Experimental Film, DW Winnicott, and Object Relations: A Thought Experiment

The topic of this essay is transitional objects as they exist in internal/external realities and, following DW Winnicott, how pre-Oedipal object relations can reframe key questions in experimental film, art, and psychoanalysis. In another sense, the essay explores the impossibility of adults to understand children’s aesthetic vision, and how the voracious yearning of artists to reach the child’s world is thwarted by the very aesthetic self-awareness that an artist has. The essay embodies an idiosyncratic and self-aware rhetorical approach: that sounds postmodern, but it is certainly not. Much theoretical framework here can be traced back to the modern world framing Winnicott’s ideas, a rhetorically freer philosophical space. In terms of process, this essay engages in collaborative writing without funneling a unison and synchronized voice. There are two voices in each section of the essay; we’ve not altered the words of each other. They’re in point-counterpoint, but not like a dense Baroque musical threading; lighter rather, hover-crafting—rococo, perhaps. But let us not confuse sincerity with irony, nor think the ornamental superfluous. The question here is whether relation is a form of destruction and usage, and how does that question makes us reconsider contemporary artists (experimental filmmakers…) explicitly concerned with object-relations and formative experiences.