Catch of the Day: 2013 Jefferson Lecture
The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, established by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1972, is the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
This year’s lecturer was Martin’s Scorsese.
“…We were experiencing something fundamental, together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen together, often in coded form, these films from the ’40s and ’50s. Sometimes expressed in small things, gestures, glances, reactions between the characters – light, shadow. I mean we experienced these things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss, or even acknowledge in our lives.
And that’s actually part of the wonder. So whenever I hear people dismiss movies as fantasy and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. And, of course it’s not life – it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.”
Sometimes a Good Notion 