Click Here to Read: Moe Berg, A film by Aviva Kempner on the Moe Berg Film website.
Category: Movies
75 years since the release of Hollywood classic Casablanca
Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049
Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow is a major work, but what does the defense of immigrants entail? By Eric London 15 November 2017
Film Night Nise: The Heart of Madness at WCSPP
WCSPP FILM NIGHT NISE: THE HEART OF MADNESS Friday, November 3, 2017 7:30 P.M. Admission: $10
Directed by Roberto Berliner, this beautiful movie explores the power of human connection, art and the ideals at the heart of psychoanalysis. Set in 1940’s Brazil, the movie tells the true story of Dr. Nise da Silviera (played by award-winning actress Gloria Pires). The only female psychiatrist in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Dr. da Silviera refuses to employ the new and violent electroshock therapy in her treatment of schizophrenics. After challenging her colleagues she is ridiculed and left to run the long-defunct occupational therapy program. As she seeks to find alternative ways to care for her patients who have long been mistreated, isolated and abandoned to institutional care, Nise first creates a space of safety and connection. She then begins to understand the meaning of her patients’ behaviors and actions. Sustained by her deep belief in the human capacity for communication, the potential for healing through the symbolic expression of inner experience and its recognition by others, and inspired by the work of Carl Jung, Nise helps transform the lives and experiences of the patients in her care.
A discussion following the screening will be facilitated by Connie M. de Pinho, Ph.D.
Continue reading Film Night Nise: The Heart of Madness at WCSPP
May a word be spoken on behalf of Kevin Spacey?
An interview with a Loving Vincent painter-animator
Motherless Brussels: Notes on Chantal Akerman’s ‘No Home Movie
“The Remains of the Day”: The Tragic Solution
This is the second of three articles comparing three films, It Can Happen to You (posted October, 2010), The Remains of the Day (posted November, 2010) and It’s a Wonderful Life (to be re-posted December, 2010)
Both It’s a Wonderful Life and It Could Happen to You provide us with gratifying fantasies that allow us to feel, through identification, that we have overcome our limitations. George Bailey and Charlie the cop are trapped by circumstances and conscience. George must overcome his idealization of his father and his reluctance to overcome his male rivals. His father dies, his rivals step aside, and he becomes a hero to the town. Charlie is trapped in a marriage to a woman he does not love by a conscience that will not allow him to be unfaithful. The film allows him to leave his wife and to find the woman of his dreams without his ever having to cross the boundaries of his conscience. There is another solution, the tragic solution. In The Remains of the Day , Stevens the butler is trapped by his position and his idealization of his father and his employer. He loves a woman, but unlike George Bailey he cannot pursue her and unlike Charlie the cop he does not have her thrown into his arms. He remains hopelessly trapped by his circumstances and his character, and we, the viewers, are trapped vicariously with him. Continue reading “The Remains of the Day”: The Tragic Solution