Secrets of a Soul

Fascinating as the first 'serious' attempt to deal with Freudian psychoanalysis on the screen, Pabst's film is also notable for bringing a solid intellectual perspective to the 'expressionist' idiom of contemporary German movies. It's essentially a bourgeois melodrama, about a chemistry professor whose frustrated desire to father a child meshes with his jealousy of his wife's childhood sweetheart. The professor's fantasies are, of course, generously illustrated in the remarkable dream sequences, awash with sexual symbols. The deciphering of these dreams as he consults a psychoanalyst is necessarily too pat, but Pabst's aims still look as bold and daring as they must have done in 1926.