Blog+News - David E. Tolchinsky

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

David E. Tolchinsky |

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Tuesday

Dec072021

My Screenplay Already Exists

Tuesday, December 7, 2021 at 5:24PM

On my worst days, I construct my screenplay, engineer my screenplay, design my script, and birth it into existence.

On my best days, I know that my screenplay already exists. I just have to find a way to have it reveal itself to me. I feel like I’m searching in the dark with a flashlight – with parts of the work revealing themselves to me, first slowly, in flashes, one by one, and then suddenly all at once as if someone suddenly turned on the light.

It’s not like my observing it is bringing it into existence. No, it was always there in the dark, I just couldn’t see it. It’s not my creation. It’s an independent being.

I relate this to courses I’ve taken on meditation. You can’t try to be creative. You already are. You have just to let your creativity exist, you observe it, and it reveals itself to you.

I relate this also to how my characters begin to emerge. In the beginning, I’m telling my characters what to say. Eventually, though they should tell me what they should say, I’m just writing it down. It’s like magic. . Suddenly, they’re alive.

Or maybe they always were, and I just couldn’t see them? I like that idea. Sometimes I believe it.

On my worst days, I continue to tell them what to say. On my worst days, I keep feeling like I’m grinding this screenplay into existence using all my tricks.

On my best days, I’m just watching and laughing or crying, writing it all down as fast as I can.

So, control is good for revising, for understanding what’s not quite working.

But for a first draft, for the beginning: There’s a time for mulling, thinking, and planning. And then there’s a time for taking long walks in the dark. . . with your flashlight.