The British Trauma Film - Adam Plummer

The British Trauma Film

Psychoanalysis and Popular British Cinema in the Immediate Aftermath of the Second World War

(Autor)

Buch | Hardcover
240 Seiten
2023
Bloomsbury Publishing USA (Verlag)
979-8-7651-0047-9 (ISBN)
109,95 inkl. MwSt
While the historical influence of psychoanalysis on Hollywood cinema has received considerable attention, the same cannot be said for its influence on British cinema. This book examines the central position that psychoanalysis occupies in British cinema in the years immediately following the Second World War.

Plummer uses a critical theory framework to understand the role that psychoanalysis plays in British culture at this time as an historical discourse, and in British cinema as a narrative, a cultural, and an ideological discourse. He defines these as arising within various areas of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking related to traumatic wartime experience, sexual difference, and the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. He analyzes six British films of the period: The Halfway House, Dead of Night, The Seventh Veil, Madonna of the Seven Moons, They Made Me a Fugitive, and Mine Own Executioner and demonstrates how psychoanalysis operates within them as a narrative and formal structuring mechanism. He argues that this engagement enables these films to begin to address the emotional fallout of the war by creating safe representational spaces where contemporary audiences could engage with their own traumatic experiences.

While The British Trauma Film defines psychoanalysis as providing a language for British cinema at this time to confront the effects of wartime trauma, it finds that it also operates within a normalizing ideological system designed to reproduce dominant pre-war relations of political, social, and sexual power. However, in this group of films, this system is often countered by subversive discursive forces that seem to be immanent to the films themselves.

Adam Plummer has taught film theory, film history, and film philosophy at Queen Mary University of London, UK, and is now an independent writer and researcher based in the UK.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. Althusser and Foucault, Psychoanalysis as Ideology and Discourse, and the Place of the British Trauma Film in British Immediate Post-War Cinema
2. "Broken Attachments and Traumatic Repetition": Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Loss, Trauma, Anxiety, and the Fragmentation of the Family Unit in The Halfway House
3. “The Perpetual Recurrence of the Same Thing”: The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma ad Infinitum, Male Anxiety, Sexual Difference, and Motherhood, and the Interplay between Subjectivity and Objectivity in Dead of Night
4. “What Does a Woman Want?”: Childhood Trauma, Female Desire, and Female Subjectivity in The Seventh Veil and Madonna of the Seven Moons
5. “The World is Full of Neurotics”: The Traumatized Serviceman, the Collapse of Maternal and Paternal Functions, and the Effects of Post-War Cultural Malaise in They Made Me a Fugitive and Mine Own Executioner
Concluding Remarks

Bibliography
The British Trauma Film - A Filmography
General Filmogrpahy
Index

Erscheinungsdatum
Zusatzinfo 55 bw illus
Verlagsort New York
Sprache englisch
Maße 152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt Kunst / Musik / Theater Film / TV
Geschichte Allgemeine Geschichte Zeitgeschichte
Sozialwissenschaften Kommunikation / Medien Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-13 979-8-7651-0047-9 / 9798765100479
Zustand Neuware
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