Topic

Therapy

Talking as treatment, and the evidence for it.

12: in film
13:00: average
156 min: in total
20: across the network

Therapy across the network →

All briefs12

13:00

After the Rehearsal

Ingmar Bergman · 1984

After the Rehearsal is a 1984 Swedish television film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, shot by Sven Nykvist and starring Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, and Lena Olin. Set entirely in a theatre rehearsal room, it traces a charged encounter between a veteran director and his lead actress — a meeting that triggers memories of her late mother, also his former lover and star. Drawing on Strindberg’s A Dream Play, it uses doubling, repetition, and minimal staging to explore inheritance, memory, and the blurred line between performance and lived experience.

13:00

Children of Paradise

Marcel Carné · 1945

Marcel Carné’s 1945 French romantic drama, written by Jacques Prévert and shot under Nazi occupation, follows courtesan Garance and the four men — mime, actor, criminal, aristocrat — who love her in 1830s Paris. Its 190-minute span balances theatrical grandeur with psychological restraint, using deep-focus cinematography, meticulous production design, and Arletty’s commanding stillness to explore love as asymmetry, art as resistance, and performance as identity.

13:00

Double Suicide

Masahiro Shinoda · 1969

Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide adapts Chikamatsu’s 1721 puppet play into live action, preserving its theatrical grammar: kuroko in black manipulate the world around the lovers, sets remain deliberately artificial, and music by Tōru Takemitsu punctuates rather than soothes. Shima Iwashita plays both wife and courtesan, binding the film’s duality in performance. It is a rigorous, unsentimental study of obligation, debt, and the formal limits of agency — where suicide is not escape but the only sentence the world permits.

13:00

Farewell My Concubine

Chen Kaige · 1993

Farewell My Concubine follows two Peking opera performers across five decades of Chinese history. Their artistic partnership and fraught personal bond are tested by war, revolution, and ideological purges. Directed by Chen Kaige and starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li, it uses the formal rigour of opera as both subject and structure — tracing how discipline, repetition, and gesture sustain and ultimately shatter the self.

13:00

My Dinner with Andre

Louis Malle · 1981

My Dinner with Andre (1981) is a 111-minute filmed dialogue between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, playing fictionalised versions of themselves over dinner in a Manhattan restaurant. Directed by Louis Malle, it unfolds as a single, sustained exchange about theatre, mysticism, fear, and everyday life — with no subplot, no visual digression, and no resolution beyond mutual understanding. Shot in Richmond, Virginia, and edited for rhythmic continuity rather than emphasis, it relies entirely on performance, writing, and acoustic intimacy. Its reputation rests on its formal rigour and philosophical candour.

13:00

Now, Voyager

Irving Rapper · 1942

Now, Voyager (1942) follows Charlotte Vale’s transformation from a cowed Boston heiress into a composed, quietly autonomous woman, guided by therapy, a transatlantic cruise, and a chaste, enduring bond with a married architect. Directed by Irving Rapper and starring Bette Davis, it avoids melodrama in favour of psychological precision, using Sol Polito’s lighting, Max Steiner’s score, and Casey Robinson’s adaptation to sustain tension in restraint. Its power lies in what it withholds — resolution, romance, catharsis — and what it insists upon: dignity as practice, care as continuity, and healing as ongoing recalibration.

13:00

Sawdust and Tinsel

Ingmar Bergman · 1953

Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 drama follows a struggling travelling circus in early-twentieth-century Scania. Ringmaster Albert Johansson and his mistress Anne confront financial ruin, marital rupture, and public humiliation, while clown Frost endures private shame. Shot by Sven Nykvist and Hilding Bladh in muted, unadorned compositions, the film treats the circus not as spectacle but as a site of embodied vulnerability — where dignity is performed, not possessed, and endurance replaces resolution.

13:00

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Steven Soderbergh · 1989

Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut is a tightly controlled drama set in Baton Rouge, following a married couple, the wife’s sister, and a visiting friend whose videotaped interviews about female sexuality unsettle their relationships. Shot on a $1.2m budget, with deliberate pacing, flat natural lighting by Walt Lloyd, and a sparse Cliff Martinez score, it builds tension through understatement. It won the Palme d’Or, launched the 1990s US indie wave, and remains a benchmark for psychological realism — not as catharsis, but as sustained, uncomfortable attention.

13:00

The Girls

Mai Zetterling · 1968

Mai Zetterling’s 1968 film follows three actresses touring a production of Lysistrata while managing motherhood, marital strain, and professional precarity. Shot with quiet precision by Rune Ericson and performed with restrained intensity by Bibi, Harriet and Gunnel Andersson, it locates feminist consciousness in accumulated small choices rather than grand declarations. Though its theatrical framing remains inert and its men underdeveloped, its enduring power lies in its unsentimental attention to the cost of being seen — and unseen.

13:00

The Magician

Ingmar Bergman · 1958

Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 The Magician follows a travelling troupe of performers led by mute magician Albert Vogler, whose claims of supernatural ability provoke suspicion in a Swedish village. Through layered deceptions, an autopsy gone awry, and a final royal summons, the film examines belief, authority, and the blurred line between fraud and revelation — all rendered in Gunnar Fischer’s muted, reflective cinematography and sustained by Max von Sydow’s physically restrained performance.

13:00

A Trip to the Moon

Georges Méliès · 1902

Georges Méliès’s 1902 A Trip to the Moon is a 16-minute silent French fantasy built from theatrical illusion, hand-painted sets, substitution splices, and hand-coloured frames. It follows astronomers who cannon-launch to the Moon, land in its eye, battle Selenites, and return with a captive. Made at Méliès’s Montreuil studio, it synthesises Verne, Wells, Offenbach, and Buffalo exposition spectacle into a self-contained world of visual puns and mechanical magic. Its power lies not in narrative or realism but in the sustained ingenuity of its craft—and its unwavering assertion that cinema is, first, a maker’s medium.

13:00

The Son's Room

Nanni Moretti · 2001

Nanni Moretti’s 2001 drama follows a psychoanalyst and his family in Ancona after their teenage son drowns. Shot with unadorned naturalism by Giuseppe Lanci and edited with deliberate restraint by Esmeralda Calabria, the film charts the quiet disintegration of routine, language, and professional distance. Its power lies in accumulation—not revelation—in how photographs, letters, and unspoken silences reconfigure daily life. It won the Palme d’Or and David di Donatello for Best Film.