The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

28 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN March— April, 1943 PSYCHOANALYTIC NOTES ON THE SCREEN AS A MEDIUM By JOHN PRATT THE scope of this article will be limited to a few psychoanalytic remarks as far as possible directed entirely to the actual technique of cinematic presentation. Let us start by recalling a somewhat outmoded phrase : " The Magic of the Screen." The belief in magic of the primitive can be shown to be due to an unconscious conviction of his own omnipotence. Tbe majority of human beings consciously attribute omnipotence to their deities alone. But the microscopy of psychoanalytic technique can show that in the unconscious mind of the more highly civilised, as in that of the savage, is present this same belief in his personal onmipotence. This is most evident in relation to certain words and gestures. An African tribesman may not pronounce the name of his mother-in-law " lest some grave mishap should occur." This taboo is a reaction against the omnipotence of the spoken word. If a tumbler is inadvertently struck and gives a ringing note, we hasten to stop it " lest a sailor should die." He has been saved by an omnipotent gesture. In relation to the omnipotence of words let us consider a magical conjuration. " By all th' infernal Gods I conjure Belcephon," says the learned Friar. And straightway appears the Devil. In the cinema we leave a scene in London on the line " It's a long time since I was in Paris." And we dissolve to the Champs Elysees or the Tour Eiffel. To our unconscious mind this too is a magical conjuration. The technique of writing and of cutting from a word to its visual representation has confirmed our unconscious belief in the omnipotence of words. We wonder with an actor "what old so and so is doing." A dissolve, and he appears before our eyes. This is the omnipotence of thought. From a gloved hand on the trigger button of a Spitfire we cut to a Messerschmidt disintegrating in the air. The causal logic of the cut is evident, but to the unconscious this is a magic gesture. It constitutes a part of the " wizardry " of the Spitfire. In a sequence about the B.A.F. we are at one moment inside the plane aiming the bombs, the next outside it watching them fall, and two or three seconds later we see the explosion from close to, just as we should have wished. Tins may not quite be omnipresence, but it is certainly omnipotence. If in the screen convention we dissolve from the tedium of a winter's landscape to a summer's sun, from a keel and ribs in a shipyard to the launching of a liner, we feel ourselves omnipotent creators. We may derive omnipotent pleasure from the timing of a commentated travelogue, but also more subtly from aerial shots, long tracking shots and crane shots. (Another source of pleasure in the crane shot I would relate to the unconscious origins of the pleasurable flying dream.) All the various types of optical gratify unconscious fantasies of omnipotent destruction and creation. A few are not so obvious : a wipe I would class as a magic gesture. In a crane shot can be seen at large a quite subtle source of this unconscious pleasure. Ordinarily the muscles of the eye perform the work of focussing and of accommodation in response to an alteration in the distance of a visual object. This they would do if we were sitting on the crane. But in the cinema our eyes are accommodated to a fixed distance, the work of focussing is done by the camera. To the unconscious this implies an omnipotent control over whatever it is that we arc craning in to. A magical control of the environment is a wish for which in the past men have sold their souls to the Devil. And to some persons at the present time the Cinema is the Devil. Out of all this I would stress one point, to which I shall return : That there is in screen technique a profound source of unconscious pleasure almost continually operative irrespective of story, actors, quality and so on. At this point we might return to the subject of focussing. There appears to the psychoanalyst to be something rather specific in the association of muscular activity with instinctual aggression which probably rests on a basis ultimately biological. As an emotional activity, looking can take over either a loving or an aggressive function. But I think the muscular acts of accommodation and of focussing carry a fundamentally aggressive significance, which is intuitively employed in the "hard focus" effect of a certain lighting technique, exemplified by the extensive stopping down of the lens in Citizen Kane. The "soft focus" effect of a diffused lighting, I would think, is an intuitive technique for avoiding ocular wrath: by representing an image that is not " clear cut " the way is freed for a more loving looking. The adjectives we naturally use in this connection serve also to illustrate my thesis. A certain preliminary explanation is necessary