Sigmund's Shorts: Memoirs of a nurse

About

Can there ever be a conclusion of analysis, or is it little more than myth? Do we ever actually get to the bottom of it and then proceed on our own, or would we continue eternally, condemned and blessed like Camus’ Sisyphus?

A hybrid of marionette theater and film, Memoirs of a nurse is the last part of a trilogy of video works exploring these themes. In this third installation, the story takes place after death, in a world beyond, where psychoanalysis turns out to be obligatory and also an infinite process. Through the eyes of the protagonist E, the film passes from her past life events and characters to her present analysis. The quest for the meaning of love intermingles with transference towards her therapist, whom she perceives as a rescuing, reparative object. In order to pay for their daily post-mortem sessions, the characters have to work through endless nights in a factory, on an assembly line which produces words.

Using a rich visual language, its multilayered tones echoing the blurred line between dream and nightmare and utopia and dystopia, the film is an affectionate but critical take on analysis. Guest appearances by David Lynch and Larry David as analyst and receptionist with strong Freud-Ferenczi tendencies.

Esther Toth was born in Budapest. She studied in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in the studio of Christian Boltanski. She received the Erasmus grant for the San Francisco Art Institute for the cinema section. She has spent several years studying the Stanislavski method in New York and Paris. But it was mainly her analytical work that motivated her, and upon which she directly drew her trilogy of films featuring marionettes.
Did I dream you or did you dream me? (2010) was produced with the help of the Fonds de dotation d’Agnès b. The second part of the trilogy Sisters, a classic case (2012), was completed with the help of the Centre national du cinema et de l’image animée and Tomorrowland. These two films were projected at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2013, followed by a debate with art critic Catherine Francblin. The third part of the trilogy Memoirs of a nurse (2015), was granted the help of the Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques and the Centre national des arts plastiques and will be projected in the Centre Pompidou in 2017.