Filming Hysteria

30/09/2026

Film    Download PDF  

The Noisy Type: The One Woman Melodrama

There are many ways to approach hysteria, and while looking at films including Woman Under the Influence, Possession, The Piano Teacher, Tar and others, we could do worse than start with the Ancients' notion of it as a problem of excessive emotion and limited sexual activity, an idea first proposed by Hippocrates and shared by Plato and Aristotle. Hysteria, after all, comes from the Greek for uterus, and few words have entered the language with such linguistic prejudice, clear enough when the Greek physician claimed, “the cause of the indisposition as poisonous stagnant humors which, due to an inadequate sexual life, have never been expelled.” But Hippocrates also “provides a good description of hysteria, which is clearly distinguished from epilepsy. He emphasises the difference between the compulsive movements of epilepsy, caused by a disorder of the brain, and those of hysteria due to the abnormal movements of the uterus in the body…” (Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health)

It also became, of course, a keyword in psychoanalysis, with both Freud and Jung having things to say about women, their bodies and their minds, and this will play out in some of the films under discussion. Freud saw in this “obtrusively noisy’ condition an unconscious problem that needed to be excavated, and spoke of ideas he developed with Breuer, and Breuer’s thesis that symptoms disappear when “we have made their unconscious predeterminants conscious…Our therapy works by transforming what is unconscious into what is conscious.” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) Jung was more likely to leave the individual unconscious to one side and view hysteria as a prime example of the extravert personality generally. “Hysteria is, in my view, by far the most frequent neurosis of the extraverted type. . . . A constant tendency to make himself interesting and produce an impression is a basic feature of the hysteric. The corollary of this is his proverbial suggestibility, his proneness to another person’s influence.” (General Description of the Types) He saw in it the “elaborate, dramatic, suggestive, [and the] insinuating.” (C.G. Jung Speaking)  “It would make sense Freud would see personal forces at work, and Jung fit it into an archetypal taxonomy. As Jung insists, he became chiefly interested in “a sort of unconscious […] that clearly produces things which are historical and not personal.” (C.G. Jung: Speaking) However, even if they looked at women only from a male perspective and within a limited purview, that doesn’t mean Freud and Jung’s ideas aren’t valuable to our discussion of how hysteria plays out in cinema and how it is represented on screen.

If both Freud and Jung agree that it is a disorder of the noisy type, what better place to start than with Mabel in John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, with David Thomson describing Mabel and Nick’s marriage as one “with noise but no communication”. (Have You Seen…?)  This suggests it isn’t only women responsible for the sound and fury that signifies nothing, though Nick wouldn’t see himself as the problem, and everybody sees Mabel as precisely that. Early in the film, Nick has been out all night working as a sewage engineer and, in the morning, brings home members of his crew. Mabel cooks them all up some pasta, but also an awkward atmosphere when she deviates from the script social convention demands. As she tries to persuade one of the workers to get up and dance with her, he gently declines; Mabel insists, and Nick yells, telling her to sit her "ass down”. Mabel may have created a scene, but the viewer might wonder if Nick hasn’t generated it, bringing his workmates home in the morning so his wife can make spaghetti for them all. How can Nick ask for contingency from his wife, while also insisting on conformity when she wants to be spontaneous? As Mabel massages the man’s face, saying what a handsome face he has, and squeezes his muscles proposing he must struggle to get into his suit, she wants a bit of fun, as if in return for the dutifulness of her actions. Yet the film is much more complicated than this — Nick was supposed to be back home the previous evening, and when he phones and says he won’t be, after she has already left her kids with her mother, she goes out to a bar alone and takes someone back home, a man she may or may not have slept with. When she awakens, she calls out Nick’s name, only for another man to answer. The sequence remains moot; we don’t quite know what Mabel was seeking, nor what it reveals about her psychic state.

