Overview

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.

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9781501385810

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Reviews

Traversing the Fantasy is an epochal engagement with the ethics of cinemagoing. By elaborating on the central role that fantasy has in the cinema, Sandra Meiri and Odeya Kohen-Raz make clear the ethical stakes in play every time we see a film. By taking fantasy as the starting point, they produce an ethical system that permits spectators how a given film asks them to relate to their own desire. The final result of Traversing the Fantasy is a psychoanalytic conception of cinema that allows us to completely reimagine what is at stake when we see a film. * Todd McGowan, Professor of Film, University of Vermont, USA * Traversing the Fantasy is the finest book on psychoanalysis and cinema I have read for many years. Meiri and Kohen-Raz propose a remarkable range of original arguments on the nature of cinematic desire. In doing so, they offer an engaging critique of the current orthodoxies of film theory. Of particular note is the authors' championing of narrative cinema as generator of intersecting conflicts in which viewers engage with fantasy and desire in ways that are captivating, confronting, and potentially liberating. * Richard Rushton, Lancaster University, UK *

Author Information

Sandra Meiri is a senior lecturer and academic supervisor of film studies in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts, The Open University of Israel. Odeya Kohen-Raz is a senior lecturer and coordinator of film theory teaching at the Sapir Academic College, Israel, a teaching coordinator in the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts, The Open University of Israel, and teaches in the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, Israel.

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