Psychiatrist Dr. Constance asks one of her patients to tell her about her attack on a man and glances at her glasses earnestly to follow what she is going to tell. The patient stops talking and gets up from the patients' bed and accuses the doctor of making fun of her, says that she does not like the doctor's frozen and arrogant face, and continues to yell at her until the hospital staff comes to take her out. Her colleague Dr. Florette then enters and tries to court the doctor, saying that she will not be able to treat patients without emotional experience, to which Dr. Constance replies that she knows that his polite style hides an unbridled sexual desire, as she believes in science and theories only in the 1945 film "Enchanted" directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
This work is one of the films that shows the influence of British-American director Alfred Hitchcock on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic school. It was not only Hitchcock who was influenced by the Freudian school of analysis and transmitted it on screen, but others followed. This school has thus found its way to different minds and generations in the West – and perhaps in the world – carried on the silver screen.
Surprisingly, Freud himself had no appreciation for cinema, and perhaps to the point of contempt; the Le Maire brothers' film screenings in Paris in the late 19th century coincided with Freud's publication of his works. He received offers from American and German producers at the time to make films about psychoanalysis, all of which were rejected.
Freud was passionate about art but held the conviction that his abstractions in psychology could not be transformed into a self-respecting work of art. Many have tried to read Freud's position on cinema from several angles, including his religious Jewish affiliation, which sees the approach of the image to man or his soul as forbidden, which leads us to the essence of the relationship of cinema with modern civilization, which revolves mainly around the image and sight.
The Moroccan thinker Dr. Taha Abdel Rahman describes modern civilization as a civilization of image tyranny, and that the makers of the camera since the 16th century were influenced by the pagan culture of images, and raised the sense of sight to a rank above all perceptions in a way that led to the "tyranny of sight", and there became an insatiable appetite for consuming images in an insatiable manner. Scientifically, it is the culture of the microscope and telescope, and technically it is the civilization of the camera, which has produced 3 major ethical challenges: spectatorship, espionage and unfolding.
According to Abd al-Rahman, this focus on the image in everything contradicts the essence and philosophy of Islamic civilization, which revolves around insight and not sight, as Islamic heritage and literature are full of urging to turn a blind eye not only to mahrams, but also to curiosity and to what is in the hands of others, as well as to pay attention to insight and the inner, not only the outward.
In the context of his disparagement of the idea of reality and visual realism, Abdel Rahman criticizes the idea of reality television, saying that it claims to reconstruct reality, which turns the spectator into a voyeur or spy in a way that contradicts the modesty of faith advocated by religion.
From the spectator and the voyeur to the viewer
Dr. Taha Abdel Rahman's critique of modern image culture focuses on the media and communication revolution, and does not come too close to cinema. However, his important theorizing about this culture indirectly carries a partial removal of cinema from this system and a space for intersections with it, and most importantly, it offers some solutions to avoid the negative effects of modern image culture.
Abdel Rahman's vision of image tyranny centers on the daily stream of images in the news, media, entertainment and social media, which influenced the viewer beyond the idea of addiction and transformed his behavior from mere spectator to spy. It is strange that the shift in the West from the authoritarianism of the Church to secularism has made religious life a private affair that has nothing to do with public life, and on the other hand, the lives of famous photographers have become permissible, if people do not intervene in it, they quickly reveal it to people before this scourge is transmitted to the rest of the public, who has become a seeker of reaching this lofty position of fame;
Cinema in this aspect is different because it is inherently an eclectic aesthetic made by professionals and going to it optionally, which puts a distance between it and the glut of other everyday images. This is about traditional cinema in theaters and not digital projection platforms that have become involved in intermediate television, placing them in the same media basket in terms of continuous visual flow.
Denigrating the idea of reality and visual realism, Abdel Rahman criticizes the idea of reality television, saying that it claims to reconstruct reality, which turns the spectator into a voyeur or spy in a way that contradicts the modesty of faith advocated by religion. There is some logic in this view if we apply it to certain reality TV shows that place surveillance cameras for participants that monitor their lives crudely. As for cinematography, this view cannot be taken for granted, because the role of art in general is to re-engineer reality, such as metaphor and metaphor in poetry and language in general.
Arab philosopher and thinker Taha Abdel Rahman (Moroccan press)
As a remedy for these moral visual ills, Abdel Rahman suggests that the consumer of these images move from the rank of an ordinary spectator to the rank of the viewer according to a relationship of trust whereby he feels that he is entrusted with his sight and these images and not the owner of them in which he releases his sight as he wishes. This is until he reaches the stage of viewing and not contesting the "God" whose name is "the photographer", and realizes that the attainment of the image can only be achieved by the knowledge of the higher photographer, which is the knowledge of the lowest knowledge of him by his most beautiful names. And here the picture, no matter how adorned, seems to represent only the appearance of things, and there is a need for inner knowledge, and this knowledge does not take place without insight that shows the truths of things, and faith is what trains this insight.
Applying this prescription to the cinematic situation is not easy, but it is not impossible; what Abdel Rahman mentioned in this regard is the behavior of the viewer in general, and we are left with the behavior of the image maker from a director and a large team and how to make a work that escapes the traps of the scourges of the civilization of sight.
The late writer Abbas Mahmoud al-Akkad used to say that European poetry was not fun in itself, so he always needed accompanying music. As for Arabic poetry, it has an internal music, which is rhyme and performances, which sings about any external musical influence. Here, directors need to explore the depths of Arab, Islamic and human culture in general according to the approach of interrogating aesthetic components and not only visual dazzling.