No German film from the period a time when no one was making films as distinctive and ambitious as the Germans was as thoroughly mixed up with Freud and Freudianism as G.W. Pabst's Secrets of a Soul (1926). The new Kino DVD has a protracted text supplement articulating in scholarly detail the efforts that the film's producers took to get Freud to officially approve of the film making it a kind of nascent-psychology house movie and the resistance Freud offered, over much correspondence, until a coterie of Freudian acolytes lent their names to it, causing a rift in the powerful Vienna psychotherapy community. Freud's complaints seemed to be mostly directed at not the proposed film in particular (on which Freudian psychologists Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs got "technical consultant" credit), but with the very idea that unconscious conflicts could be represented meaningfully on film.
He had a point thoughtful critics have long noticed that dream sequences and even outright cinematic Surrealisms have an essentially silly thrust to them, perhaps largely because cinema itself is already overwhelmingly dream-like, and our experience of it (sitting in the dark, semi-consciously "entering into" the narrative, taking as "real" an associative series of shots that are actually unrelated, etc.) is already very much like dreaming. But by the same token, most uses of dream imagery from cinema's first three decades or so have impact now as beguiling experiments (what does and doesn't work as visual narrative was still being worked out), and as anarchist time capsules (several early Surrealist films date badly, but Dali and Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, from 1929, still has the electric jolt of an airborne Molotov cocktail). Pabst's film is a little of both for one thing, it was expressly conceived as a drama structured around the concept of neurotic pathology and its psychoanalytic cure, and it's this aspect of the film, after many decades of Freudian hot air wafting its way through popular movies (just look at how badly Spellbound dates compared to Hitchcock's other mid-century films), that feels hokey. At the same time, Secrets of a Soul, based on an "actual case history," isn't so clear about what's unconscious and what isn't it's still a German Expressionist film, which demands that the "real world" outside of the protagonist's feverish skull is to some degree warped and darkened by stylistic pessimism.
You could be forgiven for mistaking the entire opening sequence as a bad dream, and a creepy forecast of the Dali/Bunuel film to come: a middle-class chemist (Werner Krauss, six years after Caligari and four years from playing the evil rabbi in the famed Nazi propaganda film Jud Suss) tries to shave in the morning, when a mismatched countershot of his wife hollering from another room summons him, at which time she asks him to cut hair at the nape of her neck with his straight razor... Then a woman outside screams who? and the man accidentally cuts his wife's neck, and a crowd forms on the street (in front of the couple's house?); cut to the dressed couple coming downstairs, where a brood of puppies frolic... They exchange meaningful but mysterious glances... She pushes a buzzer-button on the wall, dissolve to an empty kitchen... He wanders out to the street, like one of Un Chien Andalou's passers-by, eyeing a slow ambulance and hearing vaguely from the crowd about a murder...
It continues in this disjointed, enigmatic mode, piling up banal incidents nevertheless pregnant with menace, until the couple go to bed, and "The Dream" begins and suddenly we're in a Dali painting, where women's heads swing inside church bells and a matchstick city rises from the dark hills in the distance. From there, one shouldn't get caught up with the procedural structure of the movie (the opening incidents and their corresponding dream associations are reviewed in therapy with Pavel Pavlov's psychologist, to uproot Krauss's phobia of blades). Rather, watch how the film suggests visually that the characters' world is disarmingly dreamlike and irrational even when they are awake. Freud or no Freud, the subjective issues at hand are bigger than one man's neurotic kink. With only his fourth film, Pabst was already establishing the anxious, shadowy, predatory vocabulary that would make him a world-class auteur just a few years later, with The Loves of Jeanne Ney (1927), Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and Die Dreigroschenoper (1931). But quickly, he and German cinema gave up on Freudianism, leaning more toward tales of moral conflict and retribution that spoke more acutely to the German people's downtrodden postwar frame of mind, and to the ambitions of the rising Nazi party. Secrets of a Soul remains a crazy artifact, then, conflicted by style, forgotten by history, and buried by a new kind of mass pathology not unlike the private diseases it sought to elucidate.
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by Michael Atkinson
