There is no writer or philosopher who has shaped the way we think about our own thoughts, dreams, relationships, and inner lives more profoundly than Sigmund Freud and the documentary Outsider. Freud by Yair Qedar, illuminates Freud’s life in new ways.
This film, which is premiering at the 40th Haifa International Film Festival on January 5 and which will be broadcast in March on KAN 11, uses extensive excerpts from Freud’s letters, insights from psychoanalysts and historians, archival film clips, and powerful, dreamlike animation to document such aspects of the pioneer psychoanalyst’s life as his Jewish identity, his discovery of the unconscious mind, and his success at using it to help patients, his use of drugs to try to build a better understanding of the mind, and the sorrowful but productive third act of his life, marked by tragic losses. Throughout, the film guides us in understanding Freud’s unique contributions and shows how his sense of being an outsider made these contributions possible.
That’s a lot of ideas for one documentary, but Qedar is the perfect director to bring Freud’s story to the screen. He is a distinguished documentary filmmaker, concentrating on mostly literary documentaries about Jewish writers, among them Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutskever, The Fourth Window, about Amos Oz, and The Last Chapter of A. B. Yehoshua.
Qedar also produced a recent documentary about Baruch Spinoza, Spinoza: 6 Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher, and said that he was offered the chance to make a trilogy about three of the greatest Jewish thinkers of all times, Spinoza, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. “When you’re offered the chance to make a film, you never say no, it’s the unwritten law of filmmaking,” he said.
Still, making Outsider. Freud was a daunting task. It took about five years to finish, “longer than I worked on any other film. The problem with making a film about Freud is that there is too much information, he is the most written-about person in the modern world. Everybody has their own Freud. And so much of the representations of him are so cliched... I had to take the natural representation and put it aside and decide how we can re-approach the known Freud to reestablish our relationship with him. So I thought, perhaps through intimacy. Perhaps through things we didn’t know. Perhaps images we have never seen.”
In addition to the excerpts from Freud’s letters and interviews with experts, Qedar pulls the viewers out of their preconceptions with “off-the-beaten-track” images, including clips from films during Freud’s era, which coincided with the birth of cinema, and new animation, much of which was created by Tal Kantor, whose short animated film, Letter to a Pig, was nominated for an Oscar last year.
THESE IMAGES give a visual representation to Freud’s ideas by enticing viewers with dreamlike images, many of which combine footage of train journeys, a metaphor for how Freud felt the unconscious mind worked, with representations of the furniture and decorations of Freud’s own office, which was filled with antiquities, one of his great passions.
“It was all a big puzzle you have to put together in a certain immersive way, the music adds to it, and the images and the animation, and then you get this Freudian experience,” he said. The riveting images also help dramatize Freud’s own intellectual journey. As Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and essayist, notes in the film, “Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was the central drama of his life. He discovered two things: That the unconscious was a radically alternative way of thinking and in the unconscious, as it were, were all of our forbidden desires... It was all about listening. He could hear what people said and he could hear something other than what they intended to say.”
Psychoanalyst and historian Eran Rolnik points out, “He could have been a popular successful doctor, but when he started writing on the interpretation of dreams, a whole new world of concepts opened up to him, that seemingly had nothing to do with medicine, [which was] usually the domain of poets and authors.”
In addition to this groundbreaking discovery, the film details major events in Freud’s life, including how he dealt with antisemitism.
Quotes by the filmmaker
Qedar cautioned, “I had to be very careful in linking the biographical facts and the theoretical writing... It’s one of the dangers of this kind of filmmaking,” but the film makes it clear that Freud’s persistence in his research was a way of defying antisemites who wanted to marginalize him. Although Freud was a secular Jew, Qedar said, “He does not renounce his Judaism. He keeps a certain loyalty [to Judaism]. He says, ‘I do not understand what it means. I’m a secular Jew. I’m in the tribe. I would never turn my back to the tribe, but I have no idea what it means.’ He repeats this. His Jewish connection had a certain open-endedness.”
While Freud spent most of his life surrounded by family and friends in Vienna, during his later years he had to cope with his cancer diagnosis – which he understood all too well would eventually kill him – and with the deaths of a beloved daughter and grandson. The film also examines a final indignity Freud endured, when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938 and he reluctantly fled to England. Until the last moment, Freud did not take the Nazi threat too seriously and told a friend in 1938 that he thought the biggest threat to Austrian Jews was the Catholic Church.
Qedar said the film will be shown on January 9 in the Freud Museum in Vienna. “That will be a very powerful night, like a séance. I’m very curious how the film will be accepted.” For him, this screening will be the culmination of “an amazing journey. The film really got into my head. When you’re dealing with Freud, anything can happen because everything is Freudian. It was a very interesting process.”