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40), which Freud later determines is due to a trauma in the patient’s childhood. Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit (“afterwardness”) is applied, using the famous case of the Wolf Man, where the patient’s anxiety-dream of white wolves sitting in a tree leads to a “retroactive understanding of the primal scene” (p. This retroactivity is where film connects to psychoanalysis. Then, in lieu of attempting to redefine the genre of noir, Tyrer explores the dynamics of noir criticism that looks back in order to define noir and imbue it with meaning. He examines the roles of Nino Frank, Raymond Borde, and Etienne Chaumeton in naming and identifying “noir”. Tyrer delves into the history that many scholars, critics, and professors use as the groundwork for noir studies. Utilising Lacan’s Écrits, works by Slavoj Žižek, and Marc Vernet’s “ Film Noir on the Edge of Doom”, 2 Tyrer seeks to re-invigorate noir through Lacanian psychoanalysis.Ĭhapter two connects “noir” and Lacan’s point de capiton (where the signified and signifier become joined and stable), specifically relating the theory of language and the retroactive function to each other. Tyrer is primarily making a case for Lacan’s theories, which he believes have been excluded from contemporary film-philosophy. In Chapter One, the rising popularity of psychoanalysis in America during the historical timeframe frequently associated with film noir in the 1940s and 50s, and its application to WWII veterans who form a significant facet of noir film, are mentioned, although not investigated in detail. 1) What follows then is not simply analysis and applied theory, but a sort of resurrection that opens the noir genre (debates about noir as a genre put aside) to new possible avenues of engagement via Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.
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It is important to remember Tyrer’s opening lines: “This project begins as an act of mourning. Finally, the Borromean knot, as opposed to tying up loose ends, examines loose ends in key films such as Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). The sections of the text are organised around Lacan’s Symbolic (the retroactive quality of noir), the Real (the nonexistence of noir or noir as an open set), and the Imaginary (a masculine, or closed ontology, that attempts to limit which films qualify for the genre’s canon). 16) Tyrer’s text goes beyond historiography (noir’s often-claimed origins in German expressionism, American hard-boiled crime fiction, or French poetic realism) to engage in a complex and eventually illuminating dialectic with the theories of Jacques Lacan, a variety of film critics, and, at its best, the noir films themselves. In Film Noir: A Critical Introduction, Brookes poses, “Do we study the films called noir as noir? That is, do we study them according to the critical apparatus hoisted onto them retrospectively?” 1 Tyrer’s centralising question diverges from this after verifying and accepting the retrospective nature of noir instead, the inquiry becomes, “What contribution can Lacanian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier ‘noir’?” (p. This is not necessarily a new theory, Ian Brookes, and other critics Tyrer introduces, also address this debate about “origins”. Although Out of the Past is at times obtusely worded and densely theoretical, it boils down to something comprehensible and unpretentious: the retroactive formation of noir film. Ben Tyrer’s Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir forms a “Borromean Knot” of Lacanian film theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and film noir, which makes for an occasionally tangled text.