Starring Sigmund Freud

Starring Sigmund Freud is a video memento for Sigmund Freud’s little-known film career. The video collects the over 50 appearances that the character of Freud has made on films and television programs. After the 1950s, when pill vials replaced analytic couches, the father of psychoanalysis found a second career impersonating himself in everything, from a John Huston clunker to a Star Trek episode, which are gathered in this video compendium. Vivian Sky Rehberg: Prior to releasing Starring Sigmund Freud, you published in frieze your text, “Dream Factory,” on Sigmund Freud as a fictional movie character. What is the relationship between the text and the film? Or rather, in retrospect, how do you see the relationship between the two? John Menick: As usual, other people did the hard work. I got the material from a strange page on the Internet Movie Database: a page listing over seventy films and TV shows in which Sigmund Freud appears as a character. (IMDB has pages not just for crewmembers and films, but also for fictitious characters—or, in this case, a fictitious character based on a historical person.) Only a swarm of anonymous busybodies could have come up with this data: most of the films are obscure and unavailable, but I managed to find and watch about twenty of them and wrote the essay. A few months later, dOCUMENTA(13) commissioned me to make a new video, so I decided to “adapt” the frieze essay. Here, unfortunately, “adapting” meant using the essay as an almost word-for-word voice-over. In that first (deleted) version I repeated just about every video-related mistake I’d previous made: too obvious relations between voice and image; using the voice of the All Knowing Critical Theorist; using the text to dictate the editing rather than the image, etc. It was depressing, really. So I decided to scrap the voice-over and let the clips do the talking instead. That, I hope, was a better way to go. VSR: Once you abandoned the text as the template for structuring the film how did you go about editing the visual material you gathered? http://johnmenick.com/projects/starring-sigmund-freud.html