Kristeva, Julia. “Fantasy and Cinema.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia UP,1997. 63-80.

Chapter 5

FANTAST AND CINEMA

At this point in my inquiry—the intimate as representation of the subject on the way to constitution and revolt—I am confronted with the imaginary. Consider this for a moment: suppose the imaginary offered the most immediate, most subtle, but also most dangerous access to the intimate. We cannot avoid the sense Lacan gives it: “That the imaginary is supported by the reflection of the same to the same is certain.   We have always imagined that being should contain a sort of plenitude of its own. Being is a body.”

Organisms of mixed race (Didier, the collage man)

What is fantasy? The Greek root-fae, faos, fos—expresses the notion of light and thus the fact of coming to light, shining, appearing, presenting, presenting oneself, representing oneself.

When he uses the word Phantasie, Freud understands it as the intimate creation of representations, not the faculty of imagining in the philosophical sense of the word. German has another term for this: Einbildungskraft.  Since then, the word “fantasy” has designated an imaginary scenario in which the subject depicts in a more or less distorted way the fulfillment of a desire, ultimately sexual. So at the outset the term in French does not at all indicate the field of the imagination but that of particular imaginary formations. Which ones? On this point, you would do well to consult The Language of Psycho-Analysis by Laplanche and Pontalis, which sums things up better than I can do here.

But since I will guide you through this reading, I will remind you briefly of the distinction between diurnal fantasies, subliminal fantasies, unconscious fantasies, and, among the latter, primal fantasies. Diurnal fantasies are daydreams, those novels without an audience in which, in a more or less paradisiacal or infernal way, we recount our desires, in counterpoint to our real destinies: our fairytales or nightmares.  There are unconscious daydreams with strong sexual connotations, reflexively conscious or not, which are the precursors of hysterical symptoms: these are unconscious subliminal fantasies. Finally, unconscious fantasies in the strict sense—those linked to unconscious desires—are situated at the foundation of the progredient trajectory that ends in dream.  The impossibility of gaining access to this unconscious fantasy and the repression of the fantasy are the source of symptoms. Analytical work consists of making the fantasy conscious—formulating the phantasmatic narrative and interpreting it—in order to dissolve the symptom.

Freud’s analysis of Dora’s cough provides us with a classic example of unconscious fantasy linked to sexual desire. As you may recall, this young Viennese girl suffered from a cough that no traditional medical means could soothe. Freud revealed that at the origin of this symptom several sexual fantasies were hidden, notably this: as a child, Dora imagined her father’s mistress performing fellatio on him, whom she thought to be impotent. This scenario, unacceptable to the subject herself, remained unconscious. What followed was the eroticization of the throat, tongue, and mouth, which was just as inadmissible for the subject and was transformed into neurotic spasms manifested by uncontrollable coughing.  Note the way in which Freud manages to detect the fantasy. Naturally, like Lacan, he starts with language: Dora happily repeats that her father is “unfortunate” (unvermoglich). In German the word refers both to someone without money and someone without physical strength, which Freud deciphers as a man lacking sexual power.  As you can see, the signifier for Freud is embodied immediately. Like Proust, Freud is a specialist in transubstantiation, but he hears flesh in the patient’s associative speech, while Proust writes flesh in his metaphors and hyperbolic sentences. The difference is notable, but the intention is analogous: touching on the vibrations of desire with the word. The fantasy is precisely what emerges at the crossroads. In the same way, in another patient’s hysterical fits, Freud discovers that her spasmodic movements mimic the gesture of both tearing off her clothes and putting them back on: active and passive, man and woman, replaying an unacceptable, repressed erotic scene.

Two details emerge when we try to enter the singular world of fantasy. The first is this: although these scenes find their point of departure in childhood memories, they present us with a particular reality that is distinct from perceptual reality. The subject imagines something; he is having an illusion. But this illusion is nevertheless strong, steady, persistent, and subject to its own rigorous logic: it is the reality of his desire. The universe of fantasy prompts us to take seriously this other reality—psychical reality—which in a factual, efficient, pragmatic world we have a tendency to underestimate and diminish: “Psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality.

