Empathy
Nov 19, 2010
(Amie Siegel, 2003, USA, 35mm, 92 min)
Director in attendance
The postmodern Empathy explores the practice of psychoanalysis, reversing its traditional power structure, and putting psychoanalysts on the couch. It’s much more than a traditional documentary, with interviews of practicing psychoanalysts dispersed throughout, resulting in an ultimate collapse of the genres of fiction, screen test and documentary.
While following Lia (Gigi Buffington), an insecure actress undergoing psychoanalysis, a woman does a screen test for a role in Empathy (also Buffington), and later, a woman, now named Jennifer Scott James (still Buffington) is interviewed about her experience acting in the role of Lia.
Acting and therapy are connoted throughout the film for their presumed scripted nature, but even that assumption is tenuous, as fictional space and reality/public and private blur and the preconceived notion of stable identities is called into question.
"Poet Amie Siegel’s seriously playful essay on the art and craft of psychoanalysis is blatantly several films in one—psychological melodrama, historical essay and shrink verité." —J.Hoberman
Screens with:
The Sleepers
(Amie Siegel, 1999, USA, 16mm, 45 min)
Composed with a fragile narrative, The Sleepers is constructed of glimpses caught through apartment windows at night. The audience is made aware of the easy confluence of movie-goer and voyeur as we see a man watching TV, a lonely woman staring in the inky darkness, a comforting domestic scene. It’s unclear if they’re actors, or if they know they are being watched.