Sigmund Freud’s Dora/Thriller

The currents of psychoanalysis and feminism were pulling the experimental cinema of the 1970s in a new direction, away from the primarily formal preoccupations of structural film and toward narrative and emotion, yielding films like Journeys from Berlin/1971, Dora, and Thriller, which scholar Noël Carroll labeled the New Talkies. The latter two works reconceive the stories of women originally told by men: Potter’s tenebrous early film envisions La Bohème’s Mimi investigating the scenario of her own death in Puccini’s opera, while the collectively produced Dora reads and adapts the drama of Freud’s famous case study as a way to examine the politics at play in the very process of representation.