Cinematic logic and the function of the cut

It is almost as hackneyed as it is contentious to bring up the connection between cinema and psychoanalysis today: to point to their simultaneous birth at the end of the nineteenth century (as if this provided evidence of some primitive kinship); to call attention to their mutual fascination (obsession?) with all things ‘Oedipal;’ to highlight their shared concern with questions of identification, of ego-ideals and ideal-egos (as well as processes of signification and meaning-production in general). Simply, the correlation has become – to employ one of Freud’s favored terms – thoroughly overdetermined, with parallels and associations (as well as separations and distinctions) too numerous to account for.