While the historical influence of psychoanalysis on Hollywood cinema has
received considerable attention, the same cannot be said for its
influence on British cinema. This book examines the central position
that psychoanalysis occupies in British cinema in the years immediately
following the Second World War.
Plummer uses a critical theory framework to understand the role that
psychoanalysis plays in British culture at this time as an historical
discourse, and in British cinema as a narrative, a cultural, and an
ideological discourse. He defines these as arising within various areas
of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking related to traumatic wartime
experience, sexual difference, and the interplay between subjectivity
and objectivity. He analyzes six British films of the period: The
Halfway House, Dead of Night, The Seventh Veil, Madonna of the
Seven Moons, They Made Me a Fugitive, and Mine Own Executioner and
demonstrates how psychoanalysis operates within them as a narrative and
formal structuring mechanism. He argues that this engagement enables
these films to begin to address the emotional fallout of the war by
creating safe representational spaces where contemporary audiences could
engage with their own traumatic experiences.
While The British Trauma Film defines psychoanalysis as providing a
language for British cinema at this time to confront the effects of
wartime trauma, it finds that it also operates within a normalizing
ideological system designed to reproduce dominant pre-war relations of
political, social, and sexual power. However, in this group of films,
this system is often countered by subversive discursive forces that seem
to be immanent to the films themselves.
