Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts Launches

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/01/northwestern-student-film-incubator-tackles-mental-health-portrayals-in-media/

photo by Joe Mazza/Bravelux.com

Pritzker Pucker Lecture on the Self and Possession

Dear Friends: In the coming weeks I will be telling you more about NU/SOC's Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts, which I'm directing. Briefly, we're encouraging screenwriters/filmmakers to think more deeply about their depictions of mental health/illness by looking at all from a variety of angles - religion, medicine, history, anthropology, psychiatry, gender, race, media studies, etc. 

One aspect of the Lab is public programming (lectures, screenings, performances) on Thursday evenings. The first event is next Thursday Jan 6 at 7 p.m. CST. It's virtual (NU is virtual until Jan 18) so come one, come all. You just have to RSVP at the link below and you will be sent zoom info . Please join us. Best, Dave Tolchinsky

Lecture: 

Do you really have a self? A story about possession

By Michelle Molina, Associate Professor, Religious Studies/History/Gender Studies, Northwestern University 

Thursday, Jan 6 | 7:00 p.m.

Virtual, RSVP

The past provides a playground of images, texts, and ideas that can both inform and trouble contemporary storytelling about mental health and mental illness. This lecture will people your mind with images and ideas from the religious history of possession in the western world to show how its questions about the permeability of bodies and selves were key to the emergence of the medicalized sense of “self” we have today. We will look at images from the past, but also film clips (the melancholy Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, or the spider god in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly) to think about how “religion” on screen points toward the problem of selves that are largely formed by others, sometimes other-worldly “others.” Despite our contemporary discourse that emphasizes “bounded” selves, we have to ask, are the boundaries of “self” firm for anyone?

Prof. Molina’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A, moderated by Studio Lab director Dave Tolchinsky.

RSVP required:

https://forms.office.com/Pages/DesignPage.aspx...

Info at studiolab@northwestern.edu

Filming with Guy Miles

Co-producing Debra Tolchinsky's True Memories and Other Falsehoods. Filming with Guy Miles, what an amazing person - he spent 19 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.  #californiainnocenceproject #wrongful convictions. 

Portland Shakes Interview

Interesting to come across an older interview, to see what I was thinking about and working on a few years ago. Some things have changed, but what hasn't:

Be fearless. Be persistent. Be a nice person in real life, but be a total monster in your writing. Write monsters. Write monstrously. Write the scene you can’t see in real life but it would be great to see. Write a dark wish. Write something that will change the world. Write something that you get up in the middle of the night to reread. And reread and reread. And don’t let the bastards get you down. 

https://portlandshakes.org/interview-with-playwright-david-e-tolchinsky/

Cassandra featured with other works by NU Faculty

My film Cassandra was featured by NU News with other works by NU faculty.

Still from Cassandra