Unidentified photographer
1926 (ca)
Freudian inspired dream sequence in Georg Wilhelm Pabst's masterpiece "Secrets of a Soul""

Gelatin silver print, film still (detail)
9 x 11 in (22.8 x 27.9 cm)
 
Muse XX
Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema, and the influence of Max Reinhardt, University of California, 1969
 
Secrets of a Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele)
"A remarkable Expressionist feature in which a professor (Werner Krauss) is driven into a state of terror by strange intense nightmares accompanied by compulsive thoughts of murdering his wife. Based on an actual patient treated (and cured) by Sigmund Freud, and made with the collaboration of Freud's colleagues Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, "Secrets of a Soul" is the first time in film that psychoanalysis was represented as a treatment for mental illness. Superimpositions, symbolic images of razors and knives and menacing shadows create a frightening world. In the film, the tortured professor's chance meeting with a kindly psychoanalyst leads to a long period of therapy, through which he eventually gains insight into the unconscious thoughts and motives that were causing his neurosis." - Pacific CinémathÞque
 
LL/24076