Smoking, Laughing, and the Compulsion to Film: On the Beginnings of Psychoanalytic Documentaries

“The projectionist has informed us that the pictures would be enjoyed much more and would be clearer if fewer people were smoking.”

Scene: The cigar is thrown away with a hasty, almost annoyed gesture—smoking is prohibited during the shooting, but only for the “star.” He complies with the injunction unwillingly and only after it has been repeated several times. The tribute that he must pay to the camera is nothing less than the renunciation of the insignia by which the public identifies him. Contrastingly, the “supporting actors” smoke continually, as if their cigarettes had to compensate for this lost signifier. The forbidden cigar and the rising clouds of smoke that blur the images are among the most important props of the film. When one follows the blue haze back into the history of psychoanalysis, the impression arises that the film has taken as its model Wilhelm Stekel's “Conversations on Smoking,” a 1903 account in dialogue form of the first psychoanalysts at the Wednesday Society meetings in the Prager Tagblatt in which an unbreakable connection is posited between psychoanalysis, tobacco, and the disappearance of metaphysics: “Could not the decline of the metaphysical sciences, the retreat of philosophy before the other sciences, be attributed to the widespread vice of combining mental exertion with smoking?” (1926, 543),