Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Experience on the inside

1974; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3684516

1527-2095

Pascal Bonitzer, Carol Rubin,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

At least two films, released for the general public, have recently (within the past year) provoked violent and opposed opinions, some of them faschist, neo-pdtainist, of the Moral Order category, represented since the elections by the RoyerDruon-Galley triangle (and unofficially by journalists of the Jean Cau type); the other liberals of the Union of the Left category, with Le Nouvel Observateur and Pariscop acting as journalistic torch-bearers for freedom of expression and morals. Obviously, we are referring to Last Tango in Paris and Le Grande Bouffe. Let us add another Cannes selection, one that is both more discreet and more avant-garde (and infinitely more talented), but which has found itself more or less included in the scandal which the other two, within a two or three month interval, have instigated: La Maman et la Putain. These three films, if not justifying the degradation of the human individual, do at least use it as their subject, if one views them through the eyes of the government. So, a reaction against liberalism. On the other hand, we have not read any marxist-leninist point of view on these films; there have been some vague freudianmaterialistic attempts regarding Last Tango , but that is all. These films bring into play, in a non-naturalistic mode, for the first time since, let's say, L'Age d'or (which also created a scandal), what is literally sexual and excremental material (the famous butter, tampax, shit, vomit, and semen: a chain of impracticable objects --cf; Baudry, Figuratif, materiel, excrementiel in CdC n238-239... anal a objects). These films are attempting to comment critically upon a life style which one could call and petite-bourgeois; crepuscular reflections of the bourgeois conception of the world. From an approach that would give a hegemonic theoretical importance to psychoanalysis, these films, each in autonomous fashion, would propose no more than an adventure of a objects, whose fall is sanctified by the death of the subject (outside the signifying chain, of course). La Grande Bouffe is particularly susceptible to such an interpretation: cf. the breasts of gelatin which Andrea Ferrdol, the death-dealing mother, serves as a last supper to Philippe Noiret, which he eats while contem-