Shock Head Soul

con Hugo Koolschijn, Anniek Pfeifer

e con Thom Hoffman, Jochum ten Haaf

28/30

With his second cross-media film SHOCK HEAD SOUL, British director Simon Pummell makes us dive into the world of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842 – 1911), a successful German lawyer who developed a severe schizophrenic disorder at the peak of his career and started to receive messages from God which he described in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Thanks to its interpretation by Sigmund Freud, who wrote that Schreber's mental disorder was a tragic result of his repressed homosexuality, the book had a major influence on the history of psychoanalysis. As Schreber’s psychosis progressed, he felt persecuted by his physician Dr. Flechsig, who he believed to be the murderer of his soul and who was going to emasculate him. He was convinced that the universe wants him to become a woman so that he could be penetrated by God.

After spending nine years in a mental asylum, Schreber’s memoirs turned him into a well-known artist and served him as a means of evidence to argue that he was sane enough to return to his family, insisting on his freedom of religion.

SHOCK HEAD SOUL is a docu-fiction movie that merges interviews, re-enactment and animation in order to approach the complexity of its subject matter in a deeper way than a conventional narrative could do.

An eye-catching leitmotif throughout the film is the “Writing Down Machine”, depicted as a hovering ball covered with typewriter keys reminiscent of vintage steam punk illustrations. The depiction in Pummell’s movie was inspired by both Schreber’s memories, but also the Hansen Writing Ball, which was the first commercially produced typewriter. Throughout the course of the movie, Schreber loses control of his writing machine just like Williams Lee’s typewriter-cockroaches in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

The surreal twilight zone between Schreber’s perception of the world is incomparably realized with a subtle fusion of CGI and breathtakingly composed images. Present-day psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and scientists are dressed in contemporary vintage fashion, sitting in an imaginary digital courtroom commenting on Schreber’s destiny like witnesses and to top it all off, Pummell staged an imaginary dialogue between the interviewees and the fictional character of Schreber’s wife Sabine.

Yet the film missed the chance to live his full potential, as his redundant narrative anti-structure destroys the atmospheric maelstrom it created in its exposition. At times the baroque classical score, which reminded me a lot of Nyman composition in Peter Greenaway’s films, overpowers the superb cinematography. As a result, there are inelegant and overcharged video art sequences, which seemingly don’t have any dramatic justification but are mere self-adulation.

Nevertheless, it is evident that Pummell put a lot of love into the development of his characters and took them very seriously. He shows a lot of empathy and respect in his interpretation of Daniel Schreber, played by dutch actor Hugo Koolschijn who could prove his wide range of expressiveness. Pummell staged Schreber’s delusions and his travesty in a very subtle way which made me truly feel its drivenness and desire.

The movie’s focus on Daniel Schreber’s relationship to Sabine serves as an insightful and sensitive example for the harsh daily life of couples who have to deal with schizophrenia. In SHOCK HEAD SOUL, we are walking on a tightrope between mystical inspiration and fallacious self-deception, exploring how society used to with mental disorders back at the end of the 19th century.

04:09:2011