Visual Uncanny. Freud's Screen Translation in Hitchcock

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television Jahangirnagar University language: English abstract: Uncanny as a recurrent gothic ingredient has been pervading the literary narratives for quite a long time since the period of The Castle of Otranto and Mysteries of Udolpho. The idea of the return of the repressed dominates the concept the uncanny which Sigmund Freud elaborated in his 1919 essay The Uncanny. However this unfamiliarity of the real is something which grounded the domain of suspense in the prose narratives and helped in rendering the text a creepy sentimentality. But it should be kept in mind that this feeling is nothing alien to our emotional praxis. Rather it derives or finds its root from the mundaneness of our life. Maybe such concern influenced Freud to theorize dream and propound the idea of dream thought and dream content. The concept of uncanny is related in many ways to the concept of return be it a memory an unhappy recollection or a traumatic revisitation. Such return definitely accounts for a psychological interpretation with probable reference to hauntology and unconscious. One thing has to be clarified at this point of our discussion about uncanny that is this phenomenon should be distinguished from magic realism which rather problematizes the reality and our familiarity with the reality. But in the context of uncanny the reality should be recognized as an expression of the unconscious. The translation of textual uncanny is something which deals with the visual physicality of the objects. The uncanny what we perceive through words is quite different from what is spelt out by means of visuals and sound. The elaboration of popular culture and the invention of cinema technologies have facilitated and innovated a new mode of presentation of the uncanny that is film. Film as a new sign system can different modes of presentation to render the familiar unfamil