If Pauline Kael is right to say that Cassavetes’ “special talent […] is for showing intense suffering from nameless causes” (Reeling), then Mabel might be seen as more Jungian than Freudian, accepting that Freud’s purpose was name-ful causes, while Jung proposed that the unconscious wasn’t reliant on individual consciousness. As Jung says, for Freud, “the unconscious was a product of consciousness, and simply contained all the remnants; it was a store room where all the things consciousness had discarded were heaped up and left.” (C.J. Jung Speaking). Jung, however, saw “the unconscious as a real fact”, and one way of looking at this is to see individuals not so much revealing symptoms of personal and buried traumas, but instead playing out archetypal roles. If hysteria has been in the culture for thousands of years as a type, and extroversion must take a form, why wouldn’t it take the hysteric form that Mabel adopts? Rather than seeing her with trauma, we instead see her as performative, a common aspect of Cassavetes’ work that ties together the Kael quote with some of the director’s own remarks. Kael might have believed the director was in many ways a mediocre filmmaker, but part of what she attacks Cassavetes over is what makes him deemed so important a director today. Kael may reckon that, as a filmmaker, Cassavetes “has a muffled quality: his scenes are often unshaped and so rudderless that the meanings don’t emerge.” (Reeling). Cassavetes, though, reckoned it isn’t important that meaning emerges. “Dialogue should be tied up so heavily with the incident that you don’t feel dialogue and you don’t feel talk, rather you feel the emotions of the people. I’m more interested in the intention of the dialogue, in the emotion expressed by the moment, than in the right words.” (Cassavetes on Cassavetes) While Kael acknowledges the director’s special talent for capturing nameless causes, it is surely unfair for critics to expect these causes then to be given manifest form in categorical dialogue.

If we are right that Cassavetes is seeking expression over meaning, performative states over traumatic revelations, then A Woman Under the Influence is a marvellous example of performative hysteria as typology over symptomology. Mabel is a woman of excess if we take into account what her husband says to a friend and colleague when he defends her from what he perceives as accusations of her craziness “This woman, cooks, sews, makes the bed, washes the bathroom; what the hell is crazy about that?” One might wonder if this shouldn’t be seen as proof of Mabel’s sanity, but instead part of what drives her a little mad, as though she might be reacting hysterically to the drudgery of it all. If hysteria is a disorder that has gone through so many causes in its history, then better perhaps to see it as an excess of energy that is reacting to a given situation, rather than seeing it as an illness with a specific source. When Cecilia Tasca et al, look at hysteria from Ancient Egypt, through the Greeks and the Romans, into the Middle Ages, up through the Victorian era and on to the 20th century, they argue that the condition is less understood than comprehended according to the given needs and expectations of the time. Hippocrates linked it to the humours; Trotula de Ruggiero saw in it repressive shame, as women couldn’t easily share gynaecological issues. In the Middle Ages, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger produced a work linking hysteria to evil, and saw it as the presence of the Devil in the hysterical woman’s body. In the 19th century, Charcot saw it as neurological rather than biological, and helped dislodge it from its status as a female disorder.

Nevertheless, it remains chiefly associated with women, and while films might fall into this assumption, cinema has often still shown it as more complicated than a solution insists. While Hitchcock in Marnie can cure his central character’s kleptomania with a Freudian answer that traces her deeds to a childhood incident where her mother worked as a prostitute, and Marnie killed one of the clients while protecting her mother, Cassavetes has no such interest in ‘curing’ Mabel. This isn’t necessarily because Cassavetes is more Jungian than Freudian, and that Freud's work lends itself better to solutions than Jung’s — it is more how Freud and Jung are usually applied cinematically. Freud is often a useful way of resolving psychological thrillers and dramas (Spellbound; Now Voyager; The Spiral Staircase; Psycho) with revelations of past traumas, while Jung’s influence is most often apparent in films that reflect adventures, journeys, walkabouts and myths: Walkabout, Excalibur, Apocalypse Now, and Gladiator. Jung would, no more than Freud, seem to have anything to do with Cassavetes, especially as critics including Kael reckon the director nailed his mast to the ideas of R. D. Laing. Yet all we wish to extract from the Jungian is archetypes and their performance, to see hysteria as a deep type that an individual might draw upon without quite comprehending they are doing so.

