Page 258 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

world, of the 'self,' which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and
developing.1 2
The meaning is not entirely clear; arguably, the passage is obscured by early brushes with the writing of
Freud, and by a differing use of Freudian theory by Trotsky, Breton and Rivera. But a certain agreed
praxis is evident: the artist, an individual particularly attuned to tensions in the day-to-day realitv,
experiences a profound sense of alienation (in the Marxist sense) in his interaction with society. This
is the tension between the 'ego' and the 'outside elements'. Just as antibodies are generated by the
body to fight physical illness, the mind attempts to dissipate this alienation through a process of
overwhelming, engulfing and burying the tension ('sublimation'). The attempt is doomed to failure
since the society that inflicts the psychic injury remains and continues to impinge upon the artist's
sensibility.
Those who would find a process of displacement in the notion of'sublimation' (and, subsequently,
the circumstances for a repeated 'return of the repressed') then have a formula for application (the
battle between competing tensions — the recognition of the wotld as it really is, and the devices to
blind the subject to this recognition). This could be said for Haneke too, and it also suggests why there
is, at base, a great humanism in La Pianiste; the protagonist battles against all odds to find equilibrium
in a world that taunts her with indications of the way in which it refuses to allow her to restore the
broken equilibrium. This puts her in a consrant state of 'negative pleasure' - attempting to attain
those very things that indicate the equilibrium that she is denied.
But sublimation suggests allowing the enemy in rather than shuffling him off into some 'safer'
area for attempted neutralisation. So the problem is now embedded, perhaps so deeply that the artist
is unaware of it; a kind of secular equivalent to the condition of 'original sin'. The reason for the
impulse to tap into the subconscious to facilitate artistic expression is now evident. An d anything
that makes a kind of cognitive sense during this 'tapping in' process, no matter how spontaneous
the process appears to be, should be rejected (as famously occurred between you and Dalf during the
preparation of Un Chien Andalou: 'not to accept any idea or image that might given rise to a rational,
psychological or cultural explanation').13 This would make for unimpeded access to the turbulent,
alienated subconsciousness - understood here to be a dialectical tension of alienation and sublimation
- which could give rise to nightmare visions that, in themselves, come to represent the extent of
psychic injury in the face of oppression. It is a case of 'the more you beat me, the more I see you, and
resist you, in myself. This, during the upheavals of the 1930s, would have represented the creation of
a new front against fascism - a form of 'psychological warfare' against the enemy. A n d such visions,
drawn from the subconsciousness, contain a progressive tendency founded in the 'self: the index fot
the kind of existence that is acceptable (that is, the kind of psychological balance that can and should
be achieved) - so, not only critique, but also solution. An d this process only strengthens the 'ideal of
self. In general terms, this solution is then related to emancipation and the 'spirit of history':

The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course
to be led to mingle its streams with this primeval necessity - the need for the emancipation
of man. 1 4

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