These fifteen carefully chosen essays by well-known scholars demonstrate the vitality and variety of psychoanalytic film criticism, as well as the crucial role feminist theory has played in its development. Among the films discussed are Duel in the Sun, The Best Yearsof Our Lives, Three Faces of Eve, Tender is the Night,Pandora's Box, Secrets of the Soul, and the works of Jacques Tourneur (director of The Cat People and other features).
Introduction: From Plato's Cave to Freud's Screen, E. Ann Kaplan; Chapter 1 Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" inspired by Duel in the Sun, Laura Mulvey; Chapter 2 A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification, Anne Friedberg; Chapter 3 Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory, Mary Ann Doane; Chapter 4 Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies, Claire Johnston; Chapter 5 Cinematic Abreaction: Tourneur's Cat People, Deborah Linderman; Chapter 6 Believing in the Cinema, Raymond Bellour, Dana Polan; Chapter 7 Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity, Kaja Silverman; Chapter 8 Motherhood and Representation: From Postwar Freudian Figurations to Postmodernism, E. Ann Kaplan; Chapter 9 Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Postwar Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, Janet Walker; Chapter 10 Psychological Explanation in the Films of Lang and Pabst, Janet Bergstrom; Chapter 11 Not Speaking with Language/Speaking with No Language: Leslie Thornton's Adynata, Linda Peckham; Chapter 12 Some Ruminations around the Cinematic Antidotes to the Oedipal Net(les) while Playing with De Lauraedipus Mulvey, or, He May Be Off Screen, but ..., Yvonne Rainer; Chapter 13 Dialogue: Remembering (this memory of) a film, Raymond Bellour, Guy Rosolato, Thomas Y. Levin;
