EPFF: Observer Article on EPFF

Honey, I kidded the shrink...

Gaby Wood, The Observer, Sunday June 17, 2001

Freud resisted the call of the movies, but an Observer-backed film festival devoted to reading the subconscious mind shows how his work has influenced directors from Hitchcock to Nanni Moretti

Cinema and psychoanalysis were born at the same time. Just as the Lumière brothers were screening the results of their newly developed 'cinematograph', in 1895, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer published their groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria. Just as the patients at the Salp trière hospital where Freud had been a student jerked into hysterical fits and behaved with a certain 'automatism', the cinema brought what had previously been inanimate to life, in mechanical fits and starts. The birth of cinema offered a collective sense of what Freud called the uncanny: the images on screen were both familiar and somehow strange, alive and yet lifeless, real but illusory.

The psychoanalyst Andrea Sabbadini says that the two disciplines 'share a similar language'. He is one of the organisers of the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, an event that will bring together psychoanalysts, filmmakers and film historians from different countries, and will be held over the course of the first weekend in November.

Bernardo Bertolucci, the festival's honorary president, has been in psychoanalysis since the late Sixties, and has spoken about the way in which this experience coloured the films he made immediately after his analysis began: Last Tango in Paris, The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem, 1900 . 'I found that I had in my camera an additional lens,' he said, 'which was not Kodak, not Zeiss, but Freud.'

Freud was very resistant to the fusion of film and psychoanalysis, however. He disliked being filmed himself (though some fragments of footage can be seen at the Freud Museum in London), and he thought it impossible to render the psychoanalytic process cinematically. He was asked on a number of occasions to write a movie script, and a Hollywood studio once offered him a lot of money to do so. Though a member of his professional circle, Karl Abraham, scripted the first film about psychoanalysis, G.W. Pabst's Secrets of a Soul, in 1926, Freud always turned these offers down.

Since his death, various attempts have been made to portray the man on film, most famously John Huston's movie Freud: The Secret Passion, in 1962. It was scripted by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Montgomery Clift played Freud. But the complications of the subject infected the making of the film: Huston and Sartre disagreed about the plot, and, by extension, about the nature of psychoanalysis itself. Sartre accused Huston of using the film as an excuse for self-analysis, and removed his name from the credits. Marilyn Monroe, who had once made a brief appearance on a cartoonishly glamorous couch in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and had just filmed The Misfits with Huston, was the director's first choice for the role of the young hysteric. However, she was advised against taking the job by her own analyst, and died later the same year.

Now psychoanalysts are so frequently portrayed on screen that they almost constitute a genre. Woody Allen turned them into a running joke, and today's TV viewers accept the jargon in Frasier and the transference in The Sopranos with a familiarity that would have been unthinkable some years ago. Where shrinks were once played by Victor Mature, the actors now cast are Demi Moore (in Deconstructing Harry) or Billy Crystal (in Analyze This). What is going on?

In early Hollywood psychoanalysts were mostly seen as evil quacks or hopeless fools, but after the Second World War, when psychoanalytic ideas had more currency in America, they took on a new role. They became, as Hitchcock has it, 'dream detectives', the private eyes of the private consulting room, who would solve the mystery as they resolved a trauma.

In his book Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, the film writer Peter Biskind explains how analysts took over from the police in the Fifties movie plot. He describes an Otto Preminger film, Whirlpool, in which a hypnotist played by Jose Ferrer convinces his patient, Gene Tierney, that she has committed a murder. 'Luckily for Tierney,' Biskind writes, 'she's married to a prominent psychiatrist, who realises that Ferrer is the killer, not his wife. Where are the cops? Out giving traffic tickets.'

This shift is best represented in Hitchcock's Spellbound, made in 1945, with famous dream sequences designed by Salvador Dalí. The film opens with some prefatory remarks: 'Our story deals with psychoanalysis,' the solemn titles read, 'the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear... and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.'

And indeed, Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish Sherlock Holmes, works out that amnesiac Gregory Peck has not in fact committed the murder he has developed a guilt complex about. But even in such a serious thriller about 'the devils of unreason', there was still a little room left for the sceptics. In a gag worthy of Groucho Marx, a nymphomaniac patient complains that she thinks 'this whole thing's ridiculous'. 'What whole thing?' asks Bergman, her analyst. 'Psychoanalysis,' replies the nymphomaniac. 'It bores the pants off me.'

The way was paved for Woody Allen, who scripted his first film, What's New, Pussycat?, in 1965. It featured Peter Sellers as a Viennese-accented cod-Freudian with a long black wig and glasses. From then on, it seems, cine-shrinks never looked back. Only last month, Nanni Moretti, dubbed 'the Italian Woody Allen', won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, for a film in which he plays a psychoanalyst whose life of witticisms receives a tragic jolt. That film, La Stanza del Figlio, will be screened at the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival.

At least since the Seventies, film theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz have used psychoanalysis to interpret movies, applying its tools to both content and form. The title of trendy philosopher Slavoj Zizek's 1992 edition of essays brilliantly evokes the fusion of the two disciplines: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). In 1974, Christian Metz wrote in his seminal book Psychoanalysis and Cinema that he hoped this interpretative arrangement might some day be reciprocal. Yet it still remains unclear how film, or film theory, might influence the practice of psychoanalysis. Andrea Sabbadini says that the cinema's effect is 'indirect', and that analysts who write about film do so almost as a hobby, something that is detached from the daily business of the talking cure.

That's not to say, however, that psychoanalysts are not affected by films the way anyone else might be. Alain de Mijolla, who will be chairing a panel at the festival, believes that the experience of seeing a particular film as a child subliminally influenced his later decision to become an analyst.

Mijolla was six when, just before the Second World War broke out, he was taken to see a rather gruelling film because it starred his then hero, Maurice Chevalier. Later on, he had no memory of its content, a form of forgetfulness so intense, he says, that it should be 'referred to rather as a repression'. Several decades later, he saw the movie on television. Chevalier plays a man unjustly accused of a series of murders. The real killer is found out on the basis of psychological interrogation by the police. At one point, the assassin says to the detective: 'Have you read Freud?' Mijolla realised that 'a memory trace - the result of an entertaining film - had been engraved 30 years earlier in the unconscious of a child who was to become a psychoanalyst'.

Perhaps fror some the cinema always brings childhood experiences to mind. Bernardo Bertolucci thinks of the movie theatre as an 'amniotic darkness... like a womb'. Andrea Sabbadini thinks that seeing a film 'is similar to what happens in psychoanalysis' - for a brief period, you are taken outside of your world, outside of real time, to a place where entire lives can pass by in a matter of minutes. 'And then of course we have to emerge from it,' he says. 'We leave the session or the cin ema, and have to be careful crossing the road.'

Sabbadini adds that there can be something 'regressive' about spending too much time in the cinema. 'People who hide in the dark of a cinema for hours a day are certainly trying to avoid something about reality outside the cinema,' he says. 'There's an element of addiction which is close to being pathological.' He is describing the habits of at least one young boy, who later told an interviewer that 'I constantly escaped into the cinema... You would leave your poor house behind and all your problems with school and family and you would go into the cinema and there they would have penthouses and white telephones and the women were lovely and the men always had an appropriate witticism to say and things were funny, but they always turned out well, and the heroes were genuine heroes and it was just great.'

But reality never lives up to the movies. That boy grew up to be Woody Allen, a man who must have spent at least as much of his life in psychoanalysis as he has in the cinema, and the man who, more than anyone else, made shrinks famous on film.

Gaby Wood