Sigmund Freud’s Dora

This key work of the late 1970s , now digitally restored, is a unique attempt to combine contemporary debates around formalism, feminism and psychoanalysis in film. Implicitly engaged in a critical dialogue with filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer and Jean-Luc Godard , as well as the theorists of ‘Screen’ magazine, Sigmund Freud’s Dora is a milestone in the evolution of structuralist film strategies into broader questions of representation.

“In 1899, Sigmund Freud began treatment with an 18-year-old girl who was brought to him for analysis by her father after she had written a suicide note. Freud was eager to use this case to demonstrate his hypotheses laid out in his ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ but after only three months the young woman walked out, without being cured. Five years later Freud published an account of this failed treatment, calling it a ‘Fragment of an Analysis’ and giving his patient the name Dora – that of a servant in his household.

“Recently, Dora has been a focus for the appropriation of psychoanalysis by feminist theory. Questions about the exchange of women, the representation of female sexuality, and the marginal or contradictory position of women in language, have been discovered in her story.

“But the description Freud gives of Dora are not innocent documentary facts. Freud constructs her as a character in the structure of his ‘novelette’, as a recollection of the words he remembers her having spoken, as an object for his scientific detective-work. Thus the presentation of her sexuality is also a function of these analytic and narrative processes. The psychoanalytic method itself is a process of reading the language and symptoms of the patient; Freud’s written case history is a reading of that reading, which we in turn read.

“The film, Sigmund Freud’s Dora starts from the position that these processes of representation are not only a factor in psychoanalytic texts. They exist no less in a film’s shot-counter-shot than they do in advertising; no less in the iconography of the mother than they do in pornography.”

Actors

Sigmund Freud: Joel Kovel
Dora: Silvia Kolbowski
Dora’s Mother: Anne Ilegira
Talking Lips: Suzzanne Fletcher