Conference: Mourning and Melancholia

Caroline Bainbridge (author and lecturer)
On the Experience of a Melancholic Gaze

This talk focuses on Lars von Trier’s 2011 film, Melancholia, decribed as ‘a beautiful film about the end of the world’ and interlocking personal and global tragedy. Drawing directly on my personal emotional response to the film, and referring to a profound incapacity to talk about it for many years after my initial encounter with it, I will turn to object relations psychoanalysis to think about what such experience has to say about our lived emotional relationship to cinema and its role in shaping and articulating psychological states. The talk touches on debates about the cinematic gaze and the role of film as a psychological argument and considers whether film might be seen as offering a form of therapeutic encounter for viewers.

Caroline Bainbridge is Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at the University of Roehampton. She is author of The Cinema of Lars von Trier (2007) and A Feminine Cinematics (2008), and co-editor of several volumes on psychoanalysis and culture, including Television and Psychoanalysis (2013) and Media and the Inner World (2014), and special editions of journals including Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and Free Associations. The latter collections arise from the AHRC-funded Media and the Inner World research network, which Caroline co-directs. She is Film Editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and series co-editor of the ‘Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture’ list for Karnac Books. She writes enthusiastically on matters of gender, psychoanalysis, and feminism, and is an advocate of a return to psychoanalytic ideas in her home discipline of Media and Cultural Studies.