Kino/Fantazam
Cinema/Fantasy

Summary/Abstract: “Cinema/Fantasy” explores the relationship between cinema, reality, and the psychoanalytic notion of primal fantasy. It posits and develops two central theses. First, that ever since the cinematographic apparatus was invented; reality has itself been functioning as a sort of primordial state of cinema, an “uhr-kino.” Second, that “montage as butchery” describes the elementary, violent dynamic of what may be termed the “primal scene” of film editing. Building upon these two theses, the essay also seeks to explicate the psycho- sexual dimension of the fantasy of “total cinema,” in which the faculty of sight and the realm of the imaginary are perfected through a complex juxtaposition of the technological and the corporeal. Films discussed in the essay include Dimitri Kirsanoff’s silent classic, “Menilmontant” (1926), and Jean-Luc Godard’s recent short, “Je vous salue Sarajevo” (1993). A multitude of visual collages and written texts from the 1920s and the 1930s – by authors such as Max Ernst, Ljubomir Mici}, Marko Risti}, and Koca Popovic – are also analyzed.

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