This appears even more inexplicably evident in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, with the Polish director linking hysteria to a woman’s reaction to the break-up of her marriage, an affair with an older Svengali figure, and, in turn, to a monster in a flat she rents, and that gives her pleasures no man can match. Set in a depopulated West Berlin while the country was still divided by the wall, the film’s main focus is Isabelle Adjani’s performance as Anna, even if the film at least equally divides its time attending to her husband Nick, played by Sam Neill. This is perhaps because in Adjani’s performance she contains within it the entire history of hysteria: the film can be read as a study in trauma, an examination of performative desire, of uterine shame, of demonic possession. When discussing hysteria, Zulawski insisted, “this clinical term is very hurtful to me” (The Obscene Mirror), after a retrospective of his work was called Hysterical Excess. However, Zulawski would perhaps be happier with the application if one doesn’t apply it too narrowly, but uses it to understand the complexity of feeling over simply the term’s potential for excessiveness. No doubt, Zulawski’s films are consistently works of excess by most dramatic standards and, like the work of Cassavates they don’t conform to such expectations, and get labelled hysterical rather as women so often have been societally.

Yet this is partly what gives Zulawski’s work its empathic intensity. It is also why we can feel that Possession offers Adjani as its central character even if Neill is no less present. Whether it is tidying up and doing the very domestic chores Nick proclaims make Mabel sane, or working as a ballet teacher, everything in Adjani’s performance contains a surplus charge. When she insists a pupil must hold her leg in a certain position, Anna all but cripples the girl; when she cuts some meat with an electric carving knife, we wait. We wonder what purpose this most dangerous and superfluous domestic object will be used for by a woman who turns against her orderly life, and seeks a disorderly revelation of her state. Will she try to kill Mark, harm herself or even go after the child? Zulawski takes us so far away from motivated behaviour, and so close to a restless imprecision of feeling, it is hard to know what might happen next. In a scene late in the film that has become justifiably famous, Adjani is in the underground and starts convulsing. She seems to be having a fit and a collapse; at the same time, she is showing signs of possession, while also absorbing the further reaches of Grotowski . “Żuławski’s method of working with actors had evolved out of watching," David Thompson notes, “the experimental theatre work of Jerzy Grotowski as well as trips he made to Haiti to witness voodoo rites.” (Sight and Sound)

Adjani was a great actress of hysteria, and gave it different forms, absorbing the Freudian in One Deadly Summer and the societal in Camille Claudel. In the former, she plays a young woman misunderstanding who the culprits were in her mother’s rape. She loses her mind when she can’t resolve a trauma her father had already dealt with; in the latter, she is a sculptor whose closeness to Rodin leaves her increasingly socially subjugated, and she collapses. But Isabelle Huppert was no less interested in its possibilities, if in a more controlled manner, in Malena and The Piano Teacher. Huppert has always been a fussier, tighter actor than Adjani, a consequence of physiognomy as readily as approach, with Adjani’s wide eyes and pout suggesting a state without calculation; Huppert’s features less open and more capable of registering shrewdness. Her extroverted gestures often invoke introspection, as the extremity of her deeds comes from an inexplicable source. We see it in Malina, based on Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel and with a script co-written by Elfriede Jelinek, and The Piano Teacher, from Jelinek’s novel with a script by Michael Haneke. In Malina, she is consumed by a lover and sits in a cafe smoking furiously and sitting fretfully before going over to the phone booth after the phone rings and, turfing a man out, saying the call is for her, and of course discovers it isn’t.  She then sweeps glasses off a table. In The Piano Teacher, the film ends with Erika Kohut putting a knife into her shoulder as she promptly refuses to go on stage and perform.

