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quietearth [Celluloid 01.22.12] Netherlands scifi drama biography documentary history

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WOW. I have no idea how we missed this incredible looking documentary/biopic with heavy scifi elements which premiered at Venice. Variety had this to say: [it] has all the weirdness, cerebral depth and envelope-pushing style that David Cronenberg's .. "A Dangerous Method," lacks and we're just getting started. Based on the autobiography Memoirs of My Nervous Illness written by Daniel Paul Schreber which he wrote during confinement at an asylum, the story revolves around cosmic control and God trying to change him into a woman. It feels like Philip K. Dick during his VALIS days of paranoid madness which was towards the end of his life.

Shock Head Shoul will be playing at the upcoming International Film Festival Rotterdam and is directed by Simon Pummell.


In 1903 Daniel Paul Schreber published the most celebrated autobiography of madness 'from the inside' ever written. Shock Head Soul interleaves documentary interviews, fictional re-construction and CGI animation to portray his story. Daniel Paul Schreber was a successful lawyer who, in 1893, started to receive messages from God via a Writing Down Machine that spanned the cosmos. He spent the next 9 years confined to an asylum: tortured by delusions of cosmic control, suffering the belief that he was shifting gender and that his body was subjected to cruel 'miracles'. Schreber believed that only his submission to God's plan to change him into a woman would save the world. During his confinement he wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which has earned him lasting fame as an outsider artist, it allowed him to argue that that his belief system was a matter of religious freedom and that he was sane enough to return to society. Running as a recurrent motif through the film is an imaginary Writing Down Machine inspired by both the delusory writing down systems envisioned by Schreber and also the Hansen Writing Ball. This early visionary design for a typewriter is famous because Nietzsche used such a machine to compose reflections on the relationship between writing and technology. The film's mix of forms explores the borderline between religious vision and deluded fanaticism, and the intimate link between family secrets, psychiatric diagnosis, and our societal understanding of mental illness.


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arete (3 months ago) Reply

looks promising, hope they'll minimize the tropes of film-depicted insanity though, e.g "he was right all along" and the "sadistic asylum staff (/or bleeding heart doctor)"


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