American Imago articles from December 1993

American Imago archives from December 1993

Introduction to special issue of 'American Imago' on 'Psychoanalysis and Cinema.'
December 22, 1993... Editing this special issue of American Imago together with Martin Gliserman has been a rewarding if at times frustrating experience. In the end, we found ourselves with too many essays to include in one volume. Forced to make some sort of...

To Have and Have Not: the paradox of the female star.
December 22, 1993... Most of you will recognize the title as belonging to a movie by Howard Hawks, based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway, which introduced to the screen a slinky, husky-voiced young model and star-to-be named Lauren Bacall. It refers also, of course,...

Phallic women in the contemporary cinema.
December 22, 1993... The critic Georgia Brown (1990) has recently observed that if the old formula for terror in movies was a woman alone pursued by a berserk man, the new formula is a harmless man terrorized by a crazed woman. Brown characterizes the 1990 film...

Surrealist cinema: politics, history, and the language of dreams.
December 22, 1993... Surprisingly, the canon of Surrealist cinema is comprised of only a few films, with the addition of a small number of subsequent works deemed "Surrealist" in inspiration. The total cinematic output of Surrealism is actually dwarfed by the sheer...

Fits and misfits: the body of a woman.
December 22, 1993... The fits and convulsions, the paralyses of limbs, the speaking in tongues, the muteness and deafness, in short the conversion symptoms of the hysteric were among the perplexities that inspired the discovery of psychoanalysis. In Andre...

The couch affair: gender and race in Hollywood transference.
December 22, 1993... This essay, a work in progress, juxtaposes several related discussions without aiming at an integration for which I do not yet have the language: Each time I tried to remove one of the discussions, it was missed, and so the parts remain:...

The traffic in leeches: David Cronenberg's 'Rabid' and the semiotics of parasitism.
December 22, 1993... It is now surprising that the English word leech derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "to heal." For almost a millennium, the word (at least as written) referred without prejudice to both the doctor and the slug-like animal used by doctors...