In these films with Adjani and Huppert, the vital element is performance and extroversion, as they insist, like Mabel, in making a scene. The depressive, the neurotic, the melancholic are not usually scene-stealers, a troublesome phrase of course in this context, but useful if we think again of Freud’s claim that hysteria is “obtrusively noisy”. Huppert may be a less exaggerated actress than Adjani, but they are both equally capable of creating social confusion in their actions. It would make sense that film has so often been drawn to hysterical figures as they become one-woman melodramas, generating event without relying on strong causality. The explicable deed is causally strong; the inexplicable action is often causally weak, and part of the viewer’s purpose is to find in the behaviour a deeper justification than immediate narrative demand. However, if extroversion is paramount, then the cause is chiefly kinetic; if trauma is central, any kineticism is contained by the logic of trauma and unconscious impulses that can be more easily traced.

In both Black Swan and Tar, no matter the hyperbolisation of the former and the nuance of the latter, the films draw on career ambitions relatively absent from the others, and that gives the work a clearer drive, and in this sense closer to Adler than Freud, taking into account Jung’s distinction between them. While Freud “assumes that things evolve along the line of the sex instinct, the other assumes that things evolve the line of the power drive.” (C.J. Jung Speaking) Like The Piano Teacher, Nina in Black Swan has an oppressive mother - she is someone who has sacrificed her ballet career to her daughter’s, and who doesn’t expect failure. In Tar, Lydia’s ambitions seem all her own, as she has made herself anew out of what appears to be a humble childhood in Staten Island. They both share moments that would be deemed hysterical. In Black Swan, hysteria segues into schizophrenia, or at least a filmic version of it, where Nina’s personality splits in two and events that seem real to her turn out to be hallucinatory. She thinks she has killed her main rival, but it seems not. Director Darren Aronofsky has often been interested in psychological fragility (Pi, Requiem for a Daydream, Mother!), though usually to serve generic robustness — as here the film comes close to a horror movie. In this, it might resemble Possession, but Zulawski’s film always insists on an uncanny sense of dislocation, through the empty streets of the city, and Adjani’s performance, with the vacant locale accompanying an overflowing thespian register. In contrast, as Jason Bellamy says of Black Swan, “by the end there’s very little mystery left, as if there was never any mystery in the first place, but the film includes so many wild shifts and U-turns that experiencing it for the first time is like trying to balance on a seesaw in a windstorm.” (Slant) It is perhaps finally the film rather than Nina that happens to be hysterical, with Aronofsky rarely one for understatement.  

In Tar, Lydia can be viewed as a hysteric in waiting, someone whose theatrical persona and determined need to assert her personality looks like it could unravel as the coil has been wound too tight. When she talks early in the film about her career accomplishments as a famous conductor, she comes across as too articulate for her own good, as if she isn’t saying what she thinks but calculating how others will respond. If her life is a preconceived performance, what happens when others start rewriting the play? The film shows Lydia losing control of the narrative, and director Todd Field registers that loss most strongly in a scene where she storms on stage and attacks a rival. But if extroversion is a vital component to hysteria, Lydia is a woman who has no interior — everything she is she has made — and so there is no place for her to retreat to when things go wrong. When she returns to the family home in Staten Island, it isn’t an opportunity to take stock, but a realisation of how far she has fallen. Her whole life has been built on extroversion, and those around her (her partner; her work colleagues; the press) will no longer allow her the role she believes she was born to play.

It might be interesting to note that many of the films under discussion (Possession, The Piano Teacher, Black Swan, Tar) show an interest in classical music — even A Woman Under the Influence has nods to Swan Lake, while opera is vital to Malina. But what matters most is the performative dimension of the hysteric, as if for many centuries women have been compelled to play a role, and the hysterical has been one available for well over two thousand years, and often adjudicated by the opposite sex. The films may often absorb the Freudian, or perhaps more specifically the Winnicottian, in their interest in the trauma of an assertive mother (The Piano Teacher, Black Swan) or the revelation of a buried past (Marnie, One Deadly Summer). But the hysterical condition in film form appears to us most aptly comprehended through the performative. As we have observed, over the centuries philosophers, theologians, clinicians and psychoanalysts have tried to diagnose what might be the source of this apparent malady. That is a long and varied history of behavioural assumption. However, film has frequently been at its most interesting when viewing hysteria with aghast bewilderment over diagnostic assertiveness.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Filming Hysteria

