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Andrea Sabbadini, a psychoanalyst practicing in London, has written a short but stimulating survey of some films that have, to paraphrase the title of this volume, “moved” him. He freely admits that his choices are highly personal and hence arbitrary. He also disavows any attempt to provide “a systematic, scholarly approach to film criticism” and “any new general theoretical model for the interpretation of films” (p. xvii). For better or worse, Sabbadini is just as eclectic and unsystematic as he applies different psychoanalytic tools to individual films.
Sadly, some of the films that the author writes about are so obscure that most mental health professionals and even many in the film studies community will never have heard of them. As of this writing, the most obscure item, the Bulgarian film Mila from Mars , is not available on DVD, and another, the Swedish film Lilya-4-Ever , is only available in a format incompatible with most American DVD-players. In spite of his rarefied, international aesthetic, Sabbadini does, however, have much in common with the many psychoanalytically minded film buffs who are fascinated by Alfred Hitchcock. The book offers short sections on Spellbound , Rear Window , and Vertigo . Otherwise, most of the films that Sabbadini writes about are European and belong to what film scholars would call “the art cinema.” In other words, films that cry out for explanation.
Moving Images is broken into six chapters, each one devoting several pages to three, four, or five individual films. The strengths and weaknesses of Sabbadini's approach are apparent in the first chapter, “A Young Profession: Films on Psychoanalysis.” This chapter is built around four films from four different decades: Secrets of a Soul , directed during the heady days of German expressionist cinema by G.W. Pabst; the British film Nineteen Nineteen , directed by Hugh Brody; Il Postino , shot in Italy and directed by Michael Radford; and Hitchcock's Spellbound. Each of these films p