Interpretation of Dreams

"Interesting" and "provocative"
Vincent Canby, The New York Times

"A strange and superb film"
Matthew Flamm, New York Post

"Astonishing marriage of Freudian thinking and history”
Boston Globe

"A truly magical and extraordinary film…"
Cinema Independent, London.

"A film for intellectuals, packed with consequential ideas"
Leah Garchik, San Francisco Chronicle.

BLOGOSPHERE:

"The Soviet Union’s collapse, and the turmoil, and the mental and moral disarray, that ensued in the region, initially led to a spate of (mostly pedophilic) pornographic films and, worse, hateful, reactionary, proto-tsarist assaults, nearly all of them strident, coarse and incompetently made. Preferable are honest, serious films that address aspects of the Soviet regime, or Soviet society and daily life, in an analytical rather than an attack mode. One of these is Andrei Zagdansky’s documentary The Interpretation of Dreams (1990) which, in a stream of haunting images both archival and new, celebrates the dissolution of the Soviet ban on Sigmund Freud’s writings. Now that Russians can freely access what are possibly the most essential documents for understanding the twentieth century, they can record their own fresh discovery of these works, perhaps most pertinently Totem and Taboo, and apply it to Soviet history. This in fact is what Zagdansky has done. The unspoken irony throughout this highly imaginative film is the deficit of perspective and insight that the ban on Freud enforced on the Soviet Union".
Dennis Grunes. WorldPress.com