The Noisy Type: The One Woman Melodrama

There are many ways to approach hysteria, and while looking at films including Woman Under the Influence, Possession, The Piano Teacher, Tar and others, we could do worse than start with the Ancients' notion of it as a problem of excessive emotion and limited sexual activity, an idea first proposed by Hippocrates and shared by Plato and Aristotle. Hysteria, after all, comes from the Greek for uterus, and few words have entered the language with such linguistic prejudice, clear enough when the Greek physician claimed, “the cause of the indisposition as poisonous stagnant humors which, due to an inadequate sexual life, have never been expelled.” But Hippocrates also “provides a good description of hysteria, which is clearly distinguished from epilepsy. He emphasises the difference between the compulsive movements of epilepsy, caused by a disorder of the brain, and those of hysteria due to the abnormal movements of the uterus in the body…” (Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health)

It also became, of course, a keyword in psychoanalysis, with both Freud and Jung having things to say about women, their bodies and their minds, and this will play out in some of the films under discussion. Freud saw in this “obtrusively noisy’ condition an unconscious problem that needed to be excavated, and spoke of ideas he developed with Breuer, and Breuer’s thesis that symptoms disappear when “we have made their unconscious predeterminants conscious…Our therapy works by transforming what is unconscious into what is conscious.” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) Jung was more likely to leave the individual unconscious to one side and view hysteria as a prime example of the extravert personality generally. “Hysteria is, in my view, by far the most frequent neurosis of the extraverted type. . . . A constant tendency to make himself interesting and produce an impression is a basic feature of the hysteric. The corollary of this is his proverbial suggestibility, his proneness to another person’s influence.” (General Description of the Types) He saw in it the “elaborate, dramatic, suggestive, [and the] insinuating.” (C.G. Jung Speaking)  “It would make sense Freud would see personal forces at work, and Jung fit it into an archetypal taxonomy. As Jung insists, he became chiefly interested in “a sort of unconscious […] that clearly produces things which are historical and not personal.” (C.G. Jung: Speaking) However, even if they looked at women only from a male perspective and within a limited purview, that doesn’t mean Freud and Jung’s ideas aren’t valuable to our discussion of how hysteria plays out in cinema and how it is represented on screen.

If both Freud and Jung agree that it is a disorder of the noisy type, what better place to start than with Mabel in John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, with David Thomson describing Mabel and Nick’s marriage as one “with noise but no communication”. (Have You Seen…?)  This suggests it isn’t only women responsible for the sound and fury that signifies nothing, though Nick wouldn’t see himself as the problem, and everybody sees Mabel as precisely that. Early in the film, Nick has been out all night working as a sewage engineer and, in the morning, brings home members of his crew. Mabel cooks them all up some pasta, but also an awkward atmosphere when she deviates from the script social convention demands. As she tries to persuade one of the workers to get up and dance with her, he gently declines; Mabel insists, and Nick yells, telling her to sit her "ass down”. Mabel may have created a scene, but the viewer might wonder if Nick hasn’t generated it, bringing his workmates home in the morning so his wife can make spaghetti for them all. How can Nick ask for contingency from his wife, while also insisting on conformity when she wants to be spontaneous? As Mabel massages the man’s face, saying what a handsome face he has, and squeezes his muscles proposing he must struggle to get into his suit, she wants a bit of fun, as if in return for the dutifulness of her actions. Yet the film is much more complicated than this — Nick was supposed to be back home the previous evening, and when he phones and says he won’t be, after she has already left her kids with her mother, she goes out to a bar alone and takes someone back home, a man she may or may not have slept with. When she awakens, she calls out Nick’s name, only for another man to answer. The sequence remains moot; we don’t quite know what Mabel was seeking, nor what it reveals about her psychic state.

