Film and Psychoanalysis – Method

Slowly the lights are fading. We sit back in out chairs. The dream machine is about to start. Soon we will be helpless children, passionate lovers, tricky burglars, lonesome cowboys, and enchanting beauties. Yet, only temporarily: we will stroll home, still shaken, and the world will be the same as before.

How can the art of cinema make us so pervious, so ready to be anyone, and to give everything; in fantasy, at least? What are the gates of emotion the movies open so wide for us? How do films contribute to our understanding of the world and fascination with it?

Film Meets Psychoanalysis: at this intercultural meeting—to take place within the frame of the most important Bulgarian cultural festival Apollonia for the first time—Bulgarian, British, and German psychoanalysts, filmmakers, and film scholars will search for answers to these questions. In lectures, open film presentations, and workshops they will throw some light on the soul of cinema—which is obviously the soul of the audience.

The project is hosted by the Apollonia Foundation and the Goethe Institut Bulgaria and is sponsored by the National Film Center, Sofia and the British Council, Sofia.

Psychoanalysis: Another Way to Watch the Movies

Both born around the same year, 1895, film and psychoanalysis are connected like siblings. Freud‘s unconscious was instrumental for the development of the 20th century cinema—and cinema itself benefited from the development of modern psychoanalysis in the last century. For decades psychoanalysts have been dealing with the analysis of feature films. Since 2001, the biannual European Festival Film and Psychoanalysis workshop takes place in London under the patronage of the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci; its organizing committee is chaired by the London psychoanalyst Andrea Sabbadini. This festival has won a high reputation, especially for its intense cooperation between filmmakers and psychoanalysts.

The Apollonia First International Meeting is the brainchild of Dr. Vivian Pramataroff-Hamburger, Munich, Germany and Prof. Andreas Hamburger, Berlin-Munich, Germany, who have been working for many years in the Munich Project „Film and Psychoanalysis“ , a joint venture of the Akademie für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie München and the Filmmuseums der Landeshauptstadt München .