This key work of the late 1970s 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.”

Sigmund.Freuds.Dora.A.Case.of.Mistaken.Identity.McCall.Pajaczkowska.Tyndall.Weinstock.1979.bF.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	35 min 25 s
Size: 	410 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	662x542 ~> 722x542
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 394 kb/s
BPP: 	0.155
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/D806D3ED2D53D35/Sigmund.Freuds.Dora.A.Case.of.Mistaken.Identity.McCall.Pajaczkowska.Tyndall.Weinstock.1979.bF.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Various – Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Sara Driver’s first feature–a luminous, oddball comic fantasy about ancient Chinese curses and Xerox machines, set in Manhattan’s Chinatown and its immediate environs–may well be the most visually ravishing American independent film of its year (1986). Set in an irrational, poetic universe that bears a certain relationship to Jacques Rivette’s Duelle, this dreamy intrigue breaks a cardinal rule of fantasy by striking off in a number of directions: an executive barks in the street, a young Frenchwoman (Ann Magnuson) loses her hair, and machines in a copy shop start to purr and wheeze on their own initiative.The moods that are established are delicate, and not everyone will be able to go with them, but Driver, the producer of Stranger Than Paradise, sustains them with beauty and eccentric charm. Suzanne Fletcher, who also starred in Driver’s previous 50-minute You Are Not I, makes a compelling (if unconventional) heroine, and Lorenzo Mans’s screwball dialogue develops some engaging hallucinatory riffs.

While we can readily speak about the surrealist “worlds” of a Buñuel, a Lynch, or even an Akerman (at least if we think of Belgian surrealism), the three films of Driver, even if we can easily call them all surrealist as well as “Driveresque,” clearly take place in three distinctly different worlds. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t various stylistic, thematic, and temperamental connections between them going well beyond the recurrence of various collaborators. Think of the dense and hyperactive soundtracks of all three, the downscale milieus, the trancelike rhythms, the layered relation of distant past to present (bringing to mind the fact that Driver spent her junior year in college abroad, studying archeology in Athens), the depictions of bullying power-mongers and solitary children, the dreamy passivity of seemingly hapless protagonists and the prominent attention given to their dreams, and chaotic eruptions of various kinds occurring in the midst of their compulsive routines, leading to the major plot developments in all three cases.
Perhaps an even more singular common trait in You Are Not I (1982), Sleepwalk (1986), and When Pigs Fly (1993) is the simultaneous urge to follow characters conceived in unabashed fantasy terms … while charting their various interrelations with the world and each other with a great deal of plausibility. Put another way, she knows how to get the poetic and the prosaic, the supernatural and the mundane, to rub shoulders with one another.
…You Are Not I …registers unapologetically like an art film, and so, in a very different way, does Sleepwalk (this time working closer to Jacques Rivette than to a Georges Franju, integrating choreography rather than literary narration into the mise en scène).
… even though Sleepwalk is set in its entirety in the neighborhood of lower Manhattan where Driver lives, the film belongs more to the free-wheeling trappings of what the French call “fantastique”–which includes surrealism without being limited to it–than to any particular national or ethnic tradition. Could this be because the Bowery is itself a cultural melting pot, like much of New York? Significantly, the Chinese text being translated by the heroine derives from four separate fairy tales: one Chinese, one African, one by the Brothers Grimm, and one made up by Driver herself.

1.14GB | 1h 14mn | 851×460 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D7D74182B6843F4/Sara_Driver_-_(1986)_Sleepwalk.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Sara Driver – Sleepwalk (1986) first appeared on Cinema of the World.