If Pauline Kael is right to say that Cassavetes’ “special talent […] is for showing intense suffering from nameless causes” (Reeling), then Mabel might be seen as more Jungian than Freudian, accepting that Freud’s purpose was name-ful causes, while Jung proposed that the unconscious wasn’t reliant on individual consciousness. As Jung says, for Freud, “the unconscious was a product of consciousness, and simply contained all the remnants; it was a store room where all the things consciousness had discarded were heaped up and left.” (C.J. Jung Speaking). Jung, however, saw “the unconscious as a real fact”, and one way of looking at this is to see individuals not so much revealing symptoms of personal and buried traumas, but instead playing out archetypal roles. If hysteria has been in the culture for thousands of years as a type, and extroversion must take a form, why wouldn’t it take the hysteric form that Mabel adopts? Rather than seeing her with trauma, we instead see her as performative, a common aspect of Cassavetes’ work that ties together the Kael quote with some of the director’s own remarks. Kael might have believed the director was in many ways a mediocre filmmaker, but part of what she attacks Cassavetes over is what makes him deemed so important a director today. Kael may reckon that, as a filmmaker, Cassavetes “has a muffled quality: his scenes are often unshaped and so rudderless that the meanings don’t emerge.” (Reeling). Cassavetes, though, reckoned it isn’t important that meaning emerges. “Dialogue should be tied up so heavily with the incident that you don’t feel dialogue and you don’t feel talk, rather you feel the emotions of the people. I’m more interested in the intention of the dialogue, in the emotion expressed by the moment, than in the right words.” (Cassavetes on Cassavetes) While Kael acknowledges the director’s special talent for capturing nameless causes, it is surely unfair for critics to expect these causes then to be given manifest form in categorical dialogue.

If we are right that Cassavetes is seeking expression over meaning, performative states over traumatic revelations, then A Woman Under the Influence is a marvellous example of performative hysteria as typology over symptomology. Mabel is a woman of excess if we take into account what her husband says to a friend and colleague when he defends her from what he perceives as accusations of her craziness “This woman, cooks, sews, makes the bed, washes the bathroom; what the hell is crazy about that?” One might wonder if this shouldn’t be seen as proof of Mabel’s sanity, but instead part of what drives her a little mad, as though she might be reacting hysterically to the drudgery of it all. If hysteria is a disorder that has gone through so many causes in its history, then better perhaps to see it as an excess of energy that is reacting to a given situation, rather than seeing it as an illness with a specific source. When Cecilia Tasca et al, look at hysteria from Ancient Egypt, through the Greeks and the Romans, into the Middle Ages, up through the Victorian era and on to the 20th century, they argue that the condition is less understood than comprehended according to the given needs and expectations of the time. Hippocrates linked it to the humours; Trotula de Ruggiero saw in it repressive shame, as women couldn’t easily share gynaecological issues. In the Middle Ages, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger produced a work linking hysteria to evil, and saw it as the presence of the Devil in the hysterical woman’s body. In the 19th century, Charcot saw it as neurological rather than biological, and helped dislodge it from its status as a female disorder.

Nevertheless, it remains chiefly associated with women, and while films might fall into this assumption, cinema has often still shown it as more complicated than a solution insists. While Hitchcock in Marnie can cure his central character’s kleptomania with a Freudian answer that traces her deeds to a childhood incident where her mother worked as a prostitute, and Marnie killed one of the clients while protecting her mother, Cassavetes has no such interest in ‘curing’ Mabel. This isn’t necessarily because Cassavetes is more Jungian than Freudian, and that Freud's work lends itself better to solutions than Jung’s — it is more how Freud and Jung are usually applied cinematically. Freud is often a useful way of resolving psychological thrillers and dramas (Spellbound; Now Voyager; The Spiral Staircase; Psycho) with revelations of past traumas, while Jung’s influence is most often apparent in films that reflect adventures, journeys, walkabouts and myths: Walkabout, Excalibur, Apocalypse Now, and Gladiator. Jung would, no more than Freud, seem to have anything to do with Cassavetes, especially as critics including Kael reckon the director nailed his mast to the ideas of R. D. Laing. Yet all we wish to extract from the Jungian is archetypes and their performance, to see hysteria as a deep type that an individual might draw upon without quite comprehending they are doing so.

