HYSTERICAL GIRL

Directed by KATE NOVACK
2020 / 13 min

Sigmund Freud produced only one major case history of a female patient, a teenage sexual assault victim. Hysterical Girl uses a feminist lens to imagine Dora, the name Freud used at the turn of the 20th century to protect his subject’s identity, as a girl today. In the film, she tells her version of events, alongside Freud’s own words. Dora was 17 when her parents brought her to therapy after she came forward about being sexually assaulted by a family friend. “Please,” Dora’s father asked Freud, “bring her to reason.” During the 11-week treatment, Freud chipped away at the case like a detective of the unconscious: why would you keep seeing the man you say assaulted you? Are you out for revenge? Did you send out signals? Did you secretly want it? A century later, the questions that women face haven’t changed much. Woven throughout the film are several decades of archival material — from the cinema of John Hughes and Roman Polanski to the Congressional testimonies of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford. What emerges is a visceral portrait of the ways in which Freud’s theory of hysteria silences and shames survivors more than 100 years later.

Kate Novack’s feature documentary, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ANDRE, screened at The Future of Film is Female: Part 2 at the Museum of Modern Art in February 2019.

KATE NOVACK is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. Her most recent film Hysterical Girl (New York Times Op-Docs/Grasshopper Film) revisits the only major case history that Sigmund Freud produced of a female patient. It was nominated for best short by the International Documentary Association, and The New Yorker critic Richard Brody called it “Extraordinary... strikes at the very foundations of the field of psychology, and the historical failure to believe victims which has not yet been righted.”

In 2018, Kate directed The Gospel According to Andre (Magnolia Pictures), which was named one of the top ten Queer films of the year by Indiewire. A former print journalist, Kate was a producer and writer on Page One: Inside The New York Times (Magnolia Pictures/Participant Media, 2011). She has worked in a producing or story role on several films, including Ivory Tower (2014), The First Monday in May (2016) and A Table In Heaven (2008).

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