Projecting mystery and terror, the title The Burning Child identifies Vienna as an uncanny place. Taken from a model dream that Sigmund Freud recounts in his Interpretationof Dreams, it consists of a nightmarish waking situation of a child’s corpse accidentally catching on fire while the father--exhausted--sleeps in the next room. In the feature film of that title, the "Burning Child" stands as figure for the relation between generations, imagined as an awakening from one dream or nightmare into another. The figure also stands for Vienna and its history, from the outbreak of war in 1914, through Austria’s humiliating defeat in 1918, Hitler’s victory parade in Vienna in 1938 and the extermination of Vienna’s Jews that followed, to the city’s devastation and division in 1945. Shot Vienna in the summer of 2014, exactly one century after Sarajevo, the film observes the city reawakening to new dreams as it fashions itself again as an important cultural center within Central Europe. Prior to making the film, the Vienna Project at Harvard commissioned Tim Reckart to create an animated short film representing Freud's dream. |