On Vienna, Love, Language and Forgetting
(2006, DV/DVD, Color, 44 min.)
Documentary/Fiction/Essay - Originally a DVD with a bilingual concept-
English with German or French subtitles.
With: Jaschka Lämmert, Tamas Eperjessy
The film connects three elements:
-Typical moments in the life of a couple (an Austrian man and a Russian woman in Vienna).
-fragments of Sigmund Freuds writings (about memory and forgetting)
-Vienna's relationship with its 2nd World War history, represented mainly through its architecture (1)
It makes, as Freud did, a parallel between collective and individual unconscious, and interrogates the fact that Freud, who was a Jew, spent most of his life in Vienna and developed his theories about memory and forgetting there before the war. For Freud, one always forgets for a reason.
The film that can be seen with or without subtitles. The subtitles are only occasionally an accurate translation of what is heard. The slipperiness of translation and of language comprehension are one of the work's central themes.
The subtitles propose 3 different types of relationships to the image and sound. They are either:
-an "exact" translation
-what the characters think, consciously or unconsciously, but dont communicate through language (one of the possible subtexts)
-or another completely different (unrelated) meaning which could fit the same images
(1) Freud compares the monuments of a city with the symptoms of (neurotic) patients in the first of the “5 Lectures about Psychoanalysis” , since they are both memory traces (of which the origin eventually cannot be remembered but continues affecting us).
Made with the support of the Art Section of the Federal Chancellery of Austria