ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to the question of desire and sexual difference in film’s representations by tracing the complications of Lacan’s account of sexual difference that he introduces in his late seminar The Sinthome. Through a discussion of the writings of James Joyce, Lacan formulates the symptom-as-sinthome as a knotting of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, not only developing his conceptualisation of the Real but also addressing how art – the artifices of art – might be engaged through the symptom, while at the same time he complicates the role of the phallus and the Name-of-the-Father. Freud himself suggested that “if you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own experiences of life or turn to the poets” (1933/1964, p. 135). I explore the artifices not of poets but of two directors, in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud, and Jane Campion’s The Piano, to examine ways in which woman’s desire finds articulation in cinema’s stories, drawing on Lacan’s re-thinking of the symptom in relation to femininity.
