© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Thresholds: film as film and the aesthetic experience
This essay explores some concepts from object-relations theory in psychoanalysis as they shed light on the particular kind of aesthetic experience cinema is capable of offering. The argument turns mainly on D.W. Winnicott's notion of transitional objects (and, more broadly, transitional phenomena and transitional processes). For adults, as well as infants and children, transitional objects are things – objects – that are pressed into the service of inner reality. They inhabit what Winnicott called an ‘intermediate zone‘ between inner psychical reality and the outside world, keeping the two separate but interconnected. This intermediate zone, it has been suggested, is the space of our engagements with cultural and aesthetic experience. Deployed in conjunction with André Bazin's thinking on the ontology and phenomenology of film, this idea suggests intriguing new ways of conceptualizing the experience of cinema in relation to the medium's distinctive matters of expression. Among the issues discussed is the operation of the film frame and the organization of the space (and time) bounded by the frame. These questions are further explored through readings of three films: Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick, 1951), Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988) and Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999).
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