Two Impossible Films
Some time in the 1920s, Sam Goldwyn went to Vienna to ask Sigmund Freud to write him a screenplay. He wanted to bill it as “the greatest love story from the world’s most famous doctor of love”, but Freud scotched the idea. Around the same time, Sergei Eisenstein, another man not short on ambition, conceived a desire to film Karl Marx’s doorstopper Das Kapital. Vetoed by Stalin, that film was never made either. Now, however, Canadian artist Mark Lewis has made these Two Impossible Films.
“The idea was to take the two stories of impossibility and try to imagine how they would look if they were made today,” says Lewis. His film is a composite of the two unfilmable films, squashing both prolix theorists into 28 minutes of screentime, a feat he achieved by missing out the middles of each film.
Neat trick if you can get away with it…
To Lewis, it is no coincidence that the two impossible films - screening as part of the group show Rear View Mirror at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until November 7 - were connected to the 20th century’s two big theories. “I’m interested in the idea of failure. There is a history of modernism that could be written as the history of failure - the failure of utopia, of trying to achieve things. Marx was right. But his optimism was misplaced. And the same with Freud.”
Thursday 30 Sep 2004 | Paul | The Pit
