cinema» as a whole, which also includes abandoning the difference between «orthodox cinema» (Hollywood) and the «counter-cinema» of the avant-gardes (Godard on the one hand and the Coop movement on the other) and attempts to obtain a new, different concept of the cinema that goes beyond Godard/Coop and Hollywood. [8] Mulvey writes, «The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it […] in order to conceive a new language of desire.» (Mulvey 1975/1986, p.200). Wollen further specifies that «the cinema» (the general cinema of the future!) could be this new language of desire: «The cinema offers more opportunities than any other art—the cross-fertilization […] the reciprocal interlocking and input between painting, writing, music theatre could take place within the field of cinema itself. This is not a plea for a great harmony, a synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian sense. But cinema […] as a dialectical montage within and between a complex of codes» (Wollen 1975/1982, S. 104). [9] Wollen closes his essay with one notion of cinema, made up of a «complex of codes.» This formulation links him once again with Freud’s thinking

and concepts. In order to describe the totality of love and hate wishes of the child for the parents, Freud had (as part of an disagreement with Jung) adopted the general concept of a «complex of ideas» from the context of free association for his idea of the oedipal complex, At the same time, he reduces with this approach the multiplicity of the complexes to one central complex, the oedipal complex. [10] Although Wollen and Mulvey’s cultural critique speaks precisely against the reduction to a single oedipal complex, Wollen argues quite similarly to Freud with an accented displacement for a «cinema complex.» Not only the various discourses of the arts, which struggle against one another, could meet in this cinema complex. In addition, the most different concepts of the orthodox and the avant-garde cinema would also be sublated in this complex. The counter-concept to the Oedipal complex that Wollen develops together with Mulvey («Riddles of the Sphinx») still remains more open than the «cinema complex,» dependent on Freud’s terminology. In so doing, not only does the move from Oedipus to the Sphinx appear to be a shift in emphasis in terms of gender difference, but the shift