Moses

During the mid-1930s, as the Nazis were cutting a swathe through central Europe, Vienna-based psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was writing his final work. Completed in 1939, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, known in English as ’Moses and Monotheism’, was a study of the origins of monotheism. A divisive book, in part because of its claim that Moses had been born Egyptian and not a Jewish slave, it forms the basis of Jenni and Lauri Luhta’s fascinating lecture-performance film.

The Finnish experimental visual, media and performance artists have created a chamber piece that seeks to explore the link between Freud and Moses through analysis of the psychoanalytic text and their performances. Delivering a performance nothing less than staggering, Jenni plays Freud, with Lauri as Moses, creating a fictional dialogue across time and space. The impressively staged tableaux lean into Freud’s final years, as he escaped Austria and persecution, settling in London, with infirmity and age limiting his capacities, and his own Jewish heritage – even in the face of his staunch atheism – causing him to ponder on the role Moses has played in the history of humanity. The resulting film possesses a dream-like quality that is rare in recent cinema!

– Vanja Kaludjercic