Women and Images of Men in Cinema: Gender Construction in La Belle Et La Bete by Jean Cocteau

ISBN-13: 9781782202905 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 192 str.

Andreas Hamburger

Opis

Women and men in cinema are imaginary constructs created by filmmakers and their audiences. The film-psychoanalytic approach reveals how movies subliminally influence unconscious reception. On the other hand, the movie is embedded in a cultural tradition: Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et la Bete (1946) takes up the classic motif of the animal groom from Apuleius' Cupido and Psyche (originally a tale about the stunning momentum of genuine female desire), liberates it from its baroque educational moral (a girl's virtue and prudence will help her to overcome her sexual fears), and turns it into a boyhood story: inside the ugly rascal there is a good, but relatively boring prince - at least in comparison to the monsters of film history.

Introducing the monster as a suffering person, Cocteau's film reacts to the disturbing experience of World War II and the Holocaust. It questions hegemonial masculinity, designing a poetic, hallucinatory attempt at healing for a traumatized generation. Moreover, it addresses female and male adolescent development. Its deliberately incredible finale ironically portrays traditional constructs of femininity and masculinity, thus going beyond the scope of a compensatory fairy tale.

Spis treści

Beauties and Beasts in Film Psychoanalysis -- Women and images of men in cinema -- Psychoanalytical film interpretation—possibilities and limitations -- Beautiful beasts—motif tradition and film psychoanalysis in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (F 1946) -- The Beauties -- La Belle, la Bête, et la rose -- “You can’t say no to the Beauty and the Beast …”* Or: an ending and no beautiful beast -- The Beasts -- Once upon a time—Beauty and the Beast—a surrealistic survival attempt in the year 1946? -- Coming over to the wild side: women’s yearning for beastly encounters in the course of film history

O autorze

Hamburger, Andreas