'As the first credit [of Michael Haneke's 1989 film Der Siebente Kontinent/The Seventh Continent] rolls, the view shifts to the inside of a car [as above]. It is a shot from the rear: a man and woman are seated in the front, towards the left and right edges of the frame, their heads silhouetted against the windscreen. Immobile, silent, they stare straight ahead, neither speaking to nor looking at one another. With its hold on that image, Haneke’s long take does its work. Taking its time, The Seventh Continent centres its audience in the space between two, in the place where a look, or a word, that might happen does not [...]'Vicky Lebeau, 'The arts of looking: D.W. Winnicott and Michael Haneke', Screen, 50:1 Spring 2009
'Part of [Vicky] Lebeau's work [previewing her forthcoming book The Arts of Seeing: the cinema of Michael Haneke (Reaktion)] focuses on Haneke's use of absence and duration in his ubiquitous lingering shots, which Haneke himself has suggested (echoed by Lebeau) are not so much meditations on death, but unlived lives. Lebeau illustrated by examining the opening sequence of The Seventh Continent (1989), in which the camera is fixed in the back seat of a car, looking forward through the windscreen as the vehicle travels through a car wash. In her analysis of this scene and Haneke's work in general, Lebeau evoked Donald Winnicott's discussion of infantile gazing and the horror of the reflection-less specular image, and ultimately challenges us to consider cinema itself as a form of aural and visual thinking.' Davide Caputo, 'Conference Report: Emergent Encounters in Film Theory: Intersections between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy', Scope, Issue 14, June 2009
'Freud did not have a place in his topography of the mind for the experience of things cultural. He gave new value to inner psychic reality, and from this came a new value for things that are actual and truly external. Freud used the word "sublimation" to point the way to a place where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not get so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is.' D.W. Winnicott in The Location of Cultural Experience
"The concept of transitional phenomena, introduced by the object-relations psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, stems from his ‘discovery’ of transitional objects--the ubiquitous first possessions of young children that belong both to the child and to the outside world, and which occupy an intermediate position between fantasy (inner world) and reality (outer world). Importantly, while transitional objects have a physical existence, they are also pressed into the service of inner reality. Winnicott used the term ‘potential space’ to refer to the intermediate zone inhabited by transitional phenomena. For the child, playing inhabits this ‘intermediate zone’, which is consequently significant in developmental processes. Winnicott argued that this grounds all kinds of adult cultural experience, which is located in ‘the potential space between the individual and the environment’, a space of ‘maximally intense experiences’.
This model has much to offer by way of understanding of how we might engage with the world at a public level without setting aside our inner lives, our emotions and psychical investments. In the context of T-PACE, it offers new directions for the cultural researcher interested in exploring interaction between the psychical and the social/cultural, between our inner (psychical) and our outer (material) worlds, aiding understanding of key aspects of the way we relate to, consume, produce and use cultural resources, cultural objects and texts of different kinds." Annette Kuhn, T-PACE Project website (hyperlinks added by FSFF)
'Roger Silverstone’s approach to television relies on the insights of D.W. Winnicott for whom the social subject emerges in the “potential space” between the individual and the environment in relation to a transitional object. It is here, in this potential space, that the subject acquires agency, attempts to fulfill its needs, and begins to master space. That process, however, is never complete, and the subject spends much of its life searching for “ontological security” through the appropriation of other transitional objects—such as television—which help ground its experience of time and place and satisfy its needs and desires.' Bryan Ray Fruth, Media Reception, Sexual Identity and Public Space, PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, August 2007 (citing Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 1994), 9 and 10-12)
'The close-up has objectified in our world of perception our mental act of attention and by it has furnished art with a means which far transcends the power of any theatre stage', Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), p. 56
'Good close-ups are lyrical; it is the heart, not the eye, that has perceived them', Béla Balázs, ‘Theory of the Film’ in Gerald Mast & Marshall Cohen (ed), Film Theory and Criticism, Oxford: Oxford Uni Press (1979), pp. 288-298. p. 289
'[T]he close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be a part, but on the contrary, it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity', Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986, pp. 95-96
'[T]he space of the narrative, the diegesis, is constructed by a multiplicity of shots that vary in terms of both size and angle- hence this space exists nowhere; there is no totality of which the close up could be a part', Mary Ann Doane, 'The Close Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema', differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, September 22, 2003 p. 108
