Traversing the Fantasy: The Dialectic of Desire/Fantasy and the Ethics of Narrative Cinema

Traversing the Fantasy: The Dialectic of Desire/Fantasy proposes a new and comprehensive model of spectatorship at the heart of which it draws an analogy between the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the ethics of narrative film. It demonstrates how spectators engage with narrative film, undergoing unconscious processes that generate a shift in the adherence to fantasies that impede assuming responsibility for one's fate and well being. The authors discuss the affinities that the ontology and aesthetics of narrative film share with subjective, unconscious processes, offering new insights into the popular appeal of narrative film, through three film corpora, analyzed at length: body-character-breach films; dreaming-character films; and gender-crossing films. With a range of case studies from the old (Rebecca, Vertigo, Some Like it Hot) to the new (Being John Malkovich, A Fantastic Woman), Sandra Meiri and Odeya Kohen Raz build on psychoanalytic ideas about the cinema and take them in a completely new direction that promises to be the basis for further developments in the field.

Sandra Meiri is a senior lecturer and academic supervisor of film studies in the Department of Literature, Linguistics and Art, The Open University of Israel.

Odeya Kohen-Raz is a lecturer and coordinator of film theory teaching at the Sapir Academic College, a teaching coordinator in the Department of Literature, Linguistics and Art, The Open University of Israel, and teaches in the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University.