Robert Lapsley
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Michael Westlake
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The application of psychoanalysis to cinema is by no means new. The absence within psychoanalysis of a satisfactory explanation of feminine sexuality was severely to restrict its value in understanding the exchange between film and women spectators. Broadly speaking, two phases may be distinguished in the use made of psychoanalysis, each of which emphasised one aspect of the Lacanian model. The concept of fantasy at once continued and developed the earlier application of psychoanalysis to film. The continuation lay in the attention to the spectator as the subject of the enunciation, the development in the greater complexity accorded to this subject. Psychoanalysis was introduced into film theory as a supplement to historical materialism and semiotics. Although by the end of the 1970s psychoanalysis had contributed to a persuasive account of the exchange between a film and the male spectator, no comparable account existed for the female spectator.

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