This paper examines the psychoanalytic construction of visual desire and spectatorship in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love through Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the gaze, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. It investigates how cinematic framing, visual distance, surveillance, and the relationship between seeing and being seen contribute to the representation of desire. The study adopts a qualitative, interpretive research design combining close textual analysis with Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation. The analysis focuses on the film’s central relationship between a young observer and an older woman, emphasizing how visual access produces fascination without guaranteeing emotional knowledge or reciprocal intimacy. Drawing on the supplied scholarship concerning Lacanian gaze theory and Kieślowski’s cinematic treatment of love, the paper develops a conceptual framework connecting visual observation, imagined intimacy, symbolic mediation, and the limits of representation. The findings suggest that spectatorship functions not merely as passive viewing but as a psychological and ethical position shaped by distance, fantasy, and the instability of interpretation. The paper argues that the film complicates the assumption that seeing another person provides direct access to their emotional reality. Its contribution lies in integrating cinematic form and psychoanalytic theory to explain how visual desire emerges, intensifies, and encounters its limitations.
The Psychoanalytic Construction of Visual Desire and Spectatorship in A Short Film About Love: A Lacanian Perspective
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