Breaking the Dishes of Expectation: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious in the Creative Process of Film Editing

Vivien Hillgrove, Discussant Reyna Cowan PsyD, LCSW

January 8, 6:30-8:30pm

The task of a film editor is to link two images and elicit a response in the viewer, be it cognitive, emotional, or both. In a sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin: MEDIUM SHOT: A baby is seen in a carriage. CUT TO: EXTREME CLOSE UP: A hand picks up a knife. The audience reacts with horror, expecting at an unthinkable crime, and screams “no!” In psychoanalysis, patients associate to material and juxtapose various images, which ultimately allow new thoughts and insights to emerge. Curiously, creative filmmakers employ a similar creative process in the act of editing a film. Vivien Hillgrove is an award-winning film editor of both fiction and non-fiction films. She also is a mentor to many. The nature of her work as editor is to select raw footage and sounds, then place them in a sequence, and thereby construct new meaning to each element. This evening, Vivien will explore how she approaches a pile of raw material, and constructs a new narrative. At the same time, she also will comment on her personal experience as a visual artist who (in the middle of directing a personal documentary film) was diagnosed with macular degeneration and began to lose eyesight. The loneliness and isolation of blindness…and then the “breaking dishes of expectations by exploring the sensuality of the other senses and finding one’s creative voice… I’ve lost almost all my fear of exposing myself by exposing myself on this film.”