The second specificity is even more interesting: these illusory formations, these scenarios, the offshoots of our desires, are complex formations. They are transitional organisms, hybrid constructions between two psychical structures—between the conscious and the unconscious—that play with both repression and the return of the repressed.  The pressure of sexual drives assures them a prepsychical, biological base, but they manifest themselves as narration, with syntax, grammar, logical construction, and a whole narrative setup.  Thus in fantasy the mind’s armature is in no way deficient but distortedly admits the subject’s desire: Dora loves her father; she also loves the woman who is his mistress, but she cannot admit this thought in her mind; she admits it only in the form of a painful symptom(inversion of the desired pleasure into pain) and on the level of an organ (the throat, coughing) rather than in its psychical representation. In other words, unconscious fantasy prompts us to think of psychical life as a life of multiple and heterogeneous strata, as a polyvalent, layered psychical apparatus: drive/preverbal representation/organic reaction/verbal representation/and so on. Freud never attributed fantasies solely to instinctual impulse(biology), or solely to symbolic formation (parental restrictions, religious and moral ideology, etc.), but always suggested an interdependence and translatability among all levels of psychical life. The fantasy as construction/crossroads is one of the favored examples of this work of translation: “We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people.

Then, while making distinctions among these various regimes of fantasy, Freud points out the close relationships between them. Whether they are conscious or unconscious, conscious fantasies in the pervert who can enact them, or delirious fears in the paranoiac who pervert who can enact them, or delirious fears in the paranoiac who projects them onto others with a hostile meaning, or even erotic desires the psychoanalyst discovers behind the symptoms in the hysteric, the speaking, sexual subject is a subject of fantasies and subject to fantasies.

Finally, Freud supposes the existence of far more archaic and profound fantasies, which he calls primal fantasies: these are scenarios concerning our origins, which he supposes go back through generations cerning our origins, which he supposes go back through generations phylogenetically. A presubjective structure, the primal fantasy, like the fantasy of the primal scene, the fantasy of castration, and the fantasy of seduction, does not necessarily constitute a sedimentation of individual experiences but hereditary schemas. The child invents these scenarios, which he represses, but the invention is only an eternal return of hereditary schemas that have actually taken place in preceding generations and are mysteriously encrypted in the psyche: “Children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.”

If it is true that all fantasies have analogous structures and reflect unconscious fantasy, the subject’s entire life would appear to be shaped by the phantasmatic.  Literature and art are the favored places for the formulation of fantasies, not their realization. Thus the paroxysmal phantasmatic of Sade presents a hypertrophy of jouissance, particularly that provoked by violence and pain.  In a more discreet way, the diaphanous and refined sensibility of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is subetended by a phantasmatic of profanation (Mlle Vinteuil spitting on her father’s portrait) and flagellation (Baron de Charlus in the brothel scene). In another register, psychical uncertainty—am I a man or woman? And, more profoundly, am I human or inhuman?—is displayed in fantasies of metamorphosis or anamorphosis: thus Goya and his Caprices, inspired by the violence that Spain underwent during the postrevolutionary wars but also by the painter’s depression and his loss of identity in the clutches of death.

At times, social commentary makes almost no distinction between fantasy and reality. Thus a writer may find himself incriminated by horrors actually committed by executioners (e.g., Sade compared to a Nazi). We might think, on the contrary, that putting fantasies into (verbal or pictorial) form is our most subtle defense against acting out to communicate one’s fantasies by formulating them and commenting on them provides a jouissance that avoids the horror of translating them into action.

I can hear you asking: don’t we inhabit a veritable paradise of fantasy today thanks to images in the media? Aren’t we saturated with fantasies, stimulated to produce them and to become imaginary creators in turn?

Nothing is less certain.

The so-called society of the spectacle, paradoxically, is hardly favorable to the analysis of fantasies or even to their formation. The “new maladies of the soul” are characterized by a reining in, if not a destruction of, the phantasmatic, faculty.  We are inundated with images, some of which resonate with our fantasies and appease us but which, for lack of interpretative words, do not liberate us. Moreover, the stereotype of these images deprives us of the possibility of creating our own imagery, our own imaginary scenarios.

