Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity
“The Whitechapel Gallery’s film programme focuses every season on a single work in a variety of contexts. The first season presents the collectively made Sigmund Freud’s Dora... now brilliantly restored 30 years after it was originally shown. Precisely reflecting the feminist and formalist concerns of its time, this critically important film constructs a complex relationship between sound, image and text via a conversation about psychoanalysis with interludes of television adverts juxtaposed by pornography. It is accompanied by live discussion with the filmmakers and with Emily King, Design Historian and Will Holder, artist, designer, writer and editor. It is shown with related work by the avant-garde German filmmaker Christine Noll Brinckmann whose films have rarely been seen in the UK and Yvonne Rainer’s epic tour-de-force on sexuality, ageing, power and political activism.” – I.W., Whitechapel press release
During the mid-2000s, White developed a model for his seasons of programming in the Whitechapel auditorium where a single work would be shown several times, but contextualised differently on each occasion.
The season he organised around the film Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity (USA, 1979, 40’) exemplifies this approach. The film itself was made by the Jay Street Film Project – which comprised Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall and Jane Weinstock – and is a classic of structuralist cinema, using re-enactments of a famous Freudian analysis to apply a feminist eye to both psychoanalysis and film theory. The programme draws on White’s longstanding engagement with the early essayistic, collaborative works of Anthony McCall (White returned several times to Argument, McCall’s previous 1978 film with Andrew Tyndall, over the course of his career).
The Whitechapel events included a conversation with the filmmakers (audio available below), but also screenings juxtaposing it with very different works by Noll Brinckmann and Yvonne Rainer, and a discussion about the film in relation to design and typography.
Programme details
23 April – Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity
& The Jay Street Film Project: Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock
Screening and conversation
7 May – Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity
& three films by Christine Noll Brinckmann
Die Urszene (The Primal Scene), Germany 1981, 6’
Dress Rehearsal & Karola 2, US/Germany 1980-81, 14’
Empathie und Panische Angst (Empathy and Panic Fear), Germany 1989, 38’
4 June – Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity
& Yvonne Rainer
The Man Who Envied Women, US 1985, 125’
4 June – Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity
& Will Holder in conversation with Emily King
Further material
Listen to audio of the conversation between Ian White & The Jay Street Film Project (Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock), 23 April 2009
Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK
5 April – 4 June 2009
