After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English and French literature, Olga Cox Cameron worked for a number of Dublin charities. Speaking to The University Times, she explains that this experience put her in touch with “some pretty frontline suffering”. This led her to develop an interest in psychoanalysis and she later completed a PhD that combined psychoanalysis with literature.
While teaching at Trinity, she ran a regular film club, which would meet on a Friday evening, to watch a film and discuss it through the lens of psychoanalysis. The link, she explains, was very natural: “I’d been reading this guy, Christian Metz, who suggested that cinema was the closest art form to psychoanalysis in that the cinema experience is not unlike having a dream… You’re sort of passive before a series of things that unfold.” Despite being a well loved and lively weekly event, the film club encountered a logistical snap when finding a suitable venue proved challenging. This inspired someone to make a suggestion: that Olga should start a film festival. Et voila, she did.
Returning for its 11th year, the Annual Psychoanalytic Film Festival returns with a theme that seems to connect to its origin story of democratic say. The festival is intent on asking how cinema frames the 21st century citizen. Speaking to Cox, I let slip my own preconception that psychoanalysis doesn’t really have much of a link to citizenship – my rudimentary thoughts hovered around Freud, sofas and the infant experience. But, using the example of the festival’s opening documentary, Cox persuaded my reconsideration. The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid (2017) is the true story of a Kildare farmer who refused to sell the land of his small-holding to Intel, thus flagrantly restricting the presumed right of business interests to economic expansion.
“Thomas Reid, to me, is the ideal citizen, in that he knows one hundred per cent who he is, and this enables him to stand against the corporate thing.” She explains how so many people today go to therapy of one kind or another “thinking they have a problem, but what they don’t realise is that really, the problem is that they are being devoured by capitalism”. Todd McGowan from the University of Vermont, the festival’s keynote speaker, links citizenship and psychoanalysis in the same way. His 2016 book Capitalism and Desire, illustrates how capitalism thrives through our desires, in a way that makes it seem like it corresponds to our natural impulses, when, in fact, it grotesquely amplifies them.
In order to compose this year’s festival roster, Cox sent an open-call to those on the mailing lists of the psychoanalysis organisations of Ireland, asking them to respond with films that they felt fitted this year’s theme. She describes this process as “a blast” in which a mesmeric variety of films were submitted. The result is a lineup of films organised by spunky themes like “Family Complex(iti)es of the 21st Century” and “Feuds and Fugues – loving our 21st century neighbours?” The films themselves range from classic dystopias like Bladerunner (1982) and Children of Men (2006), to Finnish-Arabic comedy-drama The Other Side of Hope (2017), and a story about surveillance and a citrus grove, called Lemon Tree (2008).
Though each screening will be presented in brief by those who put them forward. “The focus is very much on the generation of discussion amongst the audience – which is why we have a wine reception afterwards.” Cox recounts how in past years discussions have often been surprising, and how these discussions tend to open up whole new vistas: one year Panti Bliss came and “talk was still going like hammer and tongs after an hour and a half and would have gone on for another two hours”.
Do you have to know a lot about psychoanalysis to attend, I wonder? Cox doesn’t think so. “We don’t want a comfortable scenario, where psychoanalysts are saying the usual clichés to each other. You need somebody from the outside to say, ‘well that’s absolutely not true!’” This follows her approach to culture: she believes that everyone can get something from it. For a time she found herself teaching Hamlet to medical students, and concluded to me that, “the human experience: everybody knows about it”. Presumably, we all know about the citizenship experience too.
The 11th Annual Psychoanalytic Film Festival – Citizen 2020: Law, Desire, Transformations – will take place from January 31st until February 1st in the Dublin City University School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health.
