What Exactly Is Going on There in the Dark?

On the phenomenology of going to movies

with Colin McGinn, Walter Murch, Molly Haskell and Jonathan Miller
moderated by Lawrence Weschler

Saturday, November 5, 7 pm
NYU's Cantor Film Center / 36 E. 8th Street
Free and Open to the Public /reservations NOT required/212.998.2100

This time out, the folks at the NYIH/NYU ponder the uncanny allure of the projected image: how can something so flickeringly immaterial be so relentlessly compelling? What precisely is it that catches and holds us when we gaze up at the screen? How do movies work on our minds (indeed, to what extent does what we see on the screen seem to recapitulate the workings of consciousness itself)? How does the experience of attending the screening of a film compare to that of attending a play, or of reading a novel, or, for that matter, of losing oneself into a dream?

This symposium rises out of two immediate occasions. For starters, Institute Fellow Colin McGinn, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University (and author, among others, of The Making of a Philosopher, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, and Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning) is just releasing a new book, The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, exploring many of these very themes. (For more on that book, contact Pamela Mullin at Pantheon, 212-572-2854.)

Secondly, Walter Murch, arguably the most celebrated sound and picture editor in the world (veteran of such projects as The Conversation, The Godfather movies, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient; and author of the seminal treatise In the Blink of an Eye, and, with Michael Ondaatje, of The Conversations) has just finished editing Sam Mendes's screen adaptation of Anthony Swofford's memoir of the first Gulf War, Jarhead, in which, among other things, he has had to edit a scene in which the Marines juice up a squadron of battle bound grunts by screening for them the climactic battle scenes from a series of Vietnam films, of all things, and in particular the Valkyrie helicopter raid from Apocalypse Now, a scene which Murch himself had labored over for months (in an entirely different temper) almost thirty years ago. The way such scenes work (or can be made to work) on subsequent audiences has therefore been much on Murch's mind recently (he will screen the scene in question as part of the symposium). Jarhead will itself be opening nationwide the day before the symposium.

Molly Haskell, another fellow of the Institute and a brilliant critic, is the author of From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies and Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists, in both of which she spent many pages pondering many of these very issues.

Jonathan Miller, the English neurologist and polymath director of theater, opera and television, veteran as well of that ur-comedy group Beyond the Fringe, will be in residence as a visiting fellow at the Institute during November 2005. For his part, he is not so sure about the power of movies; in particular, he has grave doubts over the capacity of movies to approximate the power of great novels.

Moderator Lawrence Weschler is the director of the Institute. A longtime New Yorker staff writer, his books include Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder and, most recently, Vermeer in Bosnia. The November issue of Harper's magazine features his anatomization of Murch's Jarhead perplex, "Valkyries over Iraq: Is it Even Possible to Make an Antiwar Movie?"

Interviews and images can be obtained by way of the NYIH at 212.998.2100 or info.nyih@nyu.edu

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU was established in 1976 for promoting the exchange of ideas between academics, professionals, politicians, diplomats, writers, journalists, musicians, painters, and other artists in New York City-and between all of them and the city. It currently comprises 190 fellows. Throughout the year, the NYIH organizes numerous public events and symposia.