ABSTRACT
Writing, like all representation, is never innocent. To write about anything is, explicitly or implicitly, to delimit, uphold, expand, or challenge how it is perceived and constituted. Neither is writing ever neutral. We write from a particular position, inhabit a particular discourse, which the very act of writing itself seeks to validate. The aim of this essay is to write about, to (re)constitute, a single film from contrasting discursive/theoretical positions: cine-psychoanalysis and cultural studies, 'bodies of work which have historically been set in antagonism to each other'. 1 The dominant representations of cine-psychoanalysis and cultural studies place those discourses, respectively, as text- and context-centred, as formalist and historicist, and as offering pessimistic and more optimistic models of text-spectator relations. They are likewise seen to discuss cinema in terms of a putatively monolithic notion of the cinematic institution (an Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus if ever there were one), and a broader, more fissured (Gramscian) realm of cultural production and contestation. 2 Whereas cine-psychoanalysis enjoyed theoretical dominance within film studies during the 1970s and early 1980s, this position has been since usurped by cultural studies. 3 Nevertheless, as they here differently 'write' the selected film text, the discourses not only re-present their claims for legitimacy, but raise the seemingly paradoxical issue of the possibility, even desirability, of their reconciliation.
