Neuroscience in a movie that doesn’t come out of Charlie Kaufman’s brain is a good thing indeed. “Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing,” is the key phrase from neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on how the brain remembers. “In Search of Memory” finds director Petra Seeger combining this fascinating figure’s lectures and discussions along with recreation of his childhood experiences in Vienna during the early Nazi years and in New York as an emigrant to this country since 1939. This 79-year-old charmer has stories to tell, and it’s funny at times in unexpected ways. 95m. (Ray Pride)
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
Medium Cruel: When Memory Passes My father's recent death made me think not so much of my own mortality as the mortality of memory, both institutional and personal.
Sight Specific: Memory's Movie-Like Moments There are key considerations you can make about composition after the fact of witness or capture: framing, depth of field, the golden mean, I mean, let's write a book.
Spark, Memory: A Review Of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Nolan says he wrote his screenplay, drawn from the pages of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," from the perspective of his protagonist, the man who assembled the bomb that "would preface the firestorms over Hiroshima and Nagasaki…" For lack of a keener phrase, this is an intimate…
Seeing The Elephant: A Review Of Babylon The boisterous, brawling yet melancholy "Babylon," is a variation on film history, but more drawing for drama. It's gaudy and mean, celebratory and sorrowful.
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