This appears even more inexplicably evident in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, with the Polish director linking hysteria to a woman’s reaction to the break-up of her marriage, an affair with an older Svengali figure, and, in turn, to a monster in a flat she rents, and that gives her pleasures no man can match. Set in a depopulated West Berlin while the country was still divided by the wall, the film’s main focus is Isabelle Adjani’s performance as Anna, even if the film at least equally divides its time attending to her husband Nick, played by Sam Neill. This is perhaps because in Adjani’s performance she contains within it the entire history of hysteria: the film can be read as a study in trauma, an examination of performative desire, of uterine shame, of demonic possession. When discussing hysteria, Zulawski insisted, “this clinical term is very hurtful to me” (The Obscene Mirror), after a retrospective of his work was called Hysterical Excess. However, Zulawski would perhaps be happier with the application if one doesn’t apply it too narrowly, but uses it to understand the complexity of feeling over simply the term’s potential for excessiveness. No doubt, Zulawski’s films are consistently works of excess by most dramatic standards and, like the work of Cassavates they don’t conform to such expectations, and get labelled hysterical rather as women so often have been societally.

Yet this is partly what gives Zulawski’s work its empathic intensity. It is also why we can feel that Possession offers Adjani as its central character even if Neill is no less present. Whether it is tidying up and doing the very domestic chores Nick proclaims make Mabel sane, or working as a ballet teacher, everything in Adjani’s performance contains a surplus charge. When she insists a pupil must hold her leg in a certain position, Anna all but cripples the girl; when she cuts some meat with an electric carving knife, we wait. We wonder what purpose this most dangerous and superfluous domestic object will be used for by a woman who turns against her orderly life, and seeks a disorderly revelation of her state. Will she try to kill Mark, harm herself or even go after the child? Zulawski takes us so far away from motivated behaviour, and so close to a restless imprecision of feeling, it is hard to know what might happen next. In a scene late in the film that has become justifiably famous, Adjani is in the underground and starts convulsing. She seems to be having a fit and a collapse; at the same time, she is showing signs of possession, while also absorbing the further reaches of Grotowski . “Żuławski’s method of working with actors had evolved out of watching," David Thompson notes, “the experimental theatre work of Jerzy Grotowski as well as trips he made to Haiti to witness voodoo rites.” (Sight and Sound)

Adjani was a great actress of hysteria, and gave it different forms, absorbing the Freudian in One Deadly Summer and the societal in Camille Claudel. In the former, she plays a young woman misunderstanding who the culprits were in her mother’s rape. She loses her mind when she can’t resolve a trauma her father had already dealt with; in the latter, she is a sculptor whose closeness to Rodin leaves her increasingly socially subjugated, and she collapses. But Isabelle Huppert was no less interested in its possibilities, if in a more controlled manner, in Malena and The Piano Teacher. Huppert has always been a fussier, tighter actor than Adjani, a consequence of physiognomy as readily as approach, with Adjani’s wide eyes and pout suggesting a state without calculation; Huppert’s features less open and more capable of registering shrewdness. Her extroverted gestures often invoke introspection, as the extremity of her deeds comes from an inexplicable source. We see it in Malina, based on Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel and with a script co-written by Elfriede Jelinek, and The Piano Teacher, from Jelinek’s novel with a script by Michael Haneke. In Malina, she is consumed by a lover and sits in a cafe smoking furiously and sitting fretfully before going over to the phone booth after the phone rings and, turfing a man out, saying the call is for her, and of course discovers it isn’t.  She then sweeps glasses off a table. In The Piano Teacher, the film ends with Erika Kohut putting a knife into her shoulder as she promptly refuses to go on stage and perform.

