Session 7: I Can’t Look- Tell Me When It’s Over
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
The Id in the Basement
Michele Huppert
Monash University, Australia
Alfred Hitchcock is said to have been less than an enamoured with psychoanalysis yet his film work belies this claim. The intuitive understanding of the machinations of the mind, with a fascination for what lies below the surface, is evident in all his movies. This paper examines some of the psychoanalytic principles illustrated in Hitchcock’s movies with particular emphasis on the Hitchcockian classic, ‘Psycho‘. Renowned psychoanalyst and philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, has opened the door for this recognition of the parallels between psychoanalytic theory and Hitchcock’s movies in his ‘ The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema‘ (2006), in which Zizek “delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves” (www.thepervertsguide.com), and, in particular, what Hitchcock was telling us about the hidden desires and fears of the human psyche. Hitchcock may have been skeptical of psychoanalysis, but his exploration of the psychoanalytic perspective, and his efforts to feed ourselves back to ourselves, draws me to the conclusion that “the [film director] doth protest too much, methinks” (apologies to Shakespeare).
Run For Your Lives: Remembering the Ramsay Brothers
Kartik Nair
Cinema Studies, JNU, New Delhi, India
There is a derelict history of genre cinema in Bollywood, overshadowed by the all-inclusive, cross-genre format of the mainstream. A warehouse in Bombay houses paraphernalia used in the movies Purana Mandir (1984), Saamri (1985), Veerana (1988), and Bandh Darwaza (1990). It is all that remains of a fertile run of films which began in the early 70s and played itself out at the box office by the late 80s. These were the horror films of the seven Ramsay brothers, films that were pure schlock to a generation of viewers, treated from the start as B-movies that did A-movie business.
Mostly predictable in their transgressions, the Ramsay films are conventional genre work, down to the details of pubescent girls, adolescent anarchy, and haunted houses. In Purana Mandir, sexual intercourse is taboo; trespassers invoke an ancient curse of certain death. In Bandh Darwaaza, young women are stalked by a vampire-overlord who rapes and enslaves them in his lair. Locations of choice in these movies will be the hill station, the small town, the farmhouse. City limits are past; we are outside the surveillance of the police and beyond the purview of urban control.
The Ramsays are observant students of Hammer, Bava, Argento. The 70s and 80s are further marked by the rise of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper. As a consistent, intelligible poetics, the Ramsays provide an early and altogether parallel working example of Bombay Cinema globalizing before the watershed 90s.
My paper writes this spectral story. Like their pet demons and vampires, the Ramsays were seen as unwelcome intruders in the movie industry’s onward march to bourgeois respectability. Yet, they have have persisted in popular memory, haunting our sense of the movies in the form of a beloved and campy underground. They were the unacknowledged house-guests of India’s biggest movie industry for two decades: they had legs at the box office and legions of fans, but are consigned to oblivion in most official histories of Bombay Cinema.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Fearing the Addict: Hollywood’s Projection of American’s Phobia of Drug Addicts
Bryan Brown
Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA
The citizens of the United States have been ingrained with a fear of the drug addict. Through the support of political rhetoric, legislation, and popular culture representation these people are enveloped in a realm of fear. Pre-World War II, amidst the peak of the Hays Code, Hollywood produced addiction films that portray the monstrous effects of drug experimentation in the youth culture. However, post-WWII cinema brings the addict to the urban environment and closer to the local community. These narratives are reflective of a cultural and political awareness of the rise in combative efforts against drug addiction.
Such representation fosters and supports the social structure that enables fear within the community. Through early fear films such as “The Cocaine Fiends” (1935) and “Refer Madness” (1936) Hollywood began to present the addict as an individual which offers a threat to the well being of their local community. Through their destructive behavior these addicts cause much hardship to their family, friends, and local community. Later films such as “The Man With a Golden Arm” (1955) present the addict as more sympathetic, but maintain he is someone to be feared because he weakly gives into his addiction regardless of the consequences.
The studio system, with the Catholic Church, worked to develop a system of guidelines for such representation. Above all, the addict must face harsh consequences for such behavior. The structure of the studio system coupled with the industry created Hays Code demanded the representation of the addict to be overtly negative and to instill a wide spread fear in the audience.
Political rhetoric furthers such fears in the general public. The majority of the citizens possessed little personal experience with drug addiction and their only familiarity was in the forms of both mediated representation and political commentary. Films were declaring: Fear the Addict!
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