Introduction to the Special Issue on the Cultural Therapeutics of Film

Cinematic Insights From Scholars

The first section of this issue comprises the writing of scholars about the intersection of film, psychology, and society. We are fortunate to share the work of the international community. While diverse in film choices and theoretical approaches, each film scholar attempts to illuminate various dimensions of film such as the sociocultural impact of filmmaking and the psychology of the cinematic experience.

To start, in Beth Ash’s two part article, “Contemporary Film and the Empathy Controversy,” Ash launches a critique of Against Empathy (2016) by social psychologist Paul Bloom. She states that he fails to understand how empathy is shaped by hegemonic ideological representations. Ash argues that empathy is hard wired and therefore impossible to bypass, counter to Bloom’s assertion, which favors bypassing empathy for greater rationalization. For Ash, only psychoanalysis—specifically the school of Lacan and Lacanian film theory—allows us to read unconscious dynamics in relation to coercive enculturation and identify resistant cultural representations.

In part two of Ash’s article “Contemporary Film and the Empathy Controversy,” she uses three films to illustrate Bloom’s failures: The Blind Side (2009) about the interracial adoption of a Black teenager by a White upper-middle class family; The Kids Are All Right (2009) about a middle-class lesbian marriage; and The Normal Heart (2012) about gay activism during the human immunodeficiency virus/ acquired immunodeficiency syndrome epidemic. The first two films are mainstream and as such dramatize and cultivate empathy in ways that reinforce hegemonic (White, middle-class, and heteronormative) expectations. The Normal Heart contrasts with these films and does so despite its homonormative focus on White gay men, in that The Normal Heart allows viewers to consider ways of resisting expected emotional responses.

Ceren Mert, in her article “Representation of European Utopia and its Discontents in the Films of Fatih Akın,” contemplates the question of “Europeanness” through the prism of Fatih Akın’s films. She writes that Akın’s filmic representations have been successful in capturing the postindustrial cityscapes of certain European cities. Mert discusses how Akın engages with the meaning of “Europeanness” in relation to the “Other,”—how this director tackles the issue of identities through the sociopolitical and cultural spaces of his protagonists.

In her article “Filmic Therapeutic Encounters and Resistance Silence, Forgetting and Guilt in the Face of Historical Violence,” Aylin Basaran discusses three films that address collective trauma in the aftermath of slavery, colonialism, or genocide: Peele’s Get Out (2017), Ruhorahoza’s Gray Matter, (2001) and Mhando and Mulvihill’s Maangamizi: The Ancient One (2000). Basaran asserts that asymmetric historical violence causes a crisis of reason among the victims and that the affective dream-like technique of film has the potential to make unutterable mental conditions explicit and relatable without trivializing their complexities. Basaran argues that the films themselves serve as a form of postcolonial therapy and empowerment.

Luke Hockley explores what it means to “feel film” in his article “Feeling Film: Time, Space and the Third Image.” He explores the interconnections between Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Carl Jung and their use of the ontological status of the image. Particularly, he notes that the image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film, and the images therein, is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being.

Ethan Clarke, in his article “A Phantom War: Hollywood as a Mythmaker in the Post Vietnam War Era,” examines the function of entertainment media as a mythmaker in interpreting the legacy of the Vietnam War. Clarke examines the mode by which America attempted to process its collective trauma and confusion of the Vietnam conflict by turning to Hollywood for answers.

Psychological Insights From Filmmakers

The second section of this edition comprises in-depth interviews with filmmakers about various psychological and cultural phenomena that demand continual public discourse, including the stigma of breastfeeding in public among mothers, the complexities of brutal love in family dynamics, hair discrimination and the natural hair movement among Black women, income inequality in America, the trauma of police brutality toward Black Americans, displacement and migration among immigrant communities in Portugal, and young women in the amateur porn industry.

We structured our dialogues with filmmakers around five critical questions that we considered orientating and crucial to discussing the therapeutic function of film: (1) Please tell us about your film. (2) Why did you decide to make this particular film? What personal meaning does it have for you? (3) Was there something psychologically healing about the process of making your film? (4) How might watching your film help facilitate psychological healing for viewers, personally and collectively? and (5) How do you think film, as an artform and language, can express psychological experience in a manner that is unique to its medium?

The resulting conversations between the filmmakers and us, the psychologists, are a fascinating exploration into the psychological aspects of cinematic storytelling and technique, the emotional and often therapeutic experiences that filmmakers encountered while producing their film, and their hopes for catharsis and transformation among audiences and culture as a result of film viewing. In these synergetic dialogues, we found that psychotherapists and filmmakers often attempt to accomplish similar outcomes but use different diction; thus, it was exciting to discover points of similarity and divergence between our disciplines. As filmmaker Jacob Kornbluth of Inequality for All (2013) remarked at the end of our conversation,

What’s weird and interesting about this interview is that it’s like therapy. . . . I’m talking about the emotional journey. That’s what the filmmaker’s job is. . . . That’s what storytelling is. This is emotional. I’m a human being who experienced these things. That’s what storytelling is for me—it’s emotional catharsis. When I’m teaching filmmaking, I say that each scene is a transformation machine; something must go into a scene, change, and come out the other side different. If it doesn’t, throw the scene away and make a scene that does. These are the basics of storytelling that are essentially emotional. This is an emotional process. . . . So the opportunity to get to talk about the emotional piece to the film, and that underlying emotional journey, is frankly what we should be talking about when we’re talking about film. (Kornbluth et al., 2021, p. 12)