In these films with Adjani and Huppert, the vital element is performance and extroversion, as they insist, like Mabel, in making a scene. The depressive, the neurotic, the melancholic are not usually scene-stealers, a troublesome phrase of course in this context, but useful if we think again of Freud’s claim that hysteria is “obtrusively noisy”. Huppert may be a less exaggerated actress than Adjani, but they are both equally capable of creating social confusion in their actions. It would make sense that film has so often been drawn to hysterical figures as they become one-woman melodramas, generating event without relying on strong causality. The explicable deed is causally strong; the inexplicable action is often causally weak, and part of the viewer’s purpose is to find in the behaviour a deeper justification than immediate narrative demand. However, if extroversion is paramount, then the cause is chiefly kinetic; if trauma is central, any kineticism is contained by the logic of trauma and unconscious impulses that can be more easily traced.

In both Black Swan and Tar, no matter the hyperbolisation of the former and the nuance of the latter, the films draw on career ambitions relatively absent from the others, and that gives the work a clearer drive, and in this sense closer to Adler than Freud, taking into account Jung’s distinction between them. While Freud “assumes that things evolve along the line of the sex instinct, the other assumes that things evolve the line of the power drive.” (C.J. Jung Speaking) Like The Piano Teacher, Nina in Black Swan has an oppressive mother - she is someone who has sacrificed her ballet career to her daughter’s, and who doesn’t expect failure. In Tar, Lydia’s ambitions seem all her own, as she has made herself anew out of what appears to be a humble childhood in Staten Island. They both share moments that would be deemed hysterical. In Black Swan, hysteria segues into schizophrenia, or at least a filmic version of it, where Nina’s personality splits in two and events that seem real to her turn out to be hallucinatory. She thinks she has killed her main rival, but it seems not. Director Darren Aronofsky has often been interested in psychological fragility (Pi, Requiem for a Daydream, Mother!), though usually to serve generic robustness — as here the film comes close to a horror movie. In this, it might resemble Possession, but Zulawski’s film always insists on an uncanny sense of dislocation, through the empty streets of the city, and Adjani’s performance, with the vacant locale accompanying an overflowing thespian register. In contrast, as Jason Bellamy says of Black Swan, “by the end there’s very little mystery left, as if there was never any mystery in the first place, but the film includes so many wild shifts and U-turns that experiencing it for the first time is like trying to balance on a seesaw in a windstorm.” (Slant) It is perhaps finally the film rather than Nina that happens to be hysterical, with Aronofsky rarely one for understatement.  

In Tar, Lydia can be viewed as a hysteric in waiting, someone whose theatrical persona and determined need to assert her personality looks like it could unravel as the coil has been wound too tight. When she talks early in the film about her career accomplishments as a famous conductor, she comes across as too articulate for her own good, as if she isn’t saying what she thinks but calculating how others will respond. If her life is a preconceived performance, what happens when others start rewriting the play? The film shows Lydia losing control of the narrative, and director Todd Field registers that loss most strongly in a scene where she storms on stage and attacks a rival. But if extroversion is a vital component to hysteria, Lydia is a woman who has no interior — everything she is she has made — and so there is no place for her to retreat to when things go wrong. When she returns to the family home in Staten Island, it isn’t an opportunity to take stock, but a realisation of how far she has fallen. Her whole life has been built on extroversion, and those around her (her partner; her work colleagues; the press) will no longer allow her the role she believes she was born to play.

It might be interesting to note that many of the films under discussion (Possession, The Piano Teacher, Black Swan, Tar) show an interest in classical music — even A Woman Under the Influence has nods to Swan Lake, while opera is vital to Malina. But what matters most is the performative dimension of the hysteric, as if for many centuries women have been compelled to play a role, and the hysterical has been one available for well over two thousand years, and often adjudicated by the opposite sex. The films may often absorb the Freudian, or perhaps more specifically the Winnicottian, in their interest in the trauma of an assertive mother (The Piano Teacher, Black Swan) or the revelation of a buried past (Marnie, One Deadly Summer). But the hysterical condition in film form appears to us most aptly comprehended through the performative. As we have observed, over the centuries philosophers, theologians, clinicians and psychoanalysts have tried to diagnose what might be the source of this apparent malady. That is a long and varied history of behavioural assumption. However, film has frequently been at its most interesting when viewing hysteria with aghast bewilderment over diagnostic assertiveness.


© Tony McKibbin