Bloomsbury Academic Intimacy and the Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh: Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

Combining two distinct philosophical fields to the study of cinema, Patrick Fuery proposes the first study showing how phenomenology and psychoanalysis, so often seen as contradistinctive, are explored through their commonalities rather than differences. He postulates a fresh approach to film through this phenomenological/psychoanalytic reconceptualization. This involves, on the one hand, returning to the classical/foundational ideas in phenomenology to move beyond recent phenomenological approaches to film, and diverging from the classical/foundations of psychoanalytic approaches to film to offer a fresh perspective on this important theory in film. Using three interconnected themes: intimacy, anxiety, and flesh, the core idea here is that anxiety is a driving process in all cinema, and for it to take place there must be a relationship of intimacy. These intimate anxieties and anxious intimacies will be examined as they construct, and are played out, in ‘flesh’. Discussing films such as Tree of Life, Don’t Look Now, Gravity and Roma, Fuery demonstrates why combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis to the study of cinema is necessary for studying film. Review "The book offers a rare combination of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in describing what we do when view a film. The viewer emerges as the anxiously intimate spectator without whose responses cinema could not exist. Interweaving his theorization with a rich offering of film analyses, the author is inviting us to test our own cinematic experience against the book's interpretations." --Horst Ruthrof, Emeritus Professor, Murdoch University, Australia About the Author Patrick Fuery is Professor at Chapman University, USA. His research interests include psychoanalysis, semiotics, literary and cultural theory, gender studies, film and visual studies, medicine and the arts. Fuery is the author of 8 books, including Madness and Cinema (2004), New Developments in Film Theory (2000), and The Theory of Absence (1995).