In his book Frames of Mind Luke Hockley describes in chapter 1, Cinema as Illusion and Reality, what he calls a post-Jungian point of view of the term image in the overarching context of movies.
Hockley discusses Jung’s belief in a “less clear-cut [distinction between reality and fantasy] than is generally assumed” (Hockley, 2007, p. 23). This has a striking resemblance to my project title Borderland which deals with the blurred frontier between reality and illusion. Jung questions the meaning of illusion and the criteria to define something to be an illusion. He senses an enormous importance in fantasy and illusion which “may be for the psyche an extremely important life-factor, something as indispensable as oxygen for the body” (Hockley, 2007, p. 23). Jung argues that both the psychological and the conscious reality contain illusion and that fantasy and imagination are part of the material world. The image functions as a mediator between conscious and unconscious.
According to Hockley (2007) and Jung divisions between the real and the not real, conscious and unconscious, and personal and collective are blurred. This intersection of opposites also describes my focus area which will look further into coherent audiovisual ways to translate a subjective (illusionary, hallucinating) state of a protagonist to a wider audience.
Another area of interest lies in archetypal or “out of character” behaviour, that can spring out of the unconscious when an individual (or a character) is under pressure (Hockley, 2007, p. 25). In his book Story Robert McKee writes correspondingly: “True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature” (McKee, 1997, p. 101).
Hockley’s text touches on two main aspects of my research area: one being the already mentioned blurred frontier between reality and illusion of a character, the second one being the immersion of an audience in a movie. Here the viewers of a film themselves (ideally) reach a state between conscious and unconscious. When watching a movie there is an ongoing awareness that what we watch is fictional but nevertheless we are able to be drawn into a world that temporarily appears almost real (Hockley, 2007, p. 29). To me this means that in order for a story to work for an audience it has to be believable, not necessarily realistic. Hockley also describes that characters of a film can reflect fragmented parts of the viewer’s self which makes each viewing by each member of the audience a personal experience (see also Roland Barthe’s Death of the Author). Thus the space or borderland between reality and illusion exists on both sides of the screen.
My criticism of the text is Hockley’s attempt to do too much guesswork of what Jung’s opinion would have been if he was confronted with today’s extensive media landscape. It often appears that the author tries to create a voice of Jung to back up his own theory which seems more like putting words in Jung’s mouth. One wonders why Hockley takes this approach because the text is indeed a very interesting and critical discourse about psychological film analysis, immersion and the realm between reality and illusion; even without Jung’s ‘direct approval’.
References
Hockley, L. (2007). Frames of mind. Bristol, UK, & Chicago, IL: Intellect Books.
McKee, R. (1997). Story. New York, NY: Regan Books