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Please note: this 6 hour course with Mary Wild has already taken place, tickets are for recording access only. You will receive your individual access details in the Eventbrite confirmation email, you have access for 14 days. Booking closes at 11.30pm on 31 August.
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In his paper ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), Sigmund Freud discusses a phenomenon that is simultaneously familiar and foreign, resulting in a feeling of discomfort. He qualifies the uncanny as belonging to “all that is terrible”, arousing dread and creeping horror. Situations that produce an eerie sensation (e.g., déjà-vu, animism, sorcery, omnipotence of thought, the Doppelgänger, instantaneous wish fulfilment, dolls) capture the paradox of being attracted to yet disturbed by an object.
In this webinar series, we will explore the uncanny through the medium of film, locating the oddness in the ordinary via the remarkable capacity of moving image to stage ambivalence and uneasiness. Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling that is more powerfully experienced in art than in life, and so we shall examine cinematic representations of the concept within three essential categories (The Dream, The Home, The Self), all of which give rise to a sense of reassurance whilst also provoking a suppressed primordial fear and unnerving confusion.
Advanced viewing is optional; brief film scenes will be shown during broadcast.
THE DREAM
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) Luis Buñuel
Jacob’s Ladder (1990) Adrian Lyne
Vertigo (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
THE HOME
Secret Beyond the Door (1947) Fritz Lang
Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski
Dogtooth (2009) Yorgos Lanthimos
THE SELF
Goodnight Mommy (2014) Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
Unsane (2018) Steven Soderbergh
Get Out (2017) Jordan Peele
PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation. PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in psychoanalytic theory is not necessary – the only prerequisite is the desire to enter and inhabit the imaginary world of film, which is itself a psychoanalytic act. MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.
