Jordi Montaner | 28 june 2010
Title: El modelo de los otros
Author: Ricardo Jarast
Year: 2010
Editorial: Ediciones Biebel
Number of pages: 208
Film and psychoanalysis were almost born in agreement with one another. The nineteenth century was drawing to a close. Whilst in Vienna Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuers were engaged in publishing a study on hysteria, inventors Louis and Auguste Lumière were making history in the darkness of the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris projecting the first scene ever filmed in cinema: workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon Monplaisir.
Both events would end up resizing the person and what is was to be a human. In his book El modelo de los otros Ricardo Jarast, an Argentine psychiatrist-psychoanalyst based in Seville, Spain, carries out a scrutiny of the psychoanalytic inputs found in cinema from Hitchcock to Amenábar, passing through Fosse, Klein, Mendes, Bion, Kurosawa, Winnicott, Liberman, Piñeyro, Green, Winterbottom, Racker, Cameron, Tustin, Hirschbiegel and Baranger along the way. Genre and arthouse titles provide paradigms of the relationship between cinema and dreams, jokes, sexuality and the subconscious. Cinema’s myths and legend, icons and monster, both real and imagined, have built a culture that underlies the experience of many patients. Just as David Gilmour did with his son (Cine Club) who did not want to continue studying, Jarast uses film to illustrate the texture of what we are and what we do. Terminator, from this point of view, does not appear as an action movie but rather as the metaphor of the drama of an autistic child, wounded in his narcissism by the new pregnancy of his mother ... an autistic child with a dramatic and destructive temper, who tries to stop time in order to somehow maintain his hierarchical position of primacy in the world.
Similarly, the Oscar-winning film All That Jazz, understood as Bob Fosse’s autobiography, examines the plight of those extremely gifted creative individuals who have passed the highpoint of their career and face a last tango with death. Amenábar also talks about grief, loss and blame in Abre los ojos. Similarly, director Oliver Hirschbiegel and actor Bruno Ganz perform the feat of humanizing a defeated Adolf Hitler in Downfall, making the viewer feel bad upon experiencing compassion for one of the most evil men in history.
Cinema entertains and excites emotions, but it also provokes. Jarast, author of other works such as Objeto transicional y yo-piel and Complementariedad clínica de Winnicott y Anzieu, was awarded in Argentina for his essay La responsabilidad del psicoanalista.
All cinema is nourished from the same source – human experience. What in theory should be equally applicable in theater or literature turns out, in fact, to work much better in film within the substrate subconscious. The visual metaphors and subtext allow directors and actors to say something without speaking, getting rid of the rudimentary game of words and bearing the soul.
Claudio Laks Eizirik, author of the introduction of El modelo de los otros, writes that in this book Jarast evokes various psychoanalytic theories which need to be reviewed in the light on movies along with some of the burning issues of our time and our culture: family relationships, violence, power, competition, mass destruction, greed, the desperate search for pleasure, fame, old age or death. “The stuff that dreams are made of is what the analyst is trying to find with each patient [...] That same substance which moves people, groups, masses as well as is behind those sublime, tragic, grand, depressing, horrible, joyful or sad moments that touch us one and all.”
