Evening with Sigmund Freud
"Sigmund Freud's Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity", by Anthony McCall, Great Britain, 1979
Starring Sigmund Freud by John Menick (USA, 2012)
"Starring Sigmund Freud” is a video essay devoted to the various film images of the father of psychoanalysis. The artist John Menick looks at more than a dozen films, in which Freud appears in the lead role. He analyzes the multitude of screen narratives involving the controversial, although already somewhat anachronistic, figure of Sigmund Freud. The work was commissioned by documenta in Kassel and was constructed on the basis of quotes from movies, which Menick mentions in his article, published by Frieze magazine.
Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity
by Anthony McCall (Great Britain, 1979)
Anthony McCall's film is one of the most important works of structural cinema of the 1970s. In its first days it caused a heated debate among artists, filmmakers and film critics. The film was discussed by Jean Luc-Godard, Yvonne Rainer and film critics from the legendary magazine "Screen". McCall reconstructs in his work the so. "Dora's case" - the biggest therapeutic failure of Sigmund Freud. Referring to the phenomenon of hysteria, not in terms of a disease, but as a tool of oppression against women, McCall deconstructs Freudian phallocentric language and focuses on the figure of the mother and the iconography of female sexuality. Dora’s improvised therapy sessions are interspersed with scenes from TV commercials and pornographic films, creating a collage of women's identities - hidden, fake and false.