By foregrounding the experience of those who were socially and economically disadvantaged, the Italian neorealists opened the way for other filmmakers in marginalized groups to exploit cinema’s potential for representing the experience of their own cultures on screen. One of the great masters of cinema, the Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, has revealed that he was inspired to make his first film, Pather Panchali (1955), as a result of seeing Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves in 1950, while he was staying in London. Pather Panchali, which was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, receiving many awards from film festivals around the world, was soon extended into a trilogy with the addition of Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (Apur Sansar, 1959), all of which traced the developing experience and turbulent emotional life of its central character, Apu, as he seeks to come to terms with the personal conflicts facing a young man who has to confront the prospect of separating himself from his family and their traditional way of life. To do so means leaving his rural, impoverished village in order to embrace the expansive possibilities of a new, emerging world, following the independence of India after more than a century’s colonial rule.

Later, filmmakers in other countries would follow in Ray’s footsteps. To take but one example, in New Zealand, the pioneering Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay (1944–2008) developed a comprehensive theory of what he called a “Fourth Cinema.” In contradistinction to the preoccupations and conventions of First-World cinema, Barclay argued, this Fourth Cinema should aim to transmit the stories of indigenous people in their own image, drawing upon indigenous stories and cultural values, and using indigenous crews and actors. This theory found its perfect exemplification in Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988), which, through a representation of the psychic torments of a Māori man who has transgressed against the tapu of his own culture, showed that a woman could depict masculine interior experience just as profoundly as any male director could portray that of a woman.

Satyajit Ray’s Imitation of Italian Neorealism

When Satyajit Ray saw De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, what appealed to him about the film was its “triumphant rediscovery of the fundamentals of cinema,” which, for Ray, consisted of “the simple universality of its theme, the effectiveness of its treatment, and the low cost of its production.”

If the obsessive preoccupations of Truffaut’s films reveal the presence of what Charles Mauron has called a “personal myth,” the films of his compatriot and contemporary Jacques Demy, another member of the French New Wave, provide an equally striking demonstration of the effects of an “authorial fantasmatic”—that is, a nexus of emotionally inflected memories generating reactive predispositions that have become unconsciously modelized in the imaginary of the filmmaker to the extent that they inform the topoi, metaphors, and images that recur from one film to the next.

The presence of an authorial fantasmatic in a fictive representation does not usually reveal itself through a direct transcription of autobiographical events in the filmmaker’s life. Instead, it tends to be expressed through symbolic figuration, using the various forms of mediation (metonymic displacement, metaphoric condensation, reversal, splitting and so on) that Freud identified in dreams. In addition, as Francis Vanoye has argued, a film is created out of a process of encounters between the personal themes and the emotional states of the filmmaker on one hand, and narrative elements that derive from the external world on the other. This is clearly seen in the films by Demy to be discussed in this chapter, which realize the filmmaker’s personal concerns through forms that variously invoke opera, jazz, the Hollywood musical, an array of other films, classical myth and the structural components of classical film style, thus providing yet another variant form that the post-World War II male melodrama was able to assume. It is the obsessive intrusion of personal elements, however, that makes Demy’s male-centered films so fascinating.

Figurative Manifestations in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Even when the biographical sources of a generative fantasy may be difficult to identify, the component elements of the fantasy itself (as outlined in Chapter 1) become visible in figurative manifestations, chiefly in the recurrence of over-determined images (Lyotard’s figure-image), recurrent structural components (figure-form), and recurring character configurations. In certain instances, however, sufficient information about a filmmaker’s biographical circumstances exists to allow the dynamics of the process of displaced symbolic figuration to be traced by triangulating a particular film with the known facts of the director’s life and the director’s own comments about the film, and, when the film is an adaptation, by appraising the implications of any changes made to the original source.

Viewed as a group, the art-cinema male melodramas examined in this book suggest that the normative codes of masculinity as traditionally conceived have made it difficult for men to live up to the notion of “what it is to be a man,” to cite the phrase used by the hero’s father in Tea and Sympathy. In contrast to genre films, which, for the most part, present heroes who display attributes conventionally construed as masculine, these auteur films explore circumstances—both social and psychological—that impede the ability of their protagonists to conform to the expectations of this hegemonic masculinity.

Among the impediments are socioeconomic or cultural conditions that prevent men from fulfilling roles prescribed for them, chief among which are the social and emotional costs of poverty. Furthermore, restrictive codes fail to acknowledge the reality of men’s actual experiences of inner perturbation—the “secret dramas” as Vittorio De Sica called them. Equally, traditional expectations and proscriptions make no allowance for the reality of the non-binary gender or sexual fluidity that many of these cinematic characters display. Most destructive of all are the long-term psychological effects of dysfunctional relationships within the family, especially those that concern parent-child attachments. On the evidence of the emotional difficulties revealed in the protagonists of these films, it seems likely that the male melodrama as a genre came into being as a vehicle for addressing the inadequacy of traditional conceptions of masculinity—a culturally imposed construct that since the end of World War II has increasingly been judged to be insufficiently comprehensive at best, and persecutory at worst.

A report released by the American Psychological Association in 2018 supports this conclusion. It sets out official guidelines for working with men and boys, positing that “males who are socialized to conform to ‘traditional masculinity ideology’ are often negatively affected in terms of mental and physical health.” According to the report:

Risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease, such as cardiovascular, metabolic and inflammatory problems, were probably less prevalent throughout much of human history compared to today in post-industrial societies. Therefore, I explore the possibility that individuals today have greater Alzheimer’s disease risk compared to our age-matched, pre-modern counterparts. Additionally, a critical way in which human physiology has changed across history relates to dramatic changes in female reproductive life history norms. Reproductive life history may exert cumulative effects across an individual’s lifespan, bestowing considerable influence on geriatric disease risk. A growing body of research links women’s reproductive life histories with Alzheimer’s disease risk. Here, I briefly discuss ways in which aspects of female reproductive life history (e.g. reproductive span, pregnancy and breastfeeding) might alter physiological pathways implicated in Alzheimer’s disease aetiology, as well as how each of these aspects of female reproductive life history have shifted across our species’ evolutionary past. I also explore the connections between the apolipoprotein E gene, its context-dependent role in Alzheimer’s disease risk and its emerging role in women’s reproductive function. In summary, some aspects of pre-modern female reproductive life history patterns could indicate lower age-matched risk in the past, but further research is needed to establish the relevant biological pathways and epidemiological patterns.

This introductory chapter serves multiple purposes. Its primary aim is to introduce psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who are new to Darwinian thinking to some of the basic concepts and terminology of evolutionary science in order to ease their progress through the remaining chapters of this volume. Another aim is to provide a distillation and update of some significant theoretical and other developments in a variety of evolutionary disciplines relevant to psychiatry and psychology that would be of benefit to all readers, including existing evolutionists. Given the constraints of space, there will inevitably be significant omissions. We have elected to cover the basics of standard evolutionary theory, as well as some of the basic principles of evolutionary psychology and medicine. We also briefly survey some of the recent developments in the evolutionary literature on cultural evolution and related fields. We recognise that a balance needs to be struck between covering as wide an area as possible without the chapter becoming a glossary of terms. Readers unfamiliar with specialised evolutionary terms are advised to consult the glossary on the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group at the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ website: www.epsig.org (click on ‘About us’ then ‘Resources’).