Kieślowski with Lacan: The Truth of the Real in Film

This event explores how psychoanalytic theory – and Lacan in particular – can illuminate the cinematic world of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Rather than using film merely to illustrate psychoanalytic concepts, the lecture examines how Kieślowski’s films themselves think and give form to the Real: what resists symbolisation, what breaks through the visible, and what emerges where meaning fails.

In relation to a traditional film analysis, where the film and the filmmaking are interpreted, analysed and reconstructed based on an already formulated theoretical framework – within which the narratives, the images and the words are incorporated – Jansson's intention in the following is the reverse: to illustrate how ‘one theory’ operates and takes shape in the the work of celebrated Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski. It is a matter of speaking about film as a conceptual investigation in its own right, which in virtue of a contemporary comment can be a tool for ’looking awry’ at the existing reality. What can the film teach us about the world and life? What picture of society and culture emerges from his film’s, in a psychoanalytic sense? What ideas and fantasies dwell inside the narrative and the representations of human beings, the world they inhabit, their bodies, spirituality, desires, doubts, loneliness, silence...?

In this lecture Peter Jansson will link the work, known for his startlingly beautiful films charged with existential anxiety and the drama of the everyday, to the penetrating clinical insights of Lacan. The lecture will enhance clinical acuity and clinical skill level via an elaboration of two key Lacanian concepts, Lack and Desire, enhanced by detailed and evocative references to Kieślowski's filmography. He will also open the question of melancholy. This is to evoke the intangible and the void by conferring human traits on the Abyss. In this sense, my lecture is situated in the field that Lacan has come to call the real – what has not been expressed in words or language, evades all symbolisation and has not acquired an imaginary form – the space beyond the silence, the hole in heart of the symbolic order, the void concealed by the visible, whose eye, beyond all human meaning, in the unbearable disorder of being, our eyes cannot endure.
 

Peter Jansson is a psychoanalyst and cultural theorist based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and the head of the Academy for Psychoanalysis in Gothenburg. His work explores the relation between cinema, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, with a focus on how film gives form to what escapes symbolisation. He has written on Ingmar Bergman and is currently working on a major study of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s cinema through a Lacanian lens. Alongside his analytic practice, he lectures internationally on desire, melancholy, and the limits of representation in contemporary culture.