Didier, a patient I have discussed at length elsewhere, was complaining of relationship problems and skin symptoms. Over the years he had developed a technical discourse without managing to talk to me about his conflicts and desires: no dreams, no fantasies, or, if so, they were quickly dismissed. Learning that he was a painter in his spare time, I expressed interest, and soon enough he brought me reproductions of his works: collages of body parts and face of stars set with paint and variously arranged.  The patient’s commentary was always very technical in nature: Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and so forth. I was the one to graft fantasy onto this: carnage, violence, murder on a background of the guilt he felt for provoking his mother’s death by living as a bachelor, by not having a wife and children. A rejection followed, indicating Didier’s initial aggression toward me. In the wake of this transference-countertransference, he would feel more free to talk.

By making his pictures, Didier set up operative fantasies that “operated.” By that I mean, Didier managed to have a life that was satisfactory in appearance but stereotypical, as if operated by his operative fantasies: he had no interiority, he neither loved nor was loved, he had no contact with either himself or others and remained walled up in solitude and masturbation. On the other hand, the phantasmatic novels that followed the exhibition of the pictures opened up the true universe of his fantasies—aggressive and erotic—and allowed him to have a freer psychical life, a more complex sexual life, and more complex relationships. As long as he was in the picture, the unconscious fantasy was not solely or simply repressed; more gravely, it was not formed as a fantasy, the sexual drive flowing into a gesture without psychical representation. The role of language is essential for the formation of fantasies: without the possibility of telling them to someone ( Even if “I” do not use this possibility), “my” desires do not become fantasies but remain encysted at a prepsychical level and risk spilling over into somaticization and acting-out (from crime to drug addiction). With Didier, it was not only necessary to bring the repressed to consciousness; it was necessary to create phantasmatic representation, to construct these psychical representations before analyzing them.

It has often been said how the society of the spectacle and certain aspects of the contemporary family (the lack of relationships, lack of authority, and so on) lead to phantasmatic poverty if not vacuity.  As a result, primal drives and fantasies, because they do not find psychical representation, seek the path to action or somaticization. Hence the banality of evil, the result of the inability to judge, certainly. But, even more, the impoverishment of fantasies, their reduction, their abolition threaten to abolish inner depth itself, this camera obscura that has constituted the psychical life of the speaking being for millennia. In this regard, art and literature are the allies of psychoanalysis; they open the verbal path to the construction of fantasies and prepare the terrain for psychoanalytical interpretation.

Fear and Specular Seduction

Now we come to the universe of the image that invades us through film and television: the cinematic image, the central place of the contemporary imaginary. A distinction should be made regarding the news or documentary images that fascinate us. Although not equivalent to our fantasies, these images do in fact resonate with them.

The cinema has assumed the universe of fantasy as a right: we may posit this to start, even if later we find that things are not so simple. For the cinema may also destroy fantasy: for example, when stereotypical, soap opera images reduce the viewer to a passive consumer, or, on the contrary, when so-called auteur cinema pulverizes fantasy and invents a veritable cinematic ecriture with ambitions of conceptualizing the specular. But we can start by positing that a certain kind of cinema known as realist projects fantasies. Since the visible is the port of registry of drives, their synthesis beneath language, cinema as an apotheosis of the visible offers itself to the plethoric deployment of fantasies.

 “Man walks in the image,” St. Augustine said. But the cinematic image takes us (men, and women too, needless to say) fro a ride. Movies that seduce or scare us, from Arsenic and Old Lance (Frank Capra, 1944) to A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966), from Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) to Doctor No (Terence Young, 1962), have tapped into the fantasies of an era that is now that of cinema. So much so that the other arts, such as literature or painting, when they wish to preserve their specificity, take refuge in a maximal condensation—poetry, meditation, distortion, abstraction—in order to explore other regions of the imaginary, to keep us connected with these other regions.

Cinema—a certain cinema, an other cinema—shows this condensed and meditative mode of writing in the face of and as a stand-in for fantasies. We might call this second type of image the thought specular. Cinema—when it is great art, from Eisenstein to Godard and not a universal journalistic style or more or less dramatized stereotypes-seizes us precisely in this place.

