The Voice Fantasmatic: The Role of Speech in the Cinematic Representation of Psychosis

In this practice-led research project I explore the stylistic and structural possibilities of the cinematic representation of psychosis with a focus on the creative use of the voice – that phenomenon and activity which spans the porous boundaries between interiority and exteriority, thought and speech, and, particularly in the case of voice-hearers, self and other. The subject of much discussion in psychoanalytic, narratological and structuralist studies, the voice can act as a vehicle and metaphor for the cinematic exploration of the liminal space between individuals and the world. Through analytical writing and film practice I attempt to identify, mobilise and evaluate cinematic techniques that contribute to the creation of a delusional atmosphere – a representation of hallucinations and delusions that induce in film viewers something of the disorientation that comes from being unable, even temporarily, to distinguish fantasy from reality, what the psychiatrist R.D. Laing termed ‘ontological insecurity’. I ask whether providing a convincing, immersive representation of the delusional experience can help viewers to empathise with those suffering psychosis, and to conceive of psychosis as a variant of normal human experience and not something that renders its sufferers inaccessible or unworthy of sympathetic understanding. While the stylistic parameters of such an enquiry would seem to privilege fiction film, I also ask whether the creative documentary can achieve such effects.

My starting point for investigating the theory underpinning the cinematic representation of psychosis is Pasolini’s pioneering 1965 essay ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’ in which he identifies the free-indirect style as fundamental to such a representation. The free-indirect style allows filmmakers to merge a ‘neurotic’ (in Pasolini’s words) character’s subjective point of view with the narrator’s perspective in such a way as to render making a distinction between the two impossible, and to leave the viewer stranded in a multivalent, radically ambiguous diegetic world. The free indirect subsequently appears in narratological and structuralist studies and in Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the time image. Indeed Deleuze builds on Pasolini’s free-indirect point-of-view shot by introducing the free-indirect speech act. In documentary studies Bill Nichols, as a way of identifying the uncanny, haunting effect of certain re-enactments, proposes the term ‘fantasmatic’.

This project has produced four short films – two documentaries and two dramas – in the execution and exegeses of which I have made productive discoveries in the areas of vocal performance practice, phenomenological approaches to (vocal and physical) gesture, and synergies in sound-image relations, which I hope are manifest in the works themselves.