Since its inception the world of cinema has embraced the image of the child and both extended and challenged its representations. This title explores the complex and adventure of childhood on screen and examines how the child in film has been used to embody the aspirations and anxieties of modern life.
Lebeau examines the long and uneven history of developments in modern art, science, and technology that brought pychoanalysis and the cinema together towards the end of the nineteenth century. She explores the subsequent encounters between the the seductions of psychoanalysis and cinema as converging, though distinct, ways of talking about dream and desire, image and illusion, shock, and sexuality. Beginning with Freud's encounter with the spectacle of hysteria on display in fin-de-siècle Paris, this study offers a detailed reading of the texts and concepts which generated the field of psychoanalytic film theory.
With readings of key 'youth' films of the 1980s, this book expands the psychoanalytic framework within which current debates regarding fantasy and spectatorship have been taking place.