Imaginary Dwellings: Képzeletszülte hajlékok és álompaloták : Jakab Irén munkásságáról filmes alkotásainak tükrében = Imaginary Dwellings. On the Work of Irene Jakab in the Light of her Film Works

Perenyei, Monika (2021) Imaginary Dwellings: Képzeletszülte hajlékok és álompaloták : Jakab Irén munkásságáról filmes alkotásainak tükrében = Imaginary Dwellings. On the Work of Irene Jakab in the Light of her Film Works. ARS HUNGARICA : A BÖLCSÉSZETTUDOMÁNYI KUTATÓKÖZPONT MŰVÉSZETTÖRTÉNETI INTÉZET FOLYÓIRATA, 47 (3). pp. 293-326. ISSN 0133-1531

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Abstract

The focus of the present study is the film Imaginary Dwellings, produced in international cooperation between three psychiatrists (Gaston Ferdière, kurt Behrends and Irene Jakab) and mainly edited by irene Jakab. The chapters of the study are structured according to the layers of context that were present at the time of the film’s creation. in the first and second chapters, I examine the film in the context of irene Jakab’s work as a psychiatrist-psychologist, which included a psychological analysis of imaginary architects. This research, along with the film, was presented by Jakab at the SIPE congress in Jerusalem in 1976. in the next chapter, I compare the film Imaginary Dwellings with the writings of a Hungarian expert on child psychology, the bilingual psychologist Ferenc Mérei, also published in the 1970s, who analysed surrealism from psychoanalytic viewpoint, and the relation between film and psychoanalyis. The imaginary architects, specially Ferdinand Cheval known as the embodiment of the surrealist way of life, create, in Mérei’s words, the “palace of their dreams”; the life’s work of the imaginary architects, in the literal sense of the word, is a striking example of “an internally driven creative life”. in the fourth chapter „no roles. But different ways of acting, of progressing”, I analyse Imaginary Dwellings in the critically charged tradition of the relationship between art brut artists and film (from the film jointly produced by Abraham Ségal, Delphin Seyrig and Mary Barnes, through Agnes Varda’s widely recognized film The Gleaners and I, to Tiago Pereire and Alexandre Pomar’s documentary, 2015), culminating in the conclusion: the film Imaginary Dwellings and its subject, the “imaginary dwelling”, have now acquired a metaphorical meaning in the life’s work of a psychiatrist who left her country in 1959 but maintained a “love affair” with it throughout her life. Following on from edward said’s question: is dwelling in our contemporary world possible at all, or are we all exiles and nomadic wanderers? (1993 reith lecture, BBC). Irene Jakab’s oeuvre, preserved in publications and films and in the memories of those who knew her personally, is also her imaginary dwelling, the components of which she worked tirelessly all her life to construct and make her home. Thus, art is present in irene Jakab’s work not only as a tool for clinical practice, but also as an activity with a non-medical therapeutic effect.

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