Elisabeth Márton
was born in Stuttgart in 1952. She has resided in Sweden since 1973.
She studied psychology, film and theatre and worked as a critic and director's assistant.
In 1990 she finished director's studies at the Film Academy in Budapest.

 

AWARDS

Stillness
1987
Best Documentary
Best Editing
in Velden, Austria
1987
Best documentary
in Huesca, Spain
1987
Prix de jeunes realisateurs
in Tours, FranceMoonshadow
1991
Best feature film
Nordic Panorama
Aarhus, Denmark
1992
Hungarian Television PriceThe Way of the Winds
1995
Price for best essay,
13. Montreal International
Festival of Films of Art

FILMS BY ELISABETH MÁRTON

Stillness
Documentary
11 min., 16mm, black & white,
1986
The Garden
Short
21min., 16mm, black & white
1987
The Gull
TV-play
20min., colour
1988
Moonshadow
Fiction
55min., 16mm
colour
1990
Leonardo da Vinci
7 Short films
TV-prod.
35min.
1992
The Way of the Winds
16mm
colour
1994

back to crew

STATEMENT BY THE DIRECTOR
Since Sabina Spielrein reemerged from oblivion through the discovery of her correspondence with Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, numerous publications and interpretations of her life story and scientific work have appeared. The spectrum of phrases about her ranges from "tragic victim” through "incest victim” to "seduction on the couch”, "scandalous connivance between Jung and Freud”, and the feminist variant, the "victim as heroine”.

My intension in making this feature-documentary is primarily to create a cinematic counter-image to the above fragmentary and often negative views, one that deals with Sabina’s many-sided personality, her story and her work.

Since Sabina Spielrein’s story is so closely bound up with the early history of psychoanalysis, I chose an analogous way to structure it. The search for undiscovered landscapes of the soul, the subconscious, and the language of dreams with its own world of symbols suggest this path. I proceed like an analyst in a psychoanalytic session: linearly and chronologically on the one hand, disconnectedly and associatively on the other, leaping over the boundaries of time, place, and causality, back to childhood memories, and anticipating future events. This form also determines the rhythm of montage and the multi-layered sound backdrop.

Classical elements of documentary films such as inserts from historical documents and photographs, archive films and newsreels will convey the objectivity of the film story, interwoven with subjective scenes from Sabina Spielrein’s inner world.