Cinema and psychoanalysis were born at the same time.

Just as the Lumière brothers

were screening the results of their newly developed 'cinematograph', in 1895,
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer published their groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria.
Just as the patients at the Salp trière hospital where Freud had been a student
jerked into hysterical fits and behaved with a certain 'automatism', the cinema
brought what had previously been inanimate to life, in mechanical fits and starts.
The birth of cinema offered a collective sense of what Freud called the uncanny:
the images on screen were both familiar and somehow strange, alive and yet
lifeless, real but illusory.

The psychoanalyst Andrea Sabbadini says that the two disciplines 'share a similar
language'. He is one of the organisers of the First European Psychoanalytic Film
Festival, an event that will bring together psychoanalysts, filmmakers and film
historians from different countries, and will be held over the course of the first
weekend in November.

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Bernardo Bertolucci, the festival's honorary president, has been in psychoanalysis
since the late Sixties, and has spoken about the way in which this experience
coloured the films he made immediately after his analysis began: Last Tango in
Paris, The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem, 1900 . 'I found that I had in my
camera an additional lens,' he said, 'which was not Kodak, not Zeiss, but Freud.'

Freud was very resistant to the fusion of film and psychoanalysis, however. He
disliked being filmed himself (though some fragments of footage can be seen at the
Freud Museum in London), and he thought it impossible to render the psychoanalytic
process cinematically. He was asked on a number of occasions to write a movie
script, and a Hollywood studio once offered him a lot of money to do so. Though a
member of his professional circle, Karl Abraham, scripted the first film about
psychoanalysis, G.W. Pabst's Secrets of a Soul, in 1926, Freud always turned these
offers down.

Since his death, various attempts have been made to portray the man on film, most
famously John Huston's movie Freud: The Secret Passion, in 1962. It was scripted by
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Montgomery Clift played Freud. But the complications of the
subject infected the making of the film: Huston and Sartre disagreed about the
plot, and, by extension, about the nature of psychoanalysis itself. Sartre accused
Huston of using the film as an excuse for self-analysis, and removed his name from
the credits. Marilyn Monroe, who had once made a brief appearance on a cartoonishly
glamorous couch in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and had just filmed The Misfits with
Huston, was the director's first choice for the role of the young hysteric.
However, she was advised against taking the job by her own analyst, and died later
the same year.

Now psychoanalysts are so frequently portrayed on screen that they almost

constitute a genre. Woody Allen turned them into a running joke, and today's TV
viewers accept the jargon in Frasier and the transference in The Sopranos with a
familiarity that would have been unthinkable some years ago. Where shrinks were
once played by Victor Mature, the actors now cast are Demi Moore (in Deconstructing
Harry) or Billy Crystal (in Analyze This). What is going on?

In early Hollywood psychoanalysts were mostly seen as evil quacks or hopeless

fools, but after the Second World War, when psychoanalytic ideas had more currency
in America, they took on a new role. They became, as Hitchcock has it, 'dream
detectives', the private eyes of the private consulting room, who would solve the
mystery as they resolved a trauma.
In his book Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love
the Fifties, the film writer Peter Biskind explains how analysts took over from the
police in the Fifties movie plot. He describes an Otto Preminger film, Whirlpool,
in which a hypnotist played by Jose Ferrer convinces his patient, Gene Tierney,
that she has committed a murder. 'Luckily for Tierney,' Biskind writes, 'she's
married to a prominent psychiatrist, who realises that Ferrer is the killer, not
his wife. Where are the cops? Out giving traffic tickets.'

This shift is best represented in Hitchcock's Spellbound, made in 1945, with famous
dream sequences designed by Salvador Dalí. The film opens with some prefatory
remarks: 'Our story deals with psychoanalysis,' the solemn titles read, 'the method
by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst
seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the
locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient
are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear... and the
devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.'

And indeed, Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish Sherlock Holmes, works out that amnesiac
Gregory Peck has not in fact committed the murder he has developed a guilt complex
about. But even in such a serious thriller about 'the devils of unreason', there
was still a little room left for the sceptics. In a gag worthy of Groucho Marx, a
nymphomaniac patient complains that she thinks 'this whole thing's ridiculous'.
'What whole thing?' asks Bergman, her analyst. 'Psychoanalysis,' replies the
nymphomaniac. 'It bores the pants off me.'

The way was paved for Woody Allen, who scripted his first film, What's New,
Pussycat?, in 1965. It featured Peter Sellers as a Viennese-accented cod-Freudian
with a long black wig and glasses. From then on, it seems, cine-shrinks never
looked back. Only last month, Nanni Moretti, dubbed 'the Italian Woody Allen', won
the Palme d'Or at Cannes, for a film in which he plays a psychoanalyst whose life
of witticisms receives a tragic jolt. That film, La Stanza del Figlio, will have
its British premiere at the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival.

At least since the Seventies, film theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Christian
Metz have used psychoanalysis to interpret movies, applying its tools to both
content and form. The title of trendy philosopher Slavoj Zizek's 1992 edition of
essays brilliantly evokes the fusion of the two disciplines: Everything You Always
Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). In 1974, Christian
Metz wrote in his seminal book Psychoanalysis and Cinema that he hoped this
interpretative arrangement might some day be reciprocal. Yet it still remains
unclear how film, or film theory, might influence the practice of psychoanalysis.
Andrea Sabbadini says that the cinema's effect is 'indirect', and that analysts who
write about film do so almost as a hobby, something that is detached from the daily
business of the talking cure.

That's not to say, however, that psychoanalysts are not affected by films the way
anyone else might be. Alain de Mijolla, who will be chairing a panel at the
festival, believes that the experience of seeing a particular film as a child
subliminally influenced his later decision to become an analyst.

Mijolla was six when, just before the Second World War broke out, he was taken to
see a rather gruelling film because it starred his then hero, Maurice Chevalier.
Later on, he had no memory of its content, a form of forgetfulness so intense, he
says, that it should be 'referred to rather as a repression'. Several decades
later, he saw the movie on television. Chevalier plays a man unjustly accused of a
series of murders. The real killer is found out on the basis of psychological
interrogation by the police. At one point, the assassin says to the detective:
'Have you read Freud?' Mijolla realised that 'a memory trace - the result of an
entertaining film - had been engraved 30 years earlier in the unconscious of a
child who was to become a psychoanalyst'.

Perhaps fror some the cinema always brings childhood experiences to mind. Bernardo
Bertolucci thinks of the movie theatre as an 'amniotic darkness... like a womb'.
Andrea Sabbadini thinks that seeing a film 'is similar to what happens in
psychoanalysis' - for a brief period, you are taken outside of your world, outside
of real time, to a place where entire lives can pass by in a matter of minutes.
'And then of course we have to emerge from it,' he says. 'We leave the session or
the cin ema, and have to be careful crossing the road.'