We encounter the young, angst ridden, struggling artist Adolf Hitler at an art museum on his birthday in Vienna 1913, as he becomes influenced by German Nationalism politics and anti-Semitism, indoctrinated to hate communists, socialists, and Jews. Parallel to this narrative, we watch how Freud and Jung, once aligned in their ideologies, diverge from each other, as Jung develops his own school of thought, analytical psychology distinct from Freud's psychoanalysis. This split of their models of the psyche determines the arc of the characters and plays out as both overt and covert symbols and signs throughout the film to determine behavior, actions, thoughts, emotions, and transformations. The unconscious mind takes on its own unified role, individual and collective, interior and exterior, as the viewer becomes a voyeur of repressed sexual desires, archetypes, trauma, fears, dreams, and memories.
This film will be especially meaningful to viewers who appreciate German Jewish Philosopher Walter Benjamin, with a quote of his that appears first on the screen, and refers to his concept of "time-slice" or "now-time"; which is a moment in time that feels dangerous, and triggers a memory of an important event in history, a historical rupture that changed everything. V13 explores this idea that we can look back to the past, and it can be blown apart from the usual flow and continuity of history. We can evaluate it from this perspective, and see it in a new and separate way which can create a potential revolutionary change to happen and challenge the way things are now, instead of following a conventional linear progression from the past to the present.
As Freud is strutting on Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, we see the energized, spontaneous New York City street in contemporary full color, which contrasts with the black and white film noir formalism of the psychoanalysis office scenes in Vienna, with Hugo, his new patient referred by Jung, who is a pianist from a privileged family who coincidentally befriends Adolf. One could imagine, as I did, Dorothy and her dream to Oz, upon her arrival, she steps into Technicolor, a fantasy that soon becomes nightmarish. However, Freud's walk foretells another impending disaster, not of a tornado, a wicked witch, a dictatorial impostor, magical ruby slippers, and characters all in need and search of something they already had; but instead, a brooding storm that will spiral into a long darkness and spawn a fascist brutal Nazi tyrant and regime who will assume power and dominance to conduct a genocidal world war implementing the Holocaust crimes against humanity, their final solution to the Question of the Jew. Dorothy gets to go home to Kansas, in fact she had the power all along, but Freud is forced to escape the home and life he had in Vienna, and never returns.
The future indicative is also implied as backdrop, as the camera tracks slowly over three photographs in sequence hanging on the wall in Freud's office, Muybridge's 1878 Horse in locomotion, which laid the groundwork of moving images for cinema pioneers the Lumière brothers, and could represent Walter Benjamin's concept of the "optical unconscious" revealing what is invisible to the naked eye; and the catastrophic ending of WW2 with the 1945 atomic nuclear bomb photograph from Hiroshima, Japan, and the resulting human shadow of death image.
When Hugo describes his dream recollection on Freud's couch, the camera with its dueling and repeated use of cinematic close-ups recedes to reveal Freud and Hugo are on a stage in an empty theatre, accentuating the melodrama and our own perception of being in a theatre in a theatre, and watching a film within a film. This sort of shifting time travel and pulling back of the curtain provokes the viewer to examine these worlds within worlds as unbounded and synchronous, liberated from the confines of history, and our very consciousness. As Freud identifies Hugo's dream symbols as an incestuous mirroring and desire for his mother, Hugo's torment is mitigated; but, his gratitude is conflicted by his antisemitic beliefs which also reveal Freud's own uneasiness with his Jewishness. Hugo says to Freud, " I love you and I hate you" and Freud repeats back this affirmation, "Yes, you love me, and you hate me". Director Ledes, who is of Greek origin, reinforces throughout the film examples of Dialetheism ( di-twice, aletheia- truth) , a statement that can be both true and false simultaneously, which are inherent conflicts in Freud's psychoanalytical theories.
The repeated surreal appearances and dialogue regarding Medusa and Athena could be solely interpreted from a classical Greek reading, but Ledes seems to suggest in this context that Freud's perspective on Medusa represented the fear of emasculation, while through a Jungian lens, the myth can be viewed as a development of the anima, the feminine aspect of the male psyche. But, Athena, in Jungian psychology is not a Freudian castrated male depicting female sexuality in a male context, but instead a powerful feminine archetype. Adolf's ambiguous impotency or celibacy, and Hugo's incestuous fantasies are layered within these shifting patriarchal or feminist evaluations. Predictably, in keeping with his theories of the "castration complex", Freud's favorite possession was a small bronze statue of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom and War, missing her spear that he kept on his desk, and managed to smuggle out of Nazi controlled Austria when he left for London in 1938, dying soon after in 1939, a few weeks after the start of WW2.
Summarizing this film is not easy, it resists concise order with its structure often feeling like a disorientating string of impassioned and argumentative monologues, punctuated by crescendos of classical music. But, it is not rambling, it is coherent, fluid, and focused; cerebral, but sensual, historical but imaginary. There is liberty taken to ignore historical accuracy in terms of accents, costume, locations, and race for certain supporting actors, and it would be a miscalculation to dismiss these choices as mere gimmick. Instead the viewer is able to not be tethered to a concrete and fixed representation, and experiences the viewing of Hitler, less as a depiction of his individual persona, but more so, excluding his own personality to be seen as the spiritual embodiment of the White Supremacy that still permeates society. Jung described Hitler in a series of interviews in the late 1930's "as possessed by the archetype of the collective Aryan unconscious and could not help obeying the commands of an inner voice".
Director Richard Ledes shows intellectual courage in making this film, and the actors portrayals give it the persuasiveness, subtlety, and depth necessary to communicate such an emotionally complex screenplay he wrote based on the play by Alain-Didier Weill. I would urge you to see V13, because you will come away with both a practical and theoretical understanding of the experience of collective viewing, an audience all watching the same film, actively engaged with their conscious, unconscious, and collective unconscious observations and impulses.
Perhaps Ledes' possible existential intention and message is to both determine and call upon our humanistic responsibility, morality, resistance, powerlessness, and conformity, our universal drives. The brilliant and devastating climax scene of the film, which should not be given away, prophesies Adolf's vision of evil, and Hugo's ethical awakening. Their disconnection from one another, is repeated in other juxtapositions of similarities that transform into polarities, which creates a sensibility by the end, that humankind are standing in an intersection at the crossroads of history in the current political landscape, and the signals are flashing for us to either move quickly or stand still, or yield and remain paralyzed.