During these interviews, we learned that to make a powerful film, filmmakers by means of their ability to apply their craft became adept artists and technicians of knowing and displaying human psychology. Their final products offer psychological truths to be recognized, which often resist the limits of mere speech within the therapist’s consulting room. The two crafts of filmmaking and psychotherapy generate a creative tension between them, as between the image and the word. In addition, some filmmakers we interviewed are also psychologists and therapists who, accordingly, contributed theoretical and clinical insights about the connection between psychology and film.

Jacob Kornbluth’s documentary film Inequality for All (2013) offers a passionate plea for the middle class. The film features Robert Reich—professor, best-selling author, and Clinton cabinet member—as he demonstrates how the widening income gap has a devastating impact on the American economy. Kornbluth describes his journey to produce an emotionally intimate story that raises critical consciousness about income inequality while also activating empowerment.

Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus discuss their documentary film Hot Girls Wanted (2015), which is a first-ever look at the realities of the professional amateur porn world and the 18- to 19-year old young women entering into it. Bauer and Gradus explore the relationships they developed with the young women they filmed, the ethical questions that arose while filming, and the tension between agency and social critique when creating a documentary about sex work.

Dennis Leroy Kangalee discusses his film As an Act of Protest (2002), about an African American actor named Cairo Medina who goes through a station-of-the-cross journey to find the meaning of his life and eradicate the racism and police brutality that continue to plague the world. Kangalee describes his challenges and commitments in depicting onscreen the raw, ugly truth about racial trauma and police brutality in New York City in the 1990s.

Gillian Scott-Ward discusses her documentary film Back to Natural (2019), which explores the psychological and emotional experience of the intersection of hair, politics, and identity in Black communities. Scott-Ward describes her process of producing a cinematic call for intergenerational healing that takes a grassroots approach to exploring the globalized policing of natural Black hair.

Jeremiah Zagar describes his experience of producing We the Animals (2018), a movie adaptation of a novel by Justin Torres about an adolescent boy navigating close-knit yet volatile family dynamics while simultaneously exploring his queer sexuality. Zagar describes his desire to portray the “brutal love” inherent to many people’s familial dynamics in an emotionally honest, tender, and nuanced way.

Lori Jordan Fountain shares her process of creating Inhabitation of Inhibition (2020), a phenomenological film about the stigma experienced while breastfeeding in public as a mother. Fountain describes how reversing the objectifying gaze of the other through the creative vehicle of filmmaking helped liberate her psyche from oppressive messages that shame women.

Suzanne Barnard, in her film MAXAMBA (2015), produced with co-filmmaker Sophia Borges, aspired to create a living archive of the history and memory of the inhabitants of the Quinta da Vitória neighborhood in Lisbon, Portugal, in light of its impending demolition. Barnard explores the opportunities and limitations of art activism and describes her experience of building meaningful relationships while filming the daily life of an Indian couple who emigrated from Mozambique to Lisbon, prior to being displaced from their neighborhood.

When editing these conversations for publication, we distilled the important features that appeared most relevant to our inquiry regarding the personally and culturally therapeutic aspects of filmmaking.

An Interdisciplinary Contribution

We hope that this issue provides generative commentary with regard to the intersection of psychology, psychotherapy, and film. We also hope that this unique interdisciplinary approach within an academic journal will provide new possibilities to explore the therapeutic function of film for society as well as avenues for film to address, heal, and transform the pressing cultural issues of our times. We aspire for this project to be useful for psychotherapists to explore the role of cinematherapy within traditional psychotherapy modalities (Berg-Cross et al., 1990) as well as opportunities for therapeutic filmmaking as a form of expressive art therapy (Johnson & Alderson, 2008). Finally, we hope this project can spark innovative possibilities for collaborations between filmmakers, psychologists, and psychologist-filmmakers in envisioning new ways to convey psychological insights to the public for the purposes of knowledge dissemination and cultural healing.

We would like to thank all participants in this project. We feel honored, humbled, and transformed by this process. In many ways, the struggles spoken about in making a film, the topics worked on within the films, and the processes by which a filmmaker persevered paralleled our own struggles in working through and completing this project. Speaking about abuse, trauma, and forms of oppression has the potential to transmit them. We feel thankful that so much humility, respect, and shared strength helped us continue our work with those who take up these efforts in various forms as their life’s work.

We would also like to thank our previous, fearless leader, editor-in-chief Shawn Rubin for bringing us together in collaboration for this project, as well as our current, wonderful editor-in-chief Sarah Kamens for her continual guidance, patience, and support. Additionally, we would like to thank Brinda Sharma and Gavisha Dhonsi at Sage for helping us execute the logistics of this nontraditional approach to journal publication. Without your teamwork, this text would not have been created. And last, we would like to dedicate this edition to anyone and everyone who knows the struggles of being silenced, abused, and oppressed. We hope this helps in any way it can.