John Menick

Starring Sigmund Freud is a video memento for Sigmund Freud's little-known film career. Based on an essay John Menick published in Frieze in 2011, the video collects the dozens of appearances that the character of Sigmund Freud has made on small and big screens. After the 1950s, when pill vials replaced analytic couches, the father of psychoanalysis found a second career impersonating himself in everything from a John Huston clunker to a Star Trek episode. The video suggests that maybe it is in front of the camera, alongside surgically enhanced starlets and CGI chimeras, that “Herr Doktor” will find his final resting place. This video was produced by the Kadist Foundation and commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13).

In the fall of 2006, several US and UK newspapers ran stories concerning psychological breakdowns experienced by Japanese citizens traveling in Paris, France. In an average of a dozen cases a year, Japanese travelers would undergo extreme depression and cultural rejection, sometimes culminating in hallucinations and traumatic shock. The most extreme cases were repatriated permanently to Japan. According to these articles, it was Professor Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist living in France, who was the first to identify this condition as "Paris Syndrome." Paris Syndrome is a short, cinematic essay analyzing the cultural implications of travel-related mental illnesses

A generative film exploring the automation of culture through one of the earliest electronic instruments: the Telharmonium. As in much of Menick’s work, the film links the history of technology with contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence and the mechanization of creative labor.