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When Hugh Brody's Nineteen Nineteen was released in 1985, film-critic Philip French, comparing it with three classic films on psychoanalysis (Pabst's Geheimnisse einer Seele, Hitchcock's Spellbound and Huston's Freud) wrote in his review that ‘with Nineteen Nineteen the cinema has at last reached some maturity in its approach to Freud, psychoanalysis and their place in history’ (French 1985). Before discussing Brody's film, I would like to show how those three movies mentioned by French - which belong to a small, yet to us important, sub-genre of feature films - intended to represent, though in some respects end up misrepresenting, our profession.
Aesthetically located somewhere between the claustrophobic expressionistic world of ‘Kammerspiel’ and the emergence of the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ of Georg Wilhelm Pabst's best work, his Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul) is an experimental project intended to introduce the general audience to a psychoanalytical understanding of mental phenomena and to their peculiar idiom, in a thought-provoking and visually engaging form. The film describes the mid-life identity crisis of a sexually impotent chemist (played by Werner Krauss, who had been the Doppelgänger mad psychiatrist in Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari, ). He becomes obsessed with knives and the conflictual desire to kill his beloved wife, of whose relationship with a cousin, visiting from abroad, he feels jealous. A chance meeting with a psychoanalyst, driving him to his couch and to the exploration of a frightening dream, eventually resolves his deep-rooted, oedipally-coloured neurosis. Geheimnisse einer Seele is filled with simplistic generalizations and a manneristic use of symbolism: blades (which sever links and create new boundaries), a key, a doll, mirrors (which fix identities and confound the self), a phallic tower. Interestingly, symbolism was also a trademark of the Surrealist movement that in those years was producing analytically-inspired films, such a