Central European Twins: Psychoanalysis and Cinema in Ildikó Enyedi's My Twentieth Century

Abstract

Ildiko Enyedi's My 20th Century (1989), set at the turn of the previous century, presents a fictional narrative with documentary elements, evoking a moment of convergence when both cinema and psychoanalysis were, like the twins born during the film's opening sequences, in their infancy. Together, the twins incarnate the split schisms of modernity, the competing claims on women confronted by the dual demands of fem ale sexuality and equality, the implications of self in relation to other. The film's stylistic power is rendered through the use of strategies of paradox and irony, favored tropes of Central European artistic representation; while critiquing of national and patriarchal discourses, it problematizes and comments upon female pleasure and desire. By foregrounding the power of the feminine in the encounter between twin protagonists and the patriarchal world of Freud's Central Europe, the director places female subjectivity at the center of the action, setting the stage for a narrative of desire localized in and focalized by the female gaze. In a key sequence of feminist solidarity, the sisters test the evolution of scientific wisdom by attending the lectures of Otto Weininger on “Sex and Character,” a moment that satirizes and undermines Victorian Austro-Hungarian moeurs and acknowledges the history of early feminist suffrage, repressed from public discourse during the decades of communism in Eastern Europe. Re-reading My Twentieth Century through the double lens of psychoanalysis and feminism at a moment when Hungary rejoins the European Community at once affirms and reclaims female desire and hope for something new.

Notes

¹Space considerations prevent the publication of detailed endnotes. Fuller reference documentation and discussion of the various points made in this article are available from the author upon request.

²Enyedi is both an innovative director and an eloquent voice on behalf of Hungarian cinema.

³Enyedi critiqued the mistreatment of animals by gesturing in My Twentieth Century toward scientific experiments conducted on monkeys and chimpanzees.

⁴I thank Andrew and Elizabeth Szegedy-Mászák for permission to view their private collection of Kertész and for the exhibition catalogue based upon it, André Kertész Photographs, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University (Middletown: 1976).

⁵“The end of the century is always a period of great change.… I am curious about the importance of the artist in such times: I note the enormous losses we have sustained, and await what is to come…the next hundred years will be organized according to values very different from those which are important to me” (Enyedi, private interview, February 8, 1999).

⁶Controversial author of Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung. Reprint of 1^st ed. (1903). Munich: Mathhes & Seitz, 1980) who took his own life in 1903 at the age of 23. According to the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), Weininger was driven by “the most vehement misogyny known to history” (p. 443).

⁷In my interviews and conversations with the director (in London during June of 2002), she emphasized that the film's title was meant to invite the audience to consider how the past century might have been, rather than offering a chronology or historical document.

⁸“I have rejected certain financing strategies at great cost…” (Enyedi, personal interview, February 8, 1999).

⁹The film's chronology begins in the early 19th century and extends to the mid-1930s; during this lifespan of over 120 years, the characters retain their youth in perpetuity.

Special thanks to Ildikó Enyedi, Katalin Bogyay, and the organizers of the 1^st European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (London, November 2001)