Arts 15 Life
At The Movies
`Empathy'
In a mixture of documentary and fiction, filmmaker explores
the tricky boundaries between psychoanalysts and their patients.
JULIE WIENER
Artistic
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Special to the Jewish News
T
he setting: A therapist's empty
office. The scene: Offscreen, a
psychoanalyst is counseling a
patient on the phone. When he returns
to the chair, the analyst asks the invisible
camerawoman if she was recording the
conversation. "No," she lies.
So begins the rather confus-
ing and often frustrating
Empathy, experimental film-
maker Arnie Siegel's exploration
of psychoanalysis. The Detroit Film
Theatre screens the film 7:30 p.m.
Monday, Oct. 11, at the Detroit
Institute of Arts.
While Empathy raises interesting ques-
tions about the renowned talking cure,
one can gain more insights about its
complexities — and certainly have a bet-
ter time — from watching a few
episodes of The Sopranos.
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much, despite witnessing several of her
therapy sessions. Perpetually stiff and
uncomfortable looking, Lia makes some
vague references to a difficult mother
and remote father, but never reveals any
interesting, telling details about her life,
and certainly never offers us any reason
to care about her.
Rather than getting to the heart of
who Lia is and why she is in therapy, the
filmmaker instead subjects us to count-
less scenes accompanied by significant-
sounding music yet not much action or
insight: Lia sitting in a cafe looking out
on traffic, Lia riding an elevator, Lia
swimming in an indoor pool. Scenes in
which she talks to friends and family
(and oddly, despite mention of a
boyfriend, we never see her interacting
with him) seem stilted. Even her therapy
sessions are so dull that I found myself
pitying the psychiatrist.
In fact, all the people in the Lia story
seem less like fully realized characters
On The Couch with Arnie Siegel
JULIE WIENER
Special to the Jewish News
M
Grebler
Ceramic
Fancy
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'42"
Empathy pivots on three main axes:
the fictional story of Lia, an underem-
ployed 38-year-old actress seeing a thera-
pist for reasons never fully explained;
documentary interviews with three real-
life, middle-aged, male (perhaps Jewish?)
analysts; and a film within a film detail-
ing the shared intellectual heritage of
psychoanalysis and modernist architec-
ture. Scattered into the mix is confusing
footage of women auditioning
for the role of Lia, a gushing
(fictional?) interview that the
actress playing Lia gives on a tele-
vision talk show and images of people
walking down a hall and into a thera-
pist's office.
All in all, it is too much for one
movie, leaving the viewer feeling bom-
barded with questions and ideas, none
of which are ever fully explored or devel-
oped.
Perhaps most disappointing is the tale
of Lia, about whom we never learn
idway through my meeting with Arnie Siegel, the
creator of Empathy, I wonder if we should be sit-
ting in Eames chairs.
The modernist, leather-upholstered recliners were long a
must-have for therapists, and several minutes of Siegel's quirky
and somewhat frustrating quasi-documentary about psycho-
analysis revolves around this piece of furniture.
Instead, we are sitting on ordinary wooden chairs in one of
the many hip cafes of Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighbor-
hood teeming with intense, grunge-wearing artists and writ-
ers. Siegel is here for a few days on break from a two-year stint
in Germany, where she is participating in an artists' fellowship
program and working on her next film.
A youthful-looking 30, Siegel is no newcomer to Sigmund
Freud's famous talking cure. She grew up in a secular Jewish
home in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago, a community
in which many of her friends had analyst parents and in
which therapy was viewed as almost a "rite of passage."
However, while she has been in therapy herself, Siegel insists
that Empathy is not based on her own experiences. Indeed,
she is fairly private about her personal life, refusing in our
interview to answer questions about her family or even to say
whether or not her own parents are analysts. "Psychoanalyze
the film, not me," she said.
As a documentary filmmaker (Empathy is her first feature-
length project), Siegel said she was drawn to the topic out of
what she saw as problematic power dynamics shared by film-
makers and analysts.
"There's always one person who knows more about the
other and who's asking questions or listening and can present
a situation where they're being very empathic," she said.
"They're not. They're being manipulative to the person who's
revealing things. That situation seemed to me kind of ripe to
be explored -- the comparison between the two things."
Siegel said she was intrigued by many of the issues posed by
the patient-therapist relationship, such as the boundaries
between truth and fiction, public and private space, bound-
aries and "how people perform themselves or the ideas of
themselves [and] to what extent they create fictions for other
people or to what extent there really is an authentic self."
Siegel's current project, tentatively titled The Captives,
explores issues of identity from a different perspective: looking
at the lives of Jews and other ethnic minorities in contempo-
rary Germany.
Although she is not particularly interested in the religious
aspects of Judaism, Siegel says it is impossible for a Jew to live
in Germany without thinking about Jewish history and with-
out feeling a cultural connection to Judaism. Although she has
not encountered anti-Semitism there, she said she is disturbed
by Germans' "personal silence" about the Holocaust.