Articles |
Figural vision: Freud, Lyotard, and early cinematic comedy
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Media, Film and Theatre at the University of New South Wales. She has published essays on film comedy, the horror film, and comedy and philosophy in various journals and anthologies. Her book, Laughing Down Silence: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Comedy is due out in 2005
This paper endeavours to demonstrate that cinema has access to the figural vision Freud supposes is specific to the unconscious, and that it is evident in the sight gags that made the slapstick at the end of the silent era distinctive. The first part of the paper establishes a theoretical framework constructed vis-à-vis Jean-François Lyotard's poststructuralist reconfiguration of some aspects of psychoanalysis. It focuses upon the relationship between discourse and figure in Freud's schematisation of the operation of the primary process and the dream-work's figural function as both destructive and transformative of discursive meaning. The second part reorients this framework by considering the impact of Lyotard's formulation of an aesthetics of transformation upon Freud's work on the joke. This framework is then used to theorise the refined slapstick that emerged in the 1920s by analysing Chaplin's film City Lights.