Unhomely Street

Unhomely Street explores the Derridean concept of hauntology both in terms of its original context taken from Spectres of Marx where Derrida suggests that ‘time is out of joint’ and that we are haunted by spectres of those dead and those not yet born, as well as recognising Mark Fisher's interpretation that mourns the lost futures of the twentieth century, suggesting we live in a time of mental illness, unable to envisage a future that is different to current times

The Uncanny, the abject and the incongruity theory of humour

A power point presentation outlining my artistic practise and how this relates to the academic content described by the title

7 Walks

Contribution to group presentation with the Sheffield Hallam University Media Arts Walking Research group at the Where to? symposium at Falmouth university April 201

Influence of Mars

Influence of Mars employs filmmaking to reveal hidden instinctual behaviour. The filmmaker asks her ten year old son, Harvey, about his arsenal of weapons, many of which are intended for other use; the handle of a back brush, juggling batons, and a plastic cricket stump. Despite his enthusiasm for maiming and killing Harvey has no idea why we have wars

Susannah Gent: a retrospective

Susannah Gent is invited to present a retrospective of her films at the 66th International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen, Germany, 2020. Oberhausen is the longest running short film festival and is the leading European festival for essayistic and experimental films. In conjunction with the Oberhausen festival, the French / German broadcaster Arte will screen Susannah Gent’s film Influence of Mars, and the documentary filmmaker Marita Loosen-Fox will present a programme of interviews and extracts of Susannah’s work. The documentary was shot in Sheffield in March, edited in Koln, and will be broadcast during the festival in May 2020

(re)collections: fragments for a retrospective film script for "Project SBSBI"

This is an experiment in writing a section of a film script for a film which has not been written. The film employs a layered audio and narrative approach which aims to promote a non conventional viewing experience where different ‘stories’ compete for attention, and unlike the traditional film, evades a fixed reading. Due to its form and creative approach, the film is being constructed in a spontaneous and reflective manner. The prospect of writing the script is necessarily retrospective and offers the challenge of translating digitally manipulated audio sequences into the form of text. The film, with the working title of “sergeant bonestar’s big shit idea”, is being created from live footage, green screen, photographs, CGI etc. with layers of audio including texts from live interview, historical reports, narrative voice over etc. The narrative component follows a woman alienated by her surroundings after sustaining a head injury. This surrealist thriller frequently disintegrates forming windows to hauntological landscapes and uncanny dreams

Methodological windows : a view of the uncanny through filmmaking, psychoanalysis, and psychology

Filmmaker Susannah Gent employs a diverse range of methodological approaches to investigate the uncanny, including art practice, psychoanalysis, and scientific survey. Following Mark Solm's assertion: ‘There can’t be a mind for neuroscience and a mind for psychoanalysis. There’s only one human mind’, (Schwartz 2015) she believes that interdisciplinary approaches will reveal interesting peripheral elements which would not come to light through single field investigations. In collaboration with cognitive psychologists at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield, Gent plans to undertake an eye tracking survey and an fMRI study which aim to see if scientific approaches can lead to uncovering a neurological underpinning to the uncanny. Currently Gent has a undertaken a behavioural study which has produced an image set of 300 images rated according to eeriness valance by 250 participants. In this presentation Gent will look at the top ten of those images and discuss why she feels psychoanalysis offers the best analytical tools for understanding how these images act upon the participants. The image set is intriguing and includes, in the top ten, an image of euphemistically named prairie oysters from a cookery blog, suggesting that the Freudian castration complex may hold a place in the collective human psyche. Humanistic investigations compliment scientific research as they employ methods unavailable to objective research, essential when researching subjectivity. The specificity of scientific method is a fruitful compliment to the broader, speculative approaches of humanistic inquiry. Filmmaking employs an intuitive, responsive method, guided by affect and arguably employing a different, possibly pre-linguistic brain region to the other more reasoned approaches. As such, this research-in-progress evaluation of interdisciplinary approaches is underpinned by the conviction that different methodological approaches can be seen as windows that can provide a variety of views on the same subject, in this case, the uncanny. Keywords: psychoanalysis, psychology, filmmakin