Why does the visible lend itself to a primary and fragile synthesis of drives, to a more supple, less controlled, riskier representability of instinctual dramas, the games of Eros and Thanatos? Take “game” as a playful, regulated exchange (checkers, fro example) but also as a space of adjustment, the free movement between two elements (the play of a windows, for example). The voyeur makes a symptom of this first articulation of drives: he takes pleasure in the sadomasochism of an autoerotic, incestuous osmosis with an object from which he is not really detached. But we also know of other more standard, more indispensable, and in this sense more noble variants. Thus when a patient who is complaining of various forms of psychic and somatic ill-being does not manage either to grasp them or to communicate them through words, we suggest, instead of analysis or before analysis, a psychodrama. That is, we invite him to put his drives into play, to show them to us: gesture and image. The act of psychodrama is in large part a specular act: “one” shows oneself, “one” relies on the analyst’s speaking action, before eventually becoming an “I” capable of deferring this action and this demonstration and acceding to the statement of a subject.

To allow you to appreciate the role of the gaze in bringing about this initial specular synthesis at the borders of the sadomasochistic drive, I will give you two examples. Francois was not yet a year old, and he spoke through echolalia: rhythms, intonations, variable intensities. He saw objects as so many embarrassing and accidental extensions of his body, which he still experienced as scattered. He allowed his voice to be recorded without protest: these were the recordings of the drama between expressions of sound and his breathing, choking, difficult adjustments between intensities and frequencies that were nevertheless already in the process of being organized by the first organizer that is rhythm. A few months later, objects began to exist for Francois; he saw them, hid them, lost them. He also saw the large tape recorder, and despite our attempt to keep the machine from impeding his movements, the simple fact of seeing it provoked his tears. It was as if the earlier vocalic dramas had been projected onto the visible object. The unbearable aspect of the vocalic apprenticeship requested by the adult, thus the rejection of the adult, tainted a visible object (the tape recorder) charged with representing the drive subjacent to the verbal function. The simplest echolalia took on a symbolic function, for it began to designate objects that were separate and that Francois henceforth saw as such. At that very moment, the drive, which previously was consumed in echolalia alone, was now represented by an object that had a metonymic relationship with the latter and became the “bad object.” Even before the “mirror stage” that consolidates this dissociation, and object appears to the gaze as designatable, namable. The apprenticeship of language as a system of signs with a communicative function is precisely assured because this seen object has become possible, because the image is there from now on , the medium and tapping of aggression and anxiety.

In the current of friendship and love, dreams do not wait for the analyst’s couch: they circulate like gifts. Antoine tells me that he often has the same nightmare: he is four years old, he is in the bathroom on his little potty. The excrement overflows and turns into a “big animal,” something between a frog and a crocodile but with transparent skin, as if the membrane of an eye. Suddenly Antoine’s father enters, sees the beast, and threatens to punish the son. We are faced with a terrifying montage of the anal drive, the autoerotic pleasure linked to maternal care of the sphincter, the incestuous desire for this invisible mother, and the subordination to the father for anal coitus. A montage also occurs between a phantasm of an anal penis and cloacal birth. Antoine gives birth to an object as if he were a woman, while at the same time being this fecal object to which his mother gave birth. Onto this instinctual and desiring, ambiguous and reversible vector, the gaze of the father is grafted: the eye of the other, the eye of the third, the menacing and seductive paternal eye. Your will note that in this dream there is a separation between the object, on the one hand—Antoine/waste/the expelling maternal body/Antoine’s body caught in its autoerotic jouissance—and the paternal eye, on the other, which depicts the first instance of the separation with autoeroticism and the mother-child dyad. This separation, not yet made in the dream and no doubt in Antoine’s unconscious, is carried out in and through visual representation, as well as in and through the symbolic prohibition that the father establishes. Antoine’s dream presents us with a phantasmatic and oneiric conglomerate that has not yet constituted a subject detached from the other two instances of the familial triangle (father, mother) Why? Because it maintains, for the sake of a sadomasochistic and autoerotic pleasure, a lack o distinction between the paternal eye—the symbolic authority—and the ego-body-object. You will note that this lack of distinction is inevitable accompanied by another: a hesitation that Antoine manifests in his daily life over sexual difference and about which he complains to his close friends. Active or passive, seeing or seen, my eye and his eye, to be a man or to let himself be taken as an erotic object by the father (or by a given hierarchical superior but also, often, by the “superwomen” Antoine chooses as partners). The separation between these two registers (acted drive/representation; sadomasochistic body/paternal eye prefiguring the symbolic) initiates at once the autonomy of the subject and access to thought and language. But nothing guarantees that this separation will ever be clear and definitive in any of us. The dream, this cinema deprived of an audience, is there to remind us how dramatic and ever incomplete this apprenticeship of symbolism is in the precincts of the visible and the instinctual; how language is striated by the image itself and suspended at instinctual pleasure; and how these ambiguities command sexual indifferentiation, out endogenous psychical bisexualities, our polymorphisms. Whether nightmarish or delightful, the dream is always seductive: the specular is the primacy of pleasure that Antoine refuses himself in daily life, the mark of a jouissance that has not taken place, that will never take place enough in the waking order.

