ANXIETY AND CINEMA THERAPY: when "thriller" becomes healing! E. Gioacchini

Dramatherapy Workshop Freemind2008-2009 – 15th March 2009 Meeting-Discussion Group

A film, the way we usually intend it, records an event, whether it be real or artistic invention, describing it in successive frames arranged in time sequence. Even in the more modern world of digital technology, things are not different: the frame contains a complex series of data reproduced in their persistence/change in the frames that follow each other – in this case with an intrinsic saving in the process.
So, what is happening in real life is broken down in snapshots describing its specific evolution in terms of persistence/change. The fact that we do not perceive it this way, but as a time continuum, without interruptions, is, as we all know, simply the result of a limitation in our visual perception. Each of the snapshots is effectively the cross-picture of the event that is taking place at a certain time. It is a punctual reproduction of what is happening, maybe foretelling its future evolution and representing what was registered previously. We can see it as an icon frozen in time, as if it were out of it, because it freezes it in an immanent reproduction, sometimes leaving it deprived of the semantics of the event; in search for its ‘parents’ and its ‘children’, and yet conditio sine qua non [condition without which] this very event might happen. Sitting in a film-house, immersed in watching the film we are interested in, with each photogram – although we do not perceive it in its individuality – we question and we continuously falsify the hypotheses and ratify in retrospect what we have been shown. The flowing frames or the transforming succession of the various frames lets us meet with our sense and with that of the author’s project. That single snapshot, though, has its energetic potential of expression which is almost untainted, as it exceeds our expectations and betrays imagined evolutions as well as formal logics. After all, to be fair, the success of a movie is also due to this element of surprise.
In the world of motion-picture, the film has the power of representation, trivial or imaginative, of a culture and is, therefore, part of a need/function which is typical of every artistic endeavour. Nevertheless, together with dance and music, it differs from all other forms of art – painting, for example – for the kinematic aspect peculiar to it.
A culture has linguistic products, iconographic ones, ritual ones, mythical memories, which all perform specific organisational functions that can be studied anthropologically and sociologically. These can involve and share human experience in its multiple and complex aspects, both its physiology and its pathology. Art is one of them.
Artists, just like doctors, reveal, through their work, hidden relationships that go beyond the sensorial perception of reality and beyond the petty game of appearances. The quid [what], always specific, that constitutes their genius is mixed with a particular form of communication, understood as ‘revelation’. This function, in some cases, becomes prophetic, it anticipates the time to come, yet it is always strictly connected to a reality over which it lays a bridge of new visions.
The sense of any work of art, and inside it the sense of any creative act, is inscribed in the visible dialectics with its audience. Every artistic expression is the daughter of time, heir of the past and prophetic of the future, while it ‘discusses’ with its contemporaries, proves them wrong or serves them, condemns or exalts, depending on the case. Here is its shamanic function. This dialogue is sometimes conflict, at times it expresses itself through the torments of the artist’s inspiration, through the pain of the quest, the thin line between genius and folly, but, fundamentally, it belongs to every creative act. We can say there is Art because I can reproduce it in myself and it is perquisite of its invisible relationship with the collective that in this operation it doesn’t become a ‘thing’, or merely an aesthetic object. The symbolic field is, indeed, the place where artists and their creative act meet with the audience, because creativity belongs to all: geniuses, executors and absent-minded passers-by.
Art is, therefore, social cure, photograph of the community, storage of memories, hopes, illusions, criticism of the conscience of the ‘I’. It performs a function for human instinct that cannot be renounced. In it instincts balance each other between implosion and explosion, projecting themselves and being represented on the outside. That magic ‘as if’, referred to at the beginning of this article, in the very representation it has in art, gains the power of making our mind work, thus resolving conflicts and unmasking our double, so as to acquire the conscience of our true resources. This is what theatre and figurative arts can do and, unconsciously, this is what we feel in front of a good movie.

Cinematherapy

“Because of how it works, the mechanism creating cinematic images is, amongst all the means of human expression, the one that best represents the work of the human spirit during sleep. The darkness that slowly floods the hall is like closing one’s eyes. It is at this point that on the screen and in the depth of man starts the nightly incursion of the unconscious; the images, like in a dream, appear and disappear, time and space and the relative concepts of duration do not correspond to reality any longer” (Bonuel)
A first aspect we should consider when we analyse the therapeutic potential of a film is that most films are a downright allegory, not differently from stories, myths, fairy-tales and dreams. Fundamentally, it is this aspect that we use therapeutically in cinematherapy. The cognitive impact that heals, in the vision of a film used for this purpose, can be explained through recent studies and theories on creativity. The American scholar Dr Birgit Wolz, who has practiced cinematherapy for years, states that these theories suggest that the therapeutic aspect goes through seven different types of information that whe has recognised. Studies carried out on the subject say that we the wider access we have to this information the faster can we learn to solve our conflicts.
Watching the screening of a movie summarises all these seven information channels: logical/mathematical (the plot), verbal/linguistic (the script), visual/spatial (the images, the colours, the symbols), bodily/kinaesthetic (the movements), musical/rhythmic (the sounds and the music), interpersonal (storytelling), and intrapersonal (the internal dialogue). In her book, the author of E-Motion Picture Magic wants to show (tracing in a scientific way Bonuel’s idea, quoted at the beginning of this) that: “The viewing of a movie has a magic effect, more than any other means of narration. Movies have the power of depicting us outside ourselves and in the experience f their characters. Equally, it is often easier to keep distance and healthy perspective while watching a movie than it would be in real-life situations”. This is what, in the context of a therapy, would generate processes of transformation and healing.
“Many movies have a mythic message that tells us about our virtues and about our real self” says the scholar “…and extracting gold in movies means discovering our best characteristics, our hidden attributes, thus understanding how we project theses virtues on heroes and heroines”. The process of identification that takes place with a character would therefore help us to develop an inner energy, since we draw from deep, forgotten resources, and to become aware of the right opportunity for the use of those very resources. The author herself has gone through this kind of deep emotional experience in the viewing of Massimo Troisi’s Il Postino (1994). Character of Mario, a man who certainly does not have a complex personality, without the important acquaintance with a person such as Pablo Neruda, would have kept on running the peaceful life of any other Italian living on the island. It is the friendship he develops with the great writer that acts as a catalysing element towards the discovery of the beauty around him and his love for poetry.

