Historical cinematography through the lens of Lacan's psychoanalysis: the approach of Nicholas Haydock

This article is devoted to the problem of interdisciplinary research located at the intersection of cinematography studies and historical research. The author offers a description of "cinema studies" as an academic discipline in foreign science, as well as its main differences from "film studies", the science of cinema art that has developed in the domestic science. The main motive of the article was the consideration of the prospects for applying the developments of cinema studies in historical studies. This problem is considered on the example of studying the phenomenon of the so-called "medieval cinematography". The basis of the research presented in this article was a detailed analysis of Nicholas Haydock's Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages, published in 2008. Haydock is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico. The aim of the study was a critical analysis of his approach to "medieval cinema" interpretation. To achieve the aim, three objectives were set: first, to study the methodological basis of Nicholas Haydock's approach - the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan; second, to consider specific examples of the author's cinematography analysis; third, to ascertain the level of correspondence between the methodological basis claimed by the scholar and the methods of his work. The research is based on the traditional methodological basis of historiographical research. The author makes a sequential logical reconstruction of the theoretical and methodological concept of Nicholas Haydock and constructs intellectual contexts, meaningful for the formation of this concept. The conducted research allowed to come to several conclusions reflected in the article. The main result was the discrepancy between the concrete examples of Haydock's work and the presented methodology, that is, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. It should be noted that, on the one hand, Haydock does not state that he uses the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the theory of the time and space image of Gilles Deleuze for his film interpretation. He stipulates that he only represents the field of cinematography research through their prism. On the other hand, without using these theories, Nicholas Haydock remains without methodology at all, and thus his basis of film analysis is unclear. However, his work is an attempt of a new theoretical rethinking of the analysis of historical cinema, which, undoubtedly, indicates the existence of extensive research prospects in this field.

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