In 1895, two founding events occurred a few months apart: Freud published his ‘Studies on Hysteria,’ and the Lumière brothers projected moving images for the first time. Two arts to observe the human enigma, and yet, for decades, no genuine bridge would be built between them. Freud did not go to the cinema; he discovered it late, in August 1909, during his one-week trip to America with Carl Gustav Jung and Sándor Ferenczi. The cinema showed unsettling hypnotists, manipulative psychiatrists in German expressionism. Both devices work through image associations and seek, in their own way, to give shape to what haunts us. Philippe Azoury, psychoanalyst, author, screenwriter, and journalist, reflects on the first representations of the psychoanalyst in cinema:
“Cinema began to play with editing around 1912-1913, and Léonce Perret’s film, ‘The Mystery of Kador Rocks,’ is extraordinary from this perspective. Editing, that is, discontinuity, something slips in, which is a secret. But editing is also the editing of emotions. And above all, there is something incredible, that during all these years, from its invention in 1895 until 1925 with ‘Secrets of a Soul’ by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, cinema literally confuses the psychoanalyst with the hypnotist, the fakir, the ‘turbaned one,’ a kind of wizard, with completely bewildering films… The figure of the psychoanalyst was the thaumaturge. It’s someone who could lead your emotions.”
The film series ‘Mystery of the Soul, psychoanalysis in silent cinema’ is presented at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris until May 12, 2026. A conference by Philippe Azoury ‘Birth of a notion (the unconscious)’ will take place on Tuesday, May 5 at 5:30 pm.
Briefs of the day:
– In Italy, the film ‘La Petite Dernière’ by Hafsia Herzi banned for under 14s: in the Cannes award-winning film in 2025, featuring a Muslim lesbian heroine, no explicit images, but in the ultra-conservative Italy of Giorgia Meloni, dialogues on female pleasure are enough to warrant a ban. LGBTQ+ associations denounce this as censorship. The production company Fandango, responsible for distributing the film, has lodged an appeal.
– Private art schools also facing financial difficulties: after the art school in Montreuil in February, the Academy of Applied Arts in Dijon was placed in receivership before announcing its permanent closure in early April. In Troyes, the higher school of design is in a difficult position. The main source of economic difficulties lies in the decrease in student numbers: in four years, the Dijon school went from 90 to 30 students. These schools often lack the means to invest in commercial tools for recruitment, such as call centers massively developed by groups like Galileo, which owns institutions like the Cours Florent and the Atelier de Sèvres.
