In Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film, Carla Ambrósio Garcia introduces the rich potential of the thinking of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for film theory. By so doing, she rethinks the space of the cinema as a space of retreat, bringing new insights into the representation of retreat in film. The book seeks to deepen our understanding of the film experience and psychical growth.
Key Features
- Explores Bion’s view on the importance of the epistemophilic instinct.
- Challenges pleasure-centred theories of the cinematic apparatus.
- Poses an emotional experience in cinema for the subject to become real.
- Examines representations of retreat in four European films.
- Presents retreat as a future-oriented gesture and space.
Additional Information
Part I critiques the works of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Gaylyn Studlar, proposing an idea of cinema as ‘thoughts in search of a thinker’. Part II shows how the selected films articulate a gesture of retreat as an emotionally turbulent transitional stage in the development of the psyche – what Bion conceptualizes as caesura. This book will be of significant interest to academics and students of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and film and media studies, as well as psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