Unhomely Street: The unconscious and the city

Unhomely Street is a twenty-minute essay film that follows a female protagonist in a state of fugue following a head injury as she wanders an alienating city underbelly of clubs and free parties. Through recollections of anti-capitalist conversations, historical information about wartime atrocity, and human brutality, she searches for hope in an increasingly frightening, subjective landscape. The film was produced when the filmmaker was recovering from post-concussive syndrome following a head injury and in contrast to conventional filmmaking methods, it was constructed directly from intuitively made audio-visual sequences without a prior script or production plan. The film captures a subjective landscape that captures this specific form of mental illness but also explores a twenty-first century vision of the real city locations; Sheffield, the filmmaker's home, and Berlin, where she visited several times during the production. The featured locations in both cities explore the hidden sides. In Freudian terms these areas and activities could be said to constitute the city's unconscious. Outdoor 'free' parties feature, and sites of past raves where the graffiti stands for human resistance to mainstream culture. I propose that the film is screened in its entirety. My research areas are psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and art practice as research. I would like to present a short paper by way of introducing the film and exploring the issues raised in the project; the urban environment, its relation to mental illness, dance culture, and art practice and dance as a form of resistance. The paper would consider the Freudian topography of the psyche as a metaphor for the city, and the relation of art and dance to Deleuze's notion of the refrain

The neuroscientific uncanny: a filmic investigation of twenty-first century hauntology

The research space of this practice-led Ph.D. invites filmmaking, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and neuroscience to interact towards an expanded understanding of the uncanny and the related concept of hauntology. The three films produced explore methods of spontaneous, creative play. Scanner follows a scientific study that attempts to explore a neurological underpinning of the uncanny through an fMRI brain scan study. The film explains the process, describes the results, and illustrates the uncanny by experimenting with the documentary form. Unhomely Street, made while experiencing post-concussive syndrome, unwittingly acts as a therapeutic project. Through post-hoc reflection the film reveals unconscious aspects of the creative process. Psychotel, a ‘thesis’ film, is informed by psychoanalytic accounts of the uncanny, philosophical, and neuroscientific descriptions of selfhood, and influenced by representations of the uncanny in art work and the supernatural horror genre. In conclusion, following Nicholas Royle’s assertion that the world is uncanny because of the discrepancy between our apparent (self) knowledge and our inability to enact change,1 I reflect upon the potential of filmmaking as research to promote new ways of thinking. Through a neuropsychoanalytic account of the uncanny I show that the evolved brain operates according to primitive and automatic processes. These processes are largely hidden from consciousness and the uncanny occurs when our sense of agency is challenged. While this view is underpinned by neuroscience and cognitive psychology, I demonstrate that it is not at odds with the psychoanalytic account of the ‘return of the repressed’. In short, in the words of Freud, the uncanny arises when the individual understands themself as ‘a temporary and transient appendage to the quasi-immortal germ-plasm’.

Haruspex: The birth and death of a spirit guide

Haruspex is a short film that stages the birth of a spirit guide that later turns bad by revealing too much of humankind’s nature. The film’s three-act-structure shows the spirit guide’s creation, life with the guide, and the loss of the guide. Haruspex, works with an open ended narrative, where a lack of narrative closure opens the question of theme for the audience. By featuring two young actors engaged in a bizarre activity in a bathroom, a scenario of child abuse is hinted at. The film suggests hidden secrets and the employment of myth as a means to both reveal and hide human behaviour. The child wears a minotaur hat, and haru, meaning death in Greek, introduce Greek mythology, and in turn, psychoanalysis, a critical framework that draws on mythology. Sigmund Freud notes a tendency of primitive beliefs to resurface despite our having superseded those beliefs. Haruspex invites speculation through the content of its narrative. As such the film both explores psychoanalytic ideas and opens questions in the audience as to the nature of the psyche, especially in relation to superstition and belief. The aim though this approach is to sponsor reflection in the audience. This is achieved by questioning rather than telling. Although the conventional filmic narrative frequently tackles so-called difficult subjects, the closure of the story traditionally operates as to maintain a status quo and re-balance the equilibrium that the filmic conflict has developed. By attending to theme rather than story within this film the ‘message’ is left open and thus invites reflection. This approach is taken by Michael Haneke in ‘Hidden’ (Caché, 2005). Here the film makes an oblique reference to the Paris massacre of 1961, during the Algerian War. As the narrative ends without resolution, the audience is encouraged to sift over the narrative clues