Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Psychoanalysis in Our Time, Gdansk, Polonya, 5 - 07 Ekim 2018
The Spanish Civil War, in which the distinctions of ideological fronts were the sharpest, has been the subject of many films. One of the most obvious situations that have come to the fore as a common aspect of these films is that the child heroes are at the forefront. Children are presented as “uncanny” beings as a sign of being in harmony with nature and as an extension of this, with the notion of “humanity”. Besides they are also represented in the form of a symbol of distance to the inhuman conditions inhabited and experienced. In this work, we will examine the ways in which the children are expression of the uncanniness through films such as The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Butterfly (1999), The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). As a common aspect, these films have surrealistic, eery and fantastic narratives. The term “uncanny” is based on a duality arising from the use of the German heimlich word. The heimlich, which means familiar and common is also substituted of the unheimlich (concealed, foreign) that has the opposite meaning. While the heimlich can be taken as a concept in mental uncertainty according to E. Jentsch, it is a category of eeriness and moreover uncertainty alone does not lead to uncanniness for Freud. There has to be something surplus, like mixing imagination with reality, overcoming of spiritual reality to physical reality. In this study, it will be focused on the potential of “uncanny” to be able to build experience of the war that is the reality itself, as well as the ideological biases, social consciousness and conditions in the context of the narratives emphasizing the surreal. It will be questioned that what kind of discourse is developed about this experience in these films.