Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926) - film review

One day, a respectable chemist, Dr Fellman, begins to have a sudden irrational fear of knives.  It began when he learnt that a neighbour of his had been murdered.  Not long after that, he received the present of a knife from a close friend who has been away travelling in the Far East.  Fellman’s anxieties quickly turn to terror as he starts to have baffling dreams and acquires an almost overwhelming urge to murder his wife...

There is clearly a natural relationship between German expressionist art of the 1920s and the revolutionary theories in psychology which were being expounded by Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries in the preceding years.  Expressionism is inherently a dreamlike re-interpretation of the real world and Freud saw dreams as the key to unlocking the secrets to the human subconscious, so the two have a manifest connection.  The first film which attempted to bring the two together was G.W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul, a curious work that manages to be both compelling and unsatisfying.

Viewed today, it is much easier to appreciate this film for its artistic merits – its striking visual design and atmospheric expressionistic photography – than its intellectual content.  As a serious attempt to represent Freud’s ideas it leaves a great deal to be desired and almost comes across as a mockery of psychoanalytic theory.  The crux of the film is its famous dream sequence (which is imaginative and well shot, but is hardly the most spectacular that cinema has given us) and its subsequent interpretation by a psychoanalyst.  These two things combined seem to constitute an Idiot’s Guide to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, so apparent is the lack of subtlety and intellectual rigour.  The images that make up the the dream sequence are so obvious that it is not beyond the wit of any spectator to make a more convincing job at explaining them than the eminent psychoanalyst does in the film’s drawn-out leather couch denouement.  Interesting, but definitely not Pabst’s best work.

© James Travers 2008

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