 1, H. 8 (Dezember 1909); now in
  A. Kaes (ed.) Kino-Debatte. Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909-1929
  (Tübingen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), pp. 37-38, our trans.
2 J. Epstein, “Grossissement,” Promenoir, no. 1-2 (February-March 1921); then in Bonjour ciné-
  ma (Paris: Editions de la Sirène, 1921); now in Ecrits sur le cinéma, ed. by P. Lherminier, vol. 1
  (Paris: Seghers, 1975), pp. 119-120, our trans. Epstein will return to the subject elsewhere, par-
  ticularly in “Ciné-analyse ou poésie en quantité industrielle,” in Esprit de cinéma (Genève-
  Paris: Jeheber, 1955), pp. 69-76.
3 This article presents a few conclusions to be found in R. Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto, studi
  su cinema e ipnosi (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2002), in particular pp. 65-161. For further in-
  depth study and bibliography refer to this volume. Special thanks to Raymond Bellour and
  Francesco Casetti for following this work with attention and encouragement.
4 P. Souriau, La Suggestion dans l’art (Paris: Alcan, 1893), our trans.
5 Ibid., pp. 193-194 of the Italian translation. The reader is reminded that Les Contemplations
  is the title Hugo gave to his poems collection (1856).
6 G. Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Alcan, 1895), our trans.
7 Ibid., p. 63. The main model of such an imaginative force is no longer identified by Le Bon in
  the magic lantern shows, but rather in plays. One should not be surprised by the conclusion
  of this theory concerning the relationship between hallucination, hypnosis and crowds.
  When, at the beginning of the 1920s, Le Bon goes back to his previous ideas and explores the

­52
                                                               THE PHANTOM OF THE RELATIONSHIP

   means through which it is possible to defend the French democracy from its enemies, he again
   uses the term “propaganda,” introduced after the war. And most of all, he will see the cinema
   as the new instrument of propaganda: the instrument that, more than others, works through
   images, lending itself to the crowd’s thought processes in mime, penetration and direction bet-
   ter than the others do. The government itself, as Le Bon concludes, has to buy some movie the-
   atres and become film distributor and producer. See G. Le Bon, “La vie politique: genèse et
   propagation des idées,” Annales littéraires et politiques, no. 81 (1923), pp. 62-63.
8 S. Ferenczi, “Der individualpsychologische Fortschritt in Freuds ‘Massenpsychologie und Ich-
   Analyse’,” (1922) in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, 1919-1926 (Paris: Payot, 1974), p. 183 and fol-
   lowing, our trans.
9 C. Lévi-Strauss, “L’efficacité symbolique,” (1949), in Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon,
   1964).
10 We are hereby linked through another way to Metz’s last phase matters: Ch. Metz,
   L’Enonciation impersonelle ou le site du film (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991).




                                                                                               ­53
