Cinematic experience, film space, and the child's world

Abstract

This essay develops some ideas from psychoanalysis - in particular the object-relations concept of transitional phenomena - concerning the psychological, physical and to a degree, the social, aspects of the child's world as these may inform an understanding of the cinematic experience. In this light, the essay explores the particular sorts of engagements that cinema can offer its consumers through the interplay between inner, psychical reality and outer, material, reality in the world of the film and the experience of the viewer. It addresses the materiality of film as a cultural medium whose distinctiveness lies in the ways it can create and organize spatiality and motion, and suggests how cinema may recreate and evoke the feeling of entering, or re-entering, a child's world. These questions are discussed with reference to three films: Where Is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, France/Iran, 1987); Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick, UK,1951); and Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, UK, 1999).