Andrea Sabbadini who is the director of European Psychoanalytic Film Festival and the film section editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis covers dozens of films in his book using a psychoanalytical interpretive approach. Moving Images: Psychoanalytical Reflections on Film which is an illuminating work for discovering movie characters, their psychic tendencies and stories, will capture not only the attention of therapists and researchers but everyone who is interested in cinema.
Ultimately it is not a question of prioritizing the potential value of cinema for psychoanalysis, or of psychoanalysis for cinema, but to preserve a creative tension between these two approaches without imposing an artificial resolution upon them.
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Perhaps the horse-drawn coach with its disturbingly reassuring jingling bells indicates that everything we have seen projected on the screen was but a dream all along; that fantasy and reality like desire and its fulfillment, draw their raison d’être from each other and always merge. And that works of art, a good film for instance, have the function of reminding us that they are ultimately indistinguishable.
Andrea Sabbadini
Sabbadini’s Moving Images interprets what is reflected from the silver screen to audience from a perspective offered by the theory and practice of psychoanalysis; in addition to addressing different currents in cinema, it blends reviews with mythological stories, senses the impressions of painting and music, and contributes to our enrichment as it mobilizes different images in our mind. Moving Images depicts the cinematic representation of human psyche’s evolution from childhood to adulthood; shows that just like the shadows and lights complementing each other in cinema, dark sides of humans complement their bright sides and accomplish the goal of bridging the gap bewteen cinema and psychoanalysis.
Özden Terbaş
