Films & Video

Nineteen Nineteen

 

 

UK, 1984, 99 mins

 

Directed By 

Hugh Brody 

 

Written By

Hugh Brody and Michael Ignatieff

 

Cast

Paul Scofield, Maria Schell, Frank Finlay,

Diana Quick, Colin Firth, Claire Higgins

Renowned writer, anthropologist and filmmaker Hugh Brody presents Nineteen Nineteen, the acclaimed 1984 feature he co-wrote with Michael Ignatieff. Sophie Rubin (Schell), returns to Vienna from exile in the US to find Alexander Scherbatov (Scofield), a White Russian aristocrat.

They are the last surviving patients of Sigmund Freud. Together, they dredge up their memories of 1919, mapping out their confessions on the couch and the impact of Nazism on their lives. Did Dr Freud help them, or hurt them? Was their unhappiness the result of their personal histories, or the turbulent age in which they lived?

"What Brody and Ignatieff, together with their remarkable cast. have succeeded in representing - to a truly astonishing extent – is a vision of the complex intertwining of current experience, personal memory, and world historical events."

Richard M. Gottlieb

"An ambitious and fascinating film, played with remarkable sensitivity and depth by Maria Schell and Paul Scofield… Mr Brody seems to have found a cinematic language for the process of thought and memory."        The New York Times

"A movie for grownups. For men and women. For anyone who feels and thinks. For anyone who has tried to love. For anyone who has survived the 20th Century."

Jerry Tallmer, New York Post

"Resonates and endures in memory in a way that no other film on the psychoanalytic process that I have seen ever has."

Leonard Quart, Cineaste

"A small, polished gem about large, ragged subjects: psychoanalysis, history, passion, despair, comfort."

  Jan Hoffman, Village Voice