EUGENE, Ore. -- (November 1, 2017) –On Wednesday, November 15 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, located on the University of Oregon campus, Schnitzer Cinema screens “The Inner World of Aphasia” with local filmmaker Edward Feil. Curated by Richard Herskowitz, JSMA Curator of Media Arts, screenings begin at 7 p.m. and include free refreshments.
The film was recently selected to join the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, one of the highest honors awarded to American films. “I’d never seen a film quite like it,” said Dan Streible, who organizes the biennial Orphan Film Symposium at N.Y.U., a showcase of neglected movies. “Stylistically, what it’s set up to be, a short medical-education film, sounds like a cliché, boring. But this was so artfully done, edited, acted, written. They were borrowing from art films in terms of editing and shots.”
This empathic and often poetic medical-training film features a powerful performance by co-director Naomi Feil as a nurse who learns to cope with aphasia, the inability to speak as a result of a brain injury. Feil, a social worker whose career has focused on communicating with language-impaired patients, produced this film and dozens more with her husband, Edward Feil. In the film, the patient’s inner thoughts are heard through voice-over as she struggles in frustration to overcome her disability and to connect with her caregivers.
JSMA Media Art Curator Richard Herskowitz comments: “Only 25 classic movies are selected each year to enter the National Film Registry and to be preserved in the Library of Congress. The Inner World of Aphasia is one of these ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films.’ We are privileged to have its creators, Edward and Naomi Feil, living here in Eugene, and it will be wonderful to learn about their careers and the history of this fascinating film."
A special addition to the program will be a rare home movie by Edward Feil capturing his family at the 1964 World’s Fair. The film, preserved by the Indiana Universities Moving Image Archive, was the subject of an article in the New York Times on October 30, 2016: “A Lost Snippet of Film History, Found in a Home Movie Shot in 1964.” As NYU graduate student Robert Anen pointed out in the article, “Ed’s home movies are not your average home movies.”
The Schnitzer Cinema series is made possible in part with a grant from the UO Office of Academic Affairs.
About the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
The University of Oregon's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is a premier Pacific Northwest museum for exhibitions and collections of historic and contemporary art. The mission of the museum is to enhance the University of Oregon’s academic mission and to further the appreciation and enjoyment of the visual arts for the general public. The JSMA features significant collections galleries devoted to art from China, Japan, Korea, Europe, and the Americas as well as changing special exhibition galleries. The JSMA is one of seven museums—and the only academic art museum-- in Oregon accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is located on the University of Oregon campus at 1430 Johnson Lane. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Admission is $5 for adults and $3 for senior citizens. Free admission is given to ages 18 and under, JSMA members, college students with ID, and University of Oregon faculty, staff and students. For information, contact the JSMA, 541-346-3027.
Contact: Debbie Williamson Smith, 541-346-0942, debbiews@uoregon.edu
Links: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, http://jsma.uoregon.edu
