Essay On Cowie's Narrative Approach To Film

For Cowie, process of identification through fantasy is not a form of distortion but expressions of deep wishes. It is from two students of Jacques Lacan- Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1986) that Cowie got the inspiration for her formulation on ‘fantasy’. Fantasies do not entail the subject to obtain the desired object but through imagination puts oneself in a situation, a scene where the subject can chart out the possibilities of pleasure. Cowie depends heavily on the Freud’s considerations on ‘Creative writers and Day Dreaming’ (Freud 1985). By following Freud, Cowie claims that for day dreams and other fictional pursuits such as are depicted in novels and films, is not an escape from reality but rather …show more content…
But this approach poses a problem too. It engages one in a close and tiresome analysis of all the scenes and sometimes shot by shot or frame by frame and the complex issue of the signifier and the signified often leads to misidentification which post-psychoanalytic film critics (like Cowie) often tend to avoid. Cowie’s argument stands rather in support of the cognitive approach to film. According to cognitive film theorists like Joseph Anderson and Torben Grodal, the activities that characterize film viewing- imagining, emphatic identification, and emotional response can be attributed to the adaptive functions. To move one step further, audience response in the cinema is not attributed to either the spectator or the art work alone, but arises from the direct interfacing of viewer and text. E. S. Tan argues that spectators’ response responses are typically aroused somehow, and this arousal is provided by various kinds of stimuli simulated throughout the text, neither the film’s patterning of stimuli nor the spectator’s activity proceeds arbitrarily. Seeking to elicit certain responses like narrative comprehension, antipathy for an antagonist, a psychological reaction and guided by the assumption