MARK LEWIS

Alongside the great films, directors, actors, inventors etc., that make up this history of the cinema, there is also a more or less silent history of, what we might call, impossible films. Two important examples of impossible films, and for which some documentation remains, are Sergei Eisenstein’s plan to make a dramatic screen adaptation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Samuel Goldwyn’s idea to bring Sigmund Freud to Hollywood to write the “definitive” film on psychoanalysis.

It was Sergei Eisenstein’s life time dream to make a film version of Marx’s Das Kapital. In 1925 Samuel Goldwyn made a much publicized trip from Hollywood to Vienna with the intention of meeting with Sigmund Freud. In an interview in the New York Times, Goldwyn announced that he would call on Freud and offer him $ 100,000 to come to Hollywood so that he might commercialize his study and write a story for the screen. As Goldwyn put it: “There is nothing really so entertaining as a really great love story,” and who better to write such a tale than Dr. Freud, “the greatest love specialist in the world.” As Goldwyn waited for an interview with Freud in a Vienna Hotel, Freud sent a note to the hotel that read: “I do not intend to meet Mr. Goldwyn.” (…) If Freud had participated in the project, it might have been possible, at this relatively early stage in the development of Hollywood cinema, for him to effect a different popular understanding of the ideas of psychoanalysis, but also of the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema itself.

Two Impossible Films consists of the scripted opening credit sequences for the imaginary full-scale and contemporary productions of Eisenstein’s and Goldwyn’s dream projects. Both films have been relocated to present day. Both Das Kapital and The Story of Psychoanalysis are set in the present and were shot in Vancouver in 35mm colour cinemascope. In Two Impossible FiIms, at the point where the opening credits finish (with the “director’s credit”), the films simply fade to black. In effect this fade to black contains the film that could never be made. After some moments of black, Das Kapital “returns” with a “tag scene,” a so-called scene of resolution that suggests that the dramatic and didactic narratives introduced in the opening sequence have somehow, during the course of the film proper (in the fade to black, so to speak) come together. After the tag scene the end credits begin and these credits include all the cast and crew who actually worked on the film together with all the cast and crew who might have worked on the film had the full scale production of the entire book by Marx been achieved. In the case of The Story of Psychoanalysis, after the fade to black, the film goes directly to rolling end credits.