Secrets of a soul

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Movie
Original title Secrets of a soul
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1926
length 97 minutes
Rod
Director Georg Wilhelm Pabst
script Colin Ross , Hans Neumann
production Hans Neumann (Neumann-Film-Produktion GmbH for Ufa)
music Giuseppe Becce
camera Guido Seeber , Curt Oertel , Robert Lach
occupation

Secrets of a Soul is a German feature film by Georg Wilhelm Pabst from 1926.

action

Just as the chemist Martin Fellman tries to shave a disturbing strand from his wife's neck with a razor, a scream comes through the open window, which announces a murder in the neighboring house. Fellman is startled and cuts his wife slightly on the neck. After he returned from work, his wife surprised him with the announcement that her cousin Erich, a friend of Martin Fellman's children, would be returning from India the next day and visiting them. Erich sent a telegram as well as a statue of a god and an Indian dagger as an advance present .

During the night Fellman is plagued by a nightmare . He is torn up by a storm, threatens his wife with a dagger and is himself threatened by a man with a pith helmet. A southern city rises from the ground and the ringing bells of a tower become the head of his wife.

The next day he found it difficult to resist an inexplicable compulsion to use the Indian dagger that Erich had sent on his wife. Fellman can't touch a knife at the evening welcome dinner for Erich. He gets up from the table and is welcomed by his mother, who cuts the pieces for him bite-sized so that he can eat them with a spoon.

On the way back from the café to which he fled after the unsuccessful dinner, he briefly meets the psychiatrist Dr. Orth. The next day, he turns to him in desperation. He tells the psychiatrist his nightmare and he analyzes the fragments that Fellman adds with information from his life.

The psychiatrist finds out that jealousy, which stems from his childhood when he and his wife, Erich and he were playmates, and an inferiority complex due to the childlessness of Fellman's marriage, are the cause of the phobia of knives. With the knowledge of the causes, explains Dr. Orth, he could now be slowly healed.

Fellman moves to the country, you can see him fishing. In the last shot he walks towards a farmhouse, his wife walks towards him with a child.

background

Secrets of a soul was advertised by Ufa as a “ psychoanalytic film” and was given the title “popular education”. The film team received scientific advice from Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs .

The stance of the film tends towards New Objectivity , but it uses creative elements of film expressionism for its story without adopting its metaphor . The buildings are by Ernő Metzner . The film premiered on March 24, 1926 at the Gloria Palast in Berlin .

Reviews

“No, gray theory is not taught here, here we experience a dramatically strong and consistently humanly easily understandable soul conflict, which is obvious to all of us. And let us understand at one stroke what it is, using this example, skilfully taken from life: 'Psycho-Analysis'! ... This film meets the big questions of our time. "

- Georg Victor Mendel : Slide show from March 25, 1926
  • "With this work, Pabst unhappily sat down between the culture and feature film chairs, but he tried out and further developed cinematic possibilities, not only in the much-cited dream that made use of optical discoveries of the French avant-garde and virtues of expressionism, but also in the sensible one Emphasis on the detail ” .
  • “Arrested in time, Pabst's ambitious mixture of documentary and feature film depicts an individual fate without taking into account the social environment. The innovative testing of cinematic possibilities is impressive, especially the multitude of camera and assembly tricks when creating the dream sequences. "

literature

  • Christiane Mückenberger: Secrets of a Soul. In: Günther Dahlke, Günter Karl (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginning to 1933. A film guide. 2nd Edition. Henschel-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-89487-009-5 , pp. 128f.
  • Reinhard Barrabas: Core areas of psychology. An introduction to film examples (= UTB 3850 Psychology ). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8252-3850-6 , pp. 160–179.
  • Paul Ries: Popularise and / or be damned: Psychoanalysis and film at the crossroads in 1925. In: International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Volume 76, 1995, pp. 759-791.
  • Paul Ries: Secrets of a Soul: Whose Film and Whose Psychoanalysis? In: Yearbook of Psychoanalysis. Volume 39, 1997, pp. 46-80.
  • Craciun Ioana: Hermeneutics of Fear. GW Pabst's silent film "Secrets of a Soul". In: Dietmar Goltschnigg (Ed.): Fear. Crippling standstill and engine of progress. Graz Humboldt College 6-9 June 2011. Stauffenburg-Verlag, Tübingen 2012, pp. 353–359.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Criticism ( memento of the original from November 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on filmgalerie.de  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.filmgalerie.de
  2. ↑ Mückenberger: Secrets of a soul. In: Karl Dahlke (Hrsg.): German feature films from the beginning to 1933. 2nd edition. 1993, p. 129.
  3. ↑ Martin Prucha, in: Thomas Kramer (Ed.): Reclams Lexikon des Deutschen Films. Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-010410-6 , p. 115.