Man Ray's film, made in France 1923, eats up the stuff of semi-consciousness and delivers them in a high-speed furore. If we can at least consider that the semi-conscious image that is being divulged is indeed that of a child's, we can identify those notions of terror that are archetypical to the psychological horror of, say, H.P Lovecraft or F.W Murnau. Common is the view that 'the fantastic' is, like Freud's 'uncanny', an instance of simultaneous familiarity and non-familiarity that toys with the subject. The horror image or text itself toys the reader with the familiar and the non-familiar. The subject may well become de-sensitised to the horror image or text if it is set from without of the familiar; in space or in the future. But the kernel of passing fear into the mind's of others is to infiltrate their comfort zone. Is this not the plan of the Big Bad Wolf to woo by means of calm the innocent girl into submission. Indeed the Mythological qualities of the Big Bad Wolf descend from its various attacks on European settlements.
A human quality for Freud is repressing what meaning (or lack of) we attached to certain objects as a child. Of course at times these repressed meanings present themselves to us; certain "childish" jokes make us laugh. Indeed Freud thought that what made a joke funny was its revisiting the meaning that the child attaches to things the bouncing and the lacking of concern for self-preservation found in the comedy of Buster Keaton, for example.
Of course what is repressed in a child is not the fear imagery of pre-sleep semi-consciousness, but simply how canny the uncanny was to him or her. On revisiting these nonsensical images in Man Ray's film we take them as almost without foundation. Quite literally they appear from nowhere and with no explanation. On later analysis of the film, in a pseudo-academic way, we see the film is designed so each appearing image stems from nowhere. It is without the safety net of cause and effect. Selected individually we see that some images in the film will be familiar to the child before sleep. The distortion, the gravel-like textures, the swinging light bulb, long tubes emanating from the walls or the ceiling, the shadows behind hanging objects.
Is it not interesting that these images that appear from nowhere are not uncanny enough. Mostly because the image is precisely how they appeared at one time when we were not so equipped to attach such a meaning to them as uncanny or fantastical. Without the appropriate net of symbolic attachment readily available to describe such raw phenomena, things were simply things. We now turn what it is to be uncanny on its head; to a child in those terrifying moments before sleep, when the walls have shadows and objects are moving independently, it is not that these things which are uncanny; i.e. objects in an ordinary capacity doing something extraordinary, because to a child this is not unusual. It would be unusual to an adult who discovers that objects which don't move independently, are. This is uncanny. To be sure the 'uncanny' only works in the symbolic order - the negation of the real of an object for its symbolisation. To the child nothing is uncanny because if things are simply just things, anything goes.
More literally, what is frightening for the child is that it is likely these objects on the wall are alive, conscious and vengeful. At their most alarming moments before semi-consciousness turns to sleep. A 'return to the repressed' in this formal sense is a return to the canniness of the independently moving object without the slightest notion of its fantastical qualities.
A human quality for Freud is repressing what meaning (or lack of) we attached to certain objects as a child. Of course at times these repressed meanings present themselves to us; certain "childish" jokes make us laugh. Indeed Freud thought that what made a joke funny was its revisiting the meaning that the child attaches to things the bouncing and the lacking of concern for self-preservation found in the comedy of Buster Keaton, for example.
Of course what is repressed in a child is not the fear imagery of pre-sleep semi-consciousness, but simply how canny the uncanny was to him or her. On revisiting these nonsensical images in Man Ray's film we take them as almost without foundation. Quite literally they appear from nowhere and with no explanation. On later analysis of the film, in a pseudo-academic way, we see the film is designed so each appearing image stems from nowhere. It is without the safety net of cause and effect. Selected individually we see that some images in the film will be familiar to the child before sleep. The distortion, the gravel-like textures, the swinging light bulb, long tubes emanating from the walls or the ceiling, the shadows behind hanging objects.
Is it not interesting that these images that appear from nowhere are not uncanny enough. Mostly because the image is precisely how they appeared at one time when we were not so equipped to attach such a meaning to them as uncanny or fantastical. Without the appropriate net of symbolic attachment readily available to describe such raw phenomena, things were simply things. We now turn what it is to be uncanny on its head; to a child in those terrifying moments before sleep, when the walls have shadows and objects are moving independently, it is not that these things which are uncanny; i.e. objects in an ordinary capacity doing something extraordinary, because to a child this is not unusual. It would be unusual to an adult who discovers that objects which don't move independently, are. This is uncanny. To be sure the 'uncanny' only works in the symbolic order - the negation of the real of an object for its symbolisation. To the child nothing is uncanny because if things are simply just things, anything goes.
More literally, what is frightening for the child is that it is likely these objects on the wall are alive, conscious and vengeful. At their most alarming moments before semi-consciousness turns to sleep. A 'return to the repressed' in this formal sense is a return to the canniness of the independently moving object without the slightest notion of its fantastical qualities.