How a psychologist thinks about your favorite Film & TV characters.
Leo Hurwitz’s powerful 1948 WWII documentary, with its ironic title Strange Victory (Watch Here), is just as timely today as it was then. Because the film explores the inescapable question: “If we won, why do we look as if we lost? And, if Hitler died, why does his voice still pursue us through the spaces …
Life doesn’t shatter in an instant, but it can seem like it when you live in a delusionally “happy,” thumbing your nose at all kinds of rules, sort of “fun.” This is the stuff of mania and mania teeters on a very delicate balance; it can easily come crashing down. Plus manic defiance is no …
The Making of Native Land Leo Hurwitz’s Native Land (Watch Film) is a 1942 expose of repressive forces against labor organizing. The film is based on the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee’s (1936-1941) 65 volumes of testimony to the Senate on their investigation. And, the investigation’s results couldn’t be more troubling. The Committee found that …
Where is home? That’s the complicated question at the heart of Garth Davis’ film Lion, for a lost, bewildered, illiterate, scared, traumatized, stoically brave, and lovingly gentle 5-year-old boy, Saroo (Sunny Pawar). This little boy accidentally finds himself on a train taking him far, far from home, where he can’t speak the language and has …
In a dictatorship, human hearts don’t matter. Leo Hurwitz shows this frightening reality in his powerful film, Heart of Spain 1937. America is now in a fight similar to that of Spain’s democratically elected republic against fascist General Francisco Franco. We need a conduit of empathy similar to Dr. Norman Bethane’s blood transfusions to soldiers in …
Loneliness is a silent world. That world is the world Ben (Oakes Fegley), Rose (Millicent Simmonds), and Jamie (Jaden Michael) inhabit in Todd Haynes’ gorgeously filmed and sensitively rendered half-period piece, half-silent and all-around beautifully woven film Wonderstruck. Haynes draws on the visual; on images that speak louder than words, to tell the story of …
