Moving Images follows The Couch and the Silver Screen and Projected Shadows, both edited by Andrea Sabbadini. However, this book is neither a collection of contributions by experts in psychoanalysis or film, nor a review of European cinema. As its title suggests, it offers Sabbadini’s own reflections on 25 feature films from Europe and Latin America. Being a prominent psychoanalyst and the director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, he not only brings a psychoanalytic perspective to these films, but also uses them as a vehicle to discuss important psychoanalytic themes.
Starting with the representation of psychoanalysis itself and the relationship between the therapist and the patient, he moves on to explore how prostitution has been portrayed in film-making, an almost explicit reference to free association (‘from a young profession … to the oldest one’). He then focuses on films about children and adolescents. This comes as little surprise considering the crucial role of the earlier years on the psychic development in the psychoanalytic theory. Sabbadini then moves on to adulthood and selects five films on love and intimate relationships to explore the Freudian concepts of Eros and Thanatos. This exploration of intimate relationships takes us back to the couch in the consulting room where it all began (relationship between therapist and patient, transference and countertransference). Finally, the author discusses films on scopophilia and voyeurism and we oscillate to the screen where another intimate (voyeuristic) experience takes place.
There are certainly many more films that I would have liked to have seen included in this book, mostly because Sabbadini’s narrative and reflections bring exactly what he promises: a psychoanalytic perspective to the films discussed and an illustration of the power of film to promote psychoanalytical thinking. Like the psychoanalyst in analysis, the author creates a space where films (or dreams), fantasies and emotions can be explored and thought about, offers new insights and ultimately lays the foundation for a journey that only begins in the book (the consulting room). It is up to the reader (viewer, analysand) to extend this journey beyond these pages (the couch) and ultimately learn more about themselves and the world.
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