ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief overview of the voluminous literature of psychoanalytically informed film theory as developed in the late 60s in France and in the 70s and early 80s in Britain. It introduces Lacan’s basic topology, which is the backbone of psychoanalytic film theory and which offers a set of preliminary tools for investigations. The chapter presents a more detailed review of the psychoanalytical thought deployed in documentary film studies. The focus of the interrogation of psychoanalytical film theory post 1968 has been the relationship between the spectator and the apparatus/screen/text in a physical cinema. In Lacanian psychoanalysis a central polemic is the claim that the unconscious is structured like a language. The child’s recognition of the absence of the mother is the pivotal moment around which the Mirror Stage revolves.