We are now in a position to define the specular as the final and very efficient depository of aggressions and anxieties and brilliant purveyor-seducer. We can also define, with Francois and Antoine, specular seduction as a diversion of facilitation (rhythms, somatic waves, waves of color, erogenous excitations) toward this possible point of convergence where series of always incomplete images converge, in which “I” is finally constituted as identical to oneself.

The ultimate seduction, if it existed, would be the ideal mother, the one who holds up the ideal mirror in which “I” see myself, sure and autonomous, finally rid of the narcissistic throes of the “mirror stage” and the paradises, both perfumed and abject, where “I” depended on the mother, more or less indistinct from her. Yet it is the paternal eye—the eye of the Law—that takes over for this ideal mother and replaces her destabilizing seduction by a call to order. Francois and Antoine are the incestuous sons who need a strong paternal intrusion in order to detach themselves from the osmosis with their mothers. This terrifying father, who is nevertheless a seductive father, refers the very young narcissistic identity to its passive position of being a seduced, feminine, uncertain subject. In effect, Antoine had a hard time contenting himself with a single identity (with a single sexual identity, to start with), as the eye of paternal law demanded of him: he returned to his potty, in narcissistic instability, by offering himself as passive object to the father’s gaze, as if he were the father’s wife—another way of fusing with his mother. The seductive and terrifying specular endlessly celebrates our identity uncertainties. Keep this in mind: we find these archaic regions once again, surprisingly enough, in Sartre, who did not avoid associating the fate of thought and that of anality.

Once installed in the specular, seduced by the image that the father holds out, seduced consequently by “my” image, “I” seduce others: “I” can entice others by addressing the aggressive drive as a desiring appeal to them. The secular transforms the drive into desire, aggression into seduction. It is at the specular that the diversion of the drive ends up, and it is from the specular that identificatory allure emanates, with its narcissistic mirage and its appeal to others. Chronologically, in the development of the child and, logically, in the functioning of the adult, the specular remains the most advanced medium for the inscription of the drive (in relation to sound or tactile material, for example). The specular is therefore also the earliest point of departure of the signs, narcissistic identifications, and phantasmatic trances of one identity speaking to another. Moreover, men and women find themselves in this knot of fear and seduction that the specular proposes in different ways. Cinema constantly offers a vision of this trial of sexual difference, as well as that of homosexuality, this collision with our impossible identities to the point of psychosis. I am thinking of the cinema that explores the specular, that reproduces it most closely to its untenable logic, or that preserves only its strident, discordant, ironic logic: Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Pasolini…

Fantasy and the Imaginary: the Specular

As we have just seen, fantasy in its visibility invents an instinctual montage and a drift toward meaning, language, thought. The most direct cinema, which projects more or less modified fantasies, seizes us in this place in our psychical lives where the imagination lets itself be controlled by fantasy, which I call the specular.

This point should be emphasized: what I see has nothing to do with he specular that fascinates me.

On the one hand, there is the gaze by which I identify an object, a face: mine, that of another. It offers me an identity that reassures me, for it delivers me from facilitations (frayages), unnamable fears (frayeurs), sounds prior to the name, to the image: pulsations, somatic waves, waves of colors, rhythms, tones. So-called intellectual speculation derives from this identifying, tenacious gaze: the hysteric knows something about this when, unable to find a sufficiently satisfying mirror, she finds herself in theory, a point of convergence of all sensible and senseless intentions, a shelter where “I” can know without seeing myself, for “I” have delegated to another (to philosophical contemplation) the concern of representing a (my) identity, as reassuring as it is false, because it blacks out fear, facilitation. So-called intellectual speculation socializes “me” and reassures others of “my” good intentions as far as sense and ethics go. But of my dreamed body it offers only what the doctor’s speculum maintains: a deeroticized surface that “I” concede to him in the wind of an eye by which “I” make him believe that he is not another, that he has only to look as “I” would if “I” were him.

