Constructing Meaning in Film

Freie Assoziation VJW and the Kultkino Basel. Psychiatrists Thorsten Jakobsen, Gerald Personnier and Petra Zell Roth are the organisers of this special event. Attendees are invited to watch a film and afterwards exchange their questions, emotions, thoughts and fantasies with each other.

The organisers suggest that there are three phases to a Film and they explain that as individuals we often go to the cinema with others but in fact sit ‘alone’ watching the film.  We watch the film in an intimate and yet a solitary experience. We set up an argument between what we see happening and our ability to decode meaning and extract understanding as the film unfolds. This process can introduce a second phase in our understanding.

At the end of the film and as the lights go up in the auditorium things are not always so bright in our heads. There’s thoughts, emotions, questions that hold you back, you need to work further on the plot and characters, things that occurred in the film that you can’t really sleep on. Here’s the third phase of the film and the so-called film cycle behind the screen. This third phase is about the need for more understanding, to clarify what happened, question how things unfold, the curiosity of how others interpret meaning. Film has a language that can sometimes leave us speechless or simply at a loss to understand. This exchange serves as a bridge to more understanding so that we ‘finish’ the film in our heads with thoughts from the structure, the shape of the theory, that sort of ' reads approximately in such a way; that you the viewer completes the picture’.

Check out the website, www. kultkino.ch/events_im-kino/hinter-dem_bild.