Purely Joyful Movie!

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

There are a lot of important elements the restorers chose to omit from the movie. There are letters that are opened & are supposed to appear on screen for the audience to read. Gone. A man pulls up on a bike delivering a telegram. Gone. All references to the name of the man Martin Fellman are omitted. When he comes home after leaving his key,he sits down in front of the idol. It disappears leaving only a baby image. Gone. His wife see a dog & litter of puppies, She says: "I wish I had a child." Gone. The Murnau people made the movie incoherent by this censorship. Its a disgrace. They had no right to do these changes to the movie as they are not part of the creative process.

I come to this as someone who thinks the presentation of dreams - much more than dreams themselves - imitates the ways we use to structure the self that presents the world to us. Charting the cinematic effort of that is exciting to me.And well, this is an interesting film to say the least, and from an interesting time. The backstory is that Freud himself approved of it and moreover sent two from his trusted Viennese circle to aid and supervise the UFA production on what would be a rational explication of psychoanalysis. You should know that his were radical , modern ideas in their time and for twenty years had been a sensation. And the Weimar public at large was struggling with deep-seated nightmares of their own, evidenced in Caligari and elsewhere, so it was very receptive to the new science for sleep, and probably every bit as confused about it as the somnambulist in Caligari.But oh boy, haven't our narrative devices come far since Freud.In the film, we have suddenly strange , unsettling urges followed by a puzzling nightmare, and then a psychoanalyst sits us down to kindly explain and assuage irrational fear. Nevermind the obtuse focus on sex and symbolic interpretation of dreams, that was Freud. The emphasis on phallic imagery, the incidental aversion to knives linked to imaginary castration in the patient. Jung would make the transition to a character-based dreamworld, and we are growing out of that too. We are insanely more complicated beings these days than a logic like Freud's can explain, our dreams much more layered, and you can see that in contemporary filmmakers who are dabbling with dream. We are unsure these days where day begins, that much (night) was certain then. Our dreams also come from movies and TV, from tweets and instagram, and we're beginning to understand what the Buddhist had been saying all along; the mind's function is to project snippets of narrative around a fictional self, and the most loaded dream is no different in mechanism to the most trivial thought. You are always at the center of an illusionary world you have set in motion, but you won't know that without a center in emptiness.The trigger for it is something to consider though. A murder (by knife) has taken place the day before in the same street, a wife killed by the husband. The same urge somehow surfaces in our guy.The actual nightmare has dated, along with the logic behind it and German expressionism. It is this eerie confluence of semiconscious machinery that still carries power. It is this aspect of dreaming Pabst would cultivate in later works.

Freudian psychiatry was all the rage back in the 1920s. It was the first psychotherapy and did much to popularize the notion of individual therapy to cure mental illness. And, not surprisingly, it was particularly popular in the German-speaking world. So, the fact that the German film maker G.W. Pabst would make a film based on Freud's theories isn't surprising at all. Just understand that since this type of therapy was the first, much of his work today might be seen as quaint or even obsolete. This isn't a slam against Freud--as he had to start somewhere. But the film's HUGE reliance on symbolism, insight and long-term treatment are, for the most part, not part of most therapies today--so don't expect this is like therapy in the 21st century. It's because of this that the film makes a wonderful viewing experience for psychology students--to understand the history of the treatment of mental illnesses. It brings to life Freud's ideas and shows the style of treatment he popularized.The story is about a couple--in particularly the husband. For unknown reasons, he's recent had a fantasy of stabbing his wife! Fortunately he realizes this is sick and is seeking help from a psychotherapist. After months of probing into his conscious and unconscious, the man's deep-seeded neurosis is uncovered and cured. And, as a result the marriage is saved and the family has a happy ending.The film has some wonderful dream sequences and lots of deliberate symbolism--and I thought this was all very clever. However, as an ex-psychology teacher and therapist, I was intrigued that the film makers did explore many common themes in Analytic psychology BUT a couple very obvious interpretations were never mentioned in the film--possibly because they were much more sexual than the interpretations given in the movie (though most therapists of the day would have seen them). First, there was LOTS of phallic imagery but the film never went there to discuss them. Any analytic therapist of the day would have jumped at the thrusting of the knife scene by the patient as well as his feelings of impotence. Also, his desire to kill her specifically with a knife is, according to Freudians, a VERY sexual sort of killing--again, with STRONG phallic connotations! I thought this was pretty funny--along with phallic images of trains and towers in the film--all of which, again ACCORDING TO FREUDIANS, would represent the sex act and sex organs. Now I am not saying I believe all this, but classical Analytic theory is based on this sort of interpretation...really.Overall, great fun for me, as in addition to psychology, I have taught history and this film is a great way to combine the two disciplines. I am sure this is not everyone's cup of tea--but it was, at least to the right audience, quite interesting--and one of the very earliest films to explore the Freudian/Analytic style of thinking and conceptualizing illness.By the way, if you enjoy movies about phallic imagery, dream interpretations and the like, try watching the COMPLETE Hitchcock film "Spellbound". I say complete, because Salvador Dali helped create a Freudian dream sequence that is great fun to watch but which in some versions is truncated. Also, Dali made an experimental film for Disney that was never released that is based on Freud's work that only recently has surfaced on the internet. It's wild and worth finding as well.

