ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the erotic's is always at issue for the documentary, but in the broadest sense Freud intends it, as the motor force behind all human endeavours. Amidst the flurry of intellectual excitement surrounding psychoanalytic theory as a political weapon for feminists or as a new language for exploring cinema's universal appeal, the study of the documentary film remained the province of a rather stuffy if politically progressive older crowd that skewed old, white, and male. As proposed by Freud, discussed by Lacan and others, through transference a special and quite delicate sort of love affair can take hold. Piotrowska's bold claim says that such a love may also ensure between the filmmaker and her subject. This chapter concludes that in a speculative note by way of suggesting that the people are only now with the new work opening up the field of psychoanalytic documentary studies in a comprehensive way.
