Research

My parents were fortunate that they spent the war where they did, in Tunisia rather than France, where a third of the Jews disappeared in the Holocaust.

Right now, I’m doing mini-courses, not so much about Holocaust films per se, but films that make you think about World War II. Maybe there is a sense of giving back; of being a survivor.

"Schindler’s List," "Inglourious Basterds." The latter is a film that thinks along the lines of “what if?” It’s about a Jewish woman who escaped assassination by the SS in France and participated in a plot to blow up Hitler and Goebbels in her cinema in Paris. It’s a film of pure imagination. 

Film is a powerful form of fiction. If you think of Greek tragedy, you are basically telling a story to get to some kind of emotional structure. At the end, the hero acquires some kind of self-consciousness, and you provoke some kind of catharsis for the spectator. A film or a novel leads you to a psychological reality and a rawness of emotions that isn’t often found in life. 

I think we disparage fiction unfairly. There is a famous story about Englishmen during the Blitz in World War II. In the shelters they recite to each other lines from Shakespeare. They don’t say “I shake with fear.” They recite Henry V. They are able to sustain each other with the lines they recall, that have everything and nothing to do with the situation they are in. This is one of the beautiful functions of art. It sustains us. Art and life are totally interwoven. Without art the world does not exist.

In the same way that French theory defined a lot of Western concepts, America has molded the world by means of Hollywood. You have a few filmmakers who have shaped the world. When you say “Kubrick” you are talking about a vision of the world. The bone that the ape in “2001” throws into the air becomes a spaceship. That’s 2 million years of evolution. Hal, the computer, is evolution gone awry. These concerns are utterly contemporary.

Today, with special effects and the way DVDs function, distinctions based on national cinemas are losing their importance. The co-production of films is as multinational as your Honda.

It’s like the Renaissance. We only think of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, but there were a lot of hack painters. It’s the 10 percent that matters.

My students were born in front of the image, but they didn’t have the rhetoric, the vocabulary, to address films. If you give them methods, if you go shot by shot, just as you diagram a sentence, and help them see the cause and effect that link one shot to another, you give them the tools to think their way into the filmic medium.

Engineering and anthropology students feel they can apply this method to their work. 

The head of the supercomputer lab here in San Diego told me that often scientists enter their fields because they are attracted to visual beauty. She also believes that aesthetics runs the world, along with symbols. The person who can frame an issue better will prevail.

So it’s not a question of deciding whether we should subsidize engineering or biotechnology or the humanities. You won’t have the ability to frame events without having a facility with rhetoric. 

It was gorgeous. Tunis was an extraordinarily beautiful city. All the houses were white with blue shutters. My memory is of sunshine, and smells. I played in the ruins of Carthage as a kid, in a Roman theater next to the palace of a king.

As a colonial city, it seemed to be a very rational world, a very organized world. In retrospect, I wonder if as a child, I perceived the suffering and the need for freedom in the people around us. 

You know, political freedom has a lot in common with psychological freedom. The suffering I witness today as a budding psychoanalyst, in my patients, may have something to do with the suffering that I was not in a position to address as a child. I think my approach to analyzing film is also a shorthand that leads to these questions, of beauty, and freedom, and pain.