“The tenderness in the relationship between Mario and Neruda and the authenticity Mario was showing have touched me deeply.” states the scholar “After the end of the movie I realised that this feeling was inside me and I realised that the movie had made me aware of values I still held deeply and that had gone unnoticed in my daily life. I then decided to bring these qualities forward, spending more time on my own in nature in order to simplify my life and bring more tenderness and authenticity in my relationships”.

In my profession, I have often used films with my patients. A therapeutic use inside a methodological structure that made a movie, or some of its parts, the stirring element in the hypnodrama sessions I usually run. The modifications of the state of consciousness allowing the subject to observe their own story from different angles, just like light trance in hypnodrama, were stimulated further by the fiction of the screening which, at the same time, would stimulate identification and distance from the plot thereof.

The intervention of the therapist, in that particular context, would then become the expression of an ‘auxiliary I’ stimulating the internal dialogue of the subject, thus reconnecting them to the reality of their own story.

On this subject, Professor Paolo Pancheri, psychiatrist and former President of the Italian Society of Psychopathology, in his presentation of a book by Gianni Canova, Healing with Cinema (2001), stated that: “Cinema induces in any person a change in the state f consciousness. The audience temporarily enter an induced dreamy state, kept and dragged both by the story told in the movie and by the powerful suggestions of the images. The movie induces a peculiar twilight state, in which objective reality is blanked out and subjective experiences induced by the cinematic sequences temporarily represent the only reality”.
One of my patients, an artist, recently commented on what she was experiencing: along the same lines of the Cubist Movement, a kind of breaking-down of one’s experience, as if seen from different perspectives, and yet summarised in that dynamic picture made up of the film sequences, in which every broken-down part contributed to the essential keeping of the subject’s identity, who was free to space out even in the dark places of their history without fear.

Professor Mastronardi, expert in cinematherapy, in a recent publication states: “The selection of the contents to be channelled constitutes the peculiar character of the research, together with how to ‘prescribe the individual film-product’ and how to take it. These use dynamically active elements which are able to structure ‘native emotional cognitivity’ or ‘native enlightenment’ stimulated from the outside and particularly active on the emotional level. They are, therefore able to carve themselves in the individual’s mind so as to favour a more functional evolution of every single frame of the person’s life, because of those alternative behavioural paths” suggested on the level of the film emotion. Professor Mastronardi has already prepared a full movie-archive of works that can be used for therapeutic purposes, depending on the context and situation of the therapeutic intervention. Gianni Canova, Lecturer of History and Criticism of Cinema at the IULM, in Milan, and Director of Duel, a monthly magazine on cinema, is carrying out a similar project. In his book Healing with Cinema (see above) he offers a filmography arranged by ‘conflicts’, almost ready for use, but still stimulating as far as research in this field is concerned. The author starts his discussion trying to answer the same question we asked ourselves on why cinema is potentially such a therapeutic tool. “I remember some winter afternoons in Milan, when the “pain of living” - its lack of meaning… - seemed natural in the fog that was swallowing you…We would go to the cinema, to watch anything, as long as it was a movie. Huddled up on the third row, like a foetus, we would be flooded by images of worlds coming out of the screen. Ninety / a hundred and twenty minutes of really intense therapy: on the way out we always felt better and it seemed that the world - almost always still wrapped in fog - was better - had more sense - than we thought before buying the ticket and plunging in the bright darkness of the hall. What was cinema healing us from? What illness could it help to defeat?”

Beverly West e Nancy Peske, editors Cinematherapy, an American magazine with wide circulation and with a female audience of all ages, from twenty- to sixty-year olds, and from all social backgrounds, published some years ago Cinematherapy for the Soul: The Girl's Guide to Finding Inspiration One Movie at a Time (2004), the latest of a series of manuals for using movies as self-help in different situations. This book, predominantly conceived for women, with the subtitle “A film for all moods”, is an interesting and funny film manual now available also in Italy and published by Feltrinelli. The authors suggest cinematherapy as a less invasive way of self-healing, even as an alternative to psychotherapy.
We welcome these ideas and there should be a democratic space for intelligent, independent evaluations. We are far from the rhetoric that sees the solution to personal problems as necessarily coming out through a painful delivery by our intellect and our emotions in a psychotherapeutic environment.
A person can also heal ‘on the way’ before reaching the ‘hut’ in which the ‘sorcerer’ practises his art, in spite of the idea of psychotherapeutic ‘orthodox’ religion as the only way to solve conflict. We also believe that often Buddha, when met on the street, should be killed (this the title of an irreplaceable book in the Astrolabio collection, a debunking of the useless therapist who should never create dependence) as soon as possible and not necessarily with his permission. It is also true, though, that a real therapy should necessarily go through the relation with the other, in order to avoid the risk of stereotypical operations of hypertrophy of our Ego, in which the self-reference of solutions can only shuffle the cards and procrastinate the answer to our conflict. Therefore, kinds of short therapy centred on the resources of the client, which use tools such as cinema or theatre, open a wide theoretical discussion on how to solve people’s problems. This is, for example, the direction in which Connie Sharp is working: Professor of Psychology at the University Pittsburgh, Connie has started actual courses in Cinematherapy.