[DOWNLOAD] "Return to Yuma (Critical Essay)" by Film Criticism ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: Return to Yuma (Critical Essay)
Author : Film Criticism
Release Date : January 22, 2007
Genre: Performing Arts,Books,Arts & Entertainment,
Pages : * pages
Size : 190 KB

Description

Delmer Daves's 3.10 to Yuma (1957) is a psychological fable concerning the male libido and its discontents. The film focuses on the inner lives of its two leading men, illuminating their interiority primarily through its two substantial female characters. Such disturbing insights into the anxieties of masculine sexuality as the film offers are resolved by its comedic pattern, which both validates the "coherent organization of mental processes" that constitutes the Freudian ego, and dramatizes its "functional importance" (Freud 1962, 7, 15) in bringing and keeping the id under subjection. Beyond this contentious bond of ego and id there rages Freud's "conflict of ambivalence, the unending struggle between Eros and the destructive drive" in the progress of civilization. This essay's approach to 3:10 to Yuma has been shaped by my understanding of three papers by Sigmund Freud: "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning," "The Ego and the Id," and "Civilization and Its Discontents." In these papers, all translated into English between 1925 and 1930, Freud formulates and develops links between the anti-social impulses of the self and the dynamics of civilization. My reading of Freud has been inflected by Philip Rieff's Freud." the Mind of The Moralist, first published in 1959 and so virtually contemporaneous with the film. This essay contends that the patterns of relationship developed in 3.10 to Yuma reveal the unconscious desires of the characters in subtle ways, the coherence of which is cogently explained by Freudian theory. Because Freud's ideas proved congenial to the cultural context from which the film grew (the 1950s were recently described on the "Charlie Rose" show [5/23/2007] as the "heyday" of psychoanalysis in America), they offer rich interpretive possibilities, not only for the analysis of character and motivation, but also for understanding the ideological work performed by the film. My Freudian reading may invite or provoke other psychoanalytic readings, post- or even anti- Freudian; nevertheless, James Mangold's recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma will surely revive interest in the gender relationships and cultural work of this neglected film.