Science on the Screen

Last night, at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, I attended a screening of a wonderful documentary by Richard and Carole Rifkind entitled "Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist". This film documented the path and travails of 3 graduate students who were lucky enough to be in the laboratory of Dr. Lawrence Shapiro at Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons in New York City. The beauty and clarity with which the film was shot made the graduate student experience feel as real as any film could. As someone ...

For anyone who doubted whether the new administration would be savvy of the importance of science in America, Obama's inaugural speech provided a great sense of hope. Ann Marie (the Executive Director of TalkingScience) and I watched the inaugural ceremony with a crowd of women (and even a few men) who packed into The White House Project's brunch at Caroline's comedy club on Broadway.
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Canadian-born Dara Bratt won the Imagine Science Film Festival's People's Choice award for In Vivid Detail (runtime 18 minutes). The short explores the impact on a budding romance of a man's childhood brain injury, a disorder called prosopagnosia. The phenomenon prevents him from recognizing faces; features appear to be mere lines. At first his girlfriend is skeptical that he really has this neurological disorder, but then struggles to understand and accept it. After watching a street artist draw a portrait of a girl, the man, who is an architect, tries ...

I caught up with filmmaker Jessica Sharzer, who directed The Wormhole, the winner of the Imagine Science Film Festival's Scientific Merit Award. Ms. Sharzer made The Wormhole seven years ago while a film student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The 19-minute short tackles the emotions of a boy, Wally, who is mourning his beloved kidnapped brother. Wally wants to rewrite the past. The present if fraught with tension between him and his mother, who, in her despair, is afraid for her one remaining son’s safety. She ...

Normally, filmmakers add a huge dose of fiction to a dash of science in order to make a movie that is palatable to a mainstream audience. Fiction has no limits; it takes us as far as the imagination can dream-- so it's not surprising that these types of stories often draw a larger audience than, say, practical texts that detail hard facts proved by scientific research and peer-reviewed by dozens of nerds whose vocabulary is chock full of 14 letter words that include so many x's and y's that not ...

By Karen A. Frenkel
On the eve before Halloween, the Imagine Science Festival culminated by bestowing the Nature Scientific Merit Award on Jessica Sharzer for The Wormhole (2002) and the Nature People's Choice Award on Dara Bratt for In Vivid Detail (2007). Each filmmaker received a $2,500 check. These works, in which science was integral to the plot, emotionally gripped the judges and audiences. But more on that in a moment.
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-- By Laura Pelcher
A man whose home is in a suitcase and a woman whose home is in her head are the subjects of the final film- Great Genius and Profound Stupidity. The director, Benita Raphan, takes on these historical eccentrics to demonstrate that genius and stupidity are twin concepts. The woman, Helen Keller, was deaf and blind since before the age of two. Without any visual or audio memories, she is somehow able to lyrically describe her surroundings with rare insight.
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--By Laura Pelcher
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi can't sleep at night. His anxiety over the world’s problems causes him to have bad dreams. One night, with a bite of a pepper, his anxieties are eased. Paprika, directed by Kati Anguelov, is an animated film with a simplistic art direction that tells the simple yet transformative tale of the little pepper man who whispers the secret of Vitamin C to Gyorgyi. The illnesses plaguing people would finally have a worthy opponent in the powers of the little pepper man and Gyorgyi’s work to isolate ...

--By Laura Pelcher
The Visionary, a film about Nikole Tesla, the man behind alternating current energy, tells of ordinary flaws and circumstance that can bring down even the most extraordinary of minds. Tesla is caught in a circus climbing a rope ladder to an uncertain future without a net to catch him. Confidence and funding make up the proverbial net that Tesla lacks. Whether it is his relentless jealousy and mistrust of Thomas Edison, his father’s disappointment in his chosen path, or his fear of public opinion, he is unable to ...

--By Laura Pelcher

The alluring and intimidating genius figure was exposed, extracted and displayed under a microscope for further investigation on the Imagine Science Film Festival’s Portrait of a Scientist night. The varied results had only one consistent factor: each scientist had an overwhelming desire to discover in hopes that a deeper understanding of this world would lead to more humane conditions.
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