Presenting Problems: The Short Films of Garrick Duckler

These films came from a time when my therapy wasn't going very well and I needed to find a way to explain what was happening. I had spent three and half years in this "failed" analysis (was it failed?) and I found it was important to represent to myself something I didn't know what to do with. So I wound up with these stories, fables or fairy tales that seemed to start fine enough but pretty quickly spun out of control.

Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!

At the time, I wrote the stories to communicate something about what my that wasn't being seen in the therapy and it wasn’t until I started a new therapy that held a completely different type of experience that I went back to the stories and turned them into short films, into something other people might find of interest.

Looking at them now, I can see the films all have something to say about the problems of aloneness and of togetherness, and also something about the perils of getting “better”: the sense that we must destroy or leave behind or transform all of the people that therapy asks us to discover if we are to be different. Also, in the films, we see one thing and hear another; in therapy, we know one thing but we feel another (we know that what we're saying doesn’t make sense but we feel it to be true). The tension between perceiving one thing but believing another seems best suited for film, where the story is told in how we are to understand what the words are saying and how we apprehend what the images say.

Another aspect of this project is that each film was created using a different visual vernacular , and this comes from an idea I had that the films would (once put together) offer a type of experience, something like Ulysses, in which the viewer would follow a theme or an idea throughout different environments or "neighborhoods" (a comic book, a foreign film, hand-drawn animation, movie stills) so that the different mediums might offer different ways by which we are able to know about something.

To say that these films are psychoanalytic films is not true but I do believe the films and psychoanalysis might have something to say to each other.

The hope I have for these films (the hope of analysis) is to capture something of both the reality of how the world is being perceived as well as the illusory quality of that "reality." I suppose this is where the comic element is since any time someone invents his or her own problems, there is comedy (whether we laugh or cry is a different matter). The tragic part, I suppose, is our belief that inventing such a problem gives us our life back when it has been taken from us. But that's the hard part –the revenge on the past through the present tense. 

Garrick Duckler

The first set in the Presenting Problems Series, “Beginnings” includes the films: “The Safe,” “The Eskimo” and “At the Movies.”

Upcoming sets include: “On Groups (and Being Alone),” “Therapy and its Outcomes,” and “Mood Disorders.”