On the other hand, there is a different gaze. In fact, when facilitation and fear burst into view this different gaze stops being simply reassuring, trompe-l’oeil, or the start of speculation and becomes—if you will—the fascination specular, that is, at once charming and maleficent. Cinema seizes us here, precisely. This is its magic. At the intersection between the sight of a real object and fantasy, the cinematic image makes what is behind identification identifiable (and there is nothing more patently identifiable than the visible): the drive, not symbolized, not caught in the object, neither in the sign nor in language. Or, to put it bluntly, it conveys aggression. The fantasy is called on to find or recognize itself, to perpetuate or empty itself, based on the ability of the specular to distance itself from itself.

All specular is fascinating, because it bears the trace—in the visible—of this aggression, of this nonsymbolized, nonverbalized, and thus nonrepresented drive. But in certain images, fantasies are referred to as such; they exercise their power of fascination while at the same time mocking their fascinating specular. I propose the term the “thought specular” for the visible signs that designate fantasy and denounce it as such. This information no longer refers to the referent (or to the object) but to the attitude of the subject vis-à-vis the object. The cinema of Godard, which most everyone is familiar with, is the “thought specular”: not images-information but signals captured, cut up, and arranged in such a way that the phantasmatic thought of the writer-director can be made out and invites you first to locate your own fantasies and then to hollow them out.

The Greek stoics distinguished the real object, or “referent,” from what they called an “expressible,” the lekton. I would say that what distinguishes the referent from the “expressible” (from the lekton) is that the latter is the expression of a desiring contract, this subjective alchemy that transforms a flat image (a denotative sign) into a symptom (a specular). There are no flat images in Godard; everything is thought specular, everything is a symptom: his, ours. But the sadness of this symptom is shattered in irony. The phantasmatic images themselves are never first degree; on the contrary, the fantasies seem boneless, dislocated, in the end there is only a certain music—logic, the movement that associates, displaces, condenses, and thereby judges: an unconscious judgment. We might call these supplementary bits of information “lektonic traces”: it is essentially a matter of introducing supplementary displacements and condensations to the raw image, associating tones, rhythms, colors, figures—in short, putting into play what Freud called “the primary processes” (the “semiotic” in my terminology) underlying the symbolic, this primary seizure of drives always in excess in relation to the represented and the signified.

That modern art—painting, sculpture, music—found its favored domain in the distribution of these lektonic traces (to the detriment of the image-sign of a referent) is something Matisse, Klee, Rothko, Schonberg, and Webern are there to remind us of. We call this imaginary “abstraction,” wrongly. Nothing is closer to unconscious fantasy in its very logic, in its form if not content, displacing-condensing the semiotic energies of the pulsing, desiring body. We could certainly choose to decipher the mathematical calculations in the calculus of this specular, but thix would be to ignore that it conceals facilitation and fear. As Philippe Sollers said in Paradis: “Writing comes from terror.” The imaginary as thought specular, by which I mean the imaginary filtering and hollowing out fantasy, comes from aggression, fear, pain inflicted or suffered, and it is expended as such. Since Sartre, Lacan, and Barthes (who dedicated his Camera Lucida to Sartre’s L’imaginaire), we all know that the imaginary is not a reflection but a subjective synthesis: this is what phenomenology reveals. I will speak of this again in chapter eleven, when I reread Sartre’s L’imaginaire (The Psychology of Imagination). I will simply point out an essential difference between what I am proposing here and the imaginary according to Sartre: namely that I seek the specular in the imaginary, that is, the trace of fantasy.

Is this to say that the specular necessarily reveals evil, or could we even go so far as to maintain that evil structures the imaginary?

This is a step that I will happily take provided we extract evil from its moral connotations and submit it to the facilitations and fears already evoked. For all that, the cinema has a social function that does not allow us avoid the topic of ethics.