Doc Talk | Screening and Q&A with Film Editor Jonathan Oppenheim
ARGUING THE WORLD
Directed by Joseph Dorman
1997, 110 min.
Screening and Q & A with film editor
JONATHAN OPPENHEIM
The life of the mind – the world of ideas – is the subject of Arguing the World, a documentary essay directed by Joseph Dorman and edited by Jonathan Oppenheim. The film explores the polarizing era of the Cold War, a particular time in 20th century American life when ideas played a powerful part, when opposing philosophies influenced the politics of the time, and when the role of the public intellectual was ideologically driven along strict binary lines of left and right, eventually to be superseded by the transformative intellectual activism of the civil rights movement.
Arguing the World captures this historical ideological moment through the lives of four remarkable thinkers, all from immigrant families, all of whom began their intellectual lives at one of New York’s great public institutions – City College. As we now enter a new era of polarizing and competing ideas, it may be illuminating to consider the formative paths of this singular generation; and, as documentarians, to appreciate the film’s aesthetic respect for the formal interview, not as a ‘talking head’, but as a site of inspired reflection and vital gesture.
Please join us for this intellectual adventure, the construction of which will be closely unpacked by the film’s Emmy and Oscar-winning editor, Jonathan Oppenheim.
Monday, April 2 at 1 pm — Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue
Hosted by Deanna Kamiel
Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies
School of Media Studies
The New School