ABSTRACT
There are three main points in Jean-Louis Baudry’s article titled ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema’ (1975) that I will address. The first is Baudry’s contention that the cinematic apparatus engenders a state of artificial regression to a pleasurable moment in the subject’s relationship with the breast; the second is his understanding of the cinema as a place where the unconscious, in the Freudian sense, is represented; and the third is the parallel he draws between Plato’s cave and the apparatus. My first question is, if traces of regression to a primordial stage are manifest in the subject – and in how the apparatus is constructed – what does this regressive state involve? Then, I ask, if the unconscious is represented in the cinema, how can this be considered beyond Freud’s metapsychology? And finally, how can psychoanalysis further expose the implications and inadequacy of the analogy between Plato’s scheme and the cinema? I will address the first and second questions in this first chapter, and the third question in Chapter 2.