Although I am no fan of psychoanalysis and Freud, this film is worth a watch for the cinematographic techniques and the visuals. The story is a bit bland, but it does give the viewer a taste of what psychoanalysis is.My favourite scene would definitely have to be the dream scene, hands down. Every section of the dream is so well done that I wonder how Pabst filmed such things. There are some crazy things going on like a gate that grows really high, the husband (Krauss) flying and then getting shot down, a montage of his wife (Weyher) and friend/wife's cousin, and the baby coming out of the river are… surreal. I really can't come up with another word to describe the dream scene. My personal favourite out of all these has to be when the bells turn into heads. I can't really figure out who the head on left belongs to (I think it's either a nurse or someone who works in his house), but the one in the center is his wife and the one on the right is his assistant (Walther). When I first saw the scene, I almost yelped because it creeped me out and it really must have been a terrifying thing to see because apparently the laughter was something that the protagonist (the husband) couldn't get out of his head. I wish that I can supply more screencaps from this film, but then it would just crowd up the entry. Oh well. Going on, the dream really brings together events from past, present, and his unconscious because the presents he received from his wife's cousin (Trevor) are in the scene, the creepy doll/baby reflects the protagonist's want for a child but also reflects a scene from his childhood, the totally crazy wife-stabbing scene triggers the protagonist's fear of knives, his jealousy over his wife's cousin, and his odd impulse to kill his wife.Throughout the film there are various motifs, repetitions and recreation of certain scenes, and symbolism. The very first motif in this film would be knives. The very first shot of the movie is of the husband's razor and whenever there is a knife/sharp object in the scene, it is always emphasized with an insert shot. Most of the time, the ones that usually have an insert shot are shown twice: the first time is when the husband isn't scared of them and the second time is when the husband is afraid to touch or see them. So what could this mean? It seems silly to be scared of knives, right? This is when the psychoanalytic part comes in. His fear of knives symbolize his insecurity about his masculinity. Out of all the knives, the one that the cousin gives him is the biggest and longest one and his jealousy of his wife's cousin is exposed later in the film. This could be tied into him being insecure because he still does not have a child and of course, the knife can be a phallic symbol. In Picture 3, the shadow you see is of the cousin and notice where his head is? Yes, between the wife's legs! And then it cuts to the husband's face where he look uncomfortable to see the shadow. In addition to the whole knife = masculinity argument, his fear of knives makes him even less masculine because he becomes a little kid who can't take care of himself. His mother has to cut his food for him when he isn't there and on top of that, she cuts them into little pieces! Now that I think about it, a lot of the motifs refer to the husband's want for a child and not having one, which connects to his masculinity. I can list quite a few, but I'll just discuss one more! The prison bars/gates in the dream scene prevent the husband from going to certain places, particularly places where his wife and her cousin are. Gates would prevent him from going near his wife and her cousin multiple times in the main dream scene and in his other one where his wife is part of an orgy-like scene. In a scene of the present, there is a scene when the husband returns home and the psychoanalyst says that he looks reluctant to go back to his own house. The gate is what separates him from his wife and her cousin inside the house. Maybe he doesn't want to go because he's scared that he'll see them together like he saw in his dream. Another thought I had was that the gate was also a symbol of how he will reach his cure. By meeting the psychoanalyst and having the psychoanalyst returning the key so that he can go home, the psychoanalyst is "opening the gate" to his cure. Just a thought. And talking about symbolism, see Picture 1 because the tree represents the couple's marriage and their hopes for a child, but while the tree grows, they don't have a real child.