Aspectos psicologicos de la direccion cinematograficalo siniestro en el cine de la casa encantada

Abstract

During the last twenty years, Film Theory has witnessed a growing interest in both the essay Das Unheimliche (Freud, 1919), and in the tendency to substitute the psychoanalytic method for a more operational discipline, as is the case with cognitive psychology. This dissertation aims to discover the reasons for the emergence of these trends that take us back to the early days of cinema. The quoted Freud’s essay and the first book on Film Theory, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (Münsterberg, 1916), were published almost a hundred years ago, and their authors are respectively the father of psychoanalysis and an eminent German-born American psychologist. Our title establishes a relationship between film psychology and the uncanny phenomenon. To simplify the above, this paper sets out to find out if a film director can deliberately incite the feeling of the uncanny in its viewers, using a series of thematic factors that Freud specified in his essay Das Unheimliche. To this general hypothesis, we have added a second goal, which was raised in the same text: checking if [film] fiction creates new possibilities for the uncanny, which cannot exist in real life. The word “film” is given in brackets as Freud only referred to literature and the medical histories of their patients when he wrote his essay...