Artist Sean Scully and neurology professor Anjan Chatterjee will examine “Abstract Cognition” as part of the Rubin’s fifth annual Brainwave festival
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
February 4 – April 23, $14-$30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/brainwave
Don’t forget to pick up tickets for the Rubin Museum’s fifth annual Brainwave festival, in which artists and neuroscientists team up to discuss personal and professional aspects of this year’s central topic, memory. Each session includes a brief mnemonic art tour of the galleries and a karma “telephone” chain that will wind down the spiral staircase left over from when the space belonged to Barneys, if you can remember that far back. The series begins this Saturday afternoon, February 4, with painter Sean Scully and neurology professor Anjan Chatterjee delving into “Abstract Cognition” and is followed by such other pairings as broadcaster Jane Pauley and computational neuroscience professor Sebastian Seung discussing “Welcome to Connectome” on February 8, roboticist Heather Knight and brain researcher Dave Carmel screening and discussing Alex Gabbay’s documentary Just Trial and Error: Conversations on Consciousness on February 18, actor Scott Shepherd and hippocampus expert John Kubie getting into “Committing the Great American Novel to Memory” on March 4, comedian Lewis Black and Johns Hopkins neurologist Dr. Barry Gordon screening Gaylen Ross’s Caris’ Peace and asking “What’s My Line?” in regard to short-term memory on March 7, author Diane Ackerman and clinical neurologist and professor Dr. Todd C. Sacktor examining “Using and Losing Language” on April 14, and gourmand Ruth Reichl and psychology professor Paul Rozin exploring Proust and “The Madeleine Syndrome” on April 23. In conjunction with Brainwave, a new Cabaret Cinema series, “You Must Remember This,” begins Friday night with Casablanca, introduced by artist Samuel Cucher, and continues February 10 with Claudia Shear introducing Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, Fern Mallis introducing Gigi on February 17, and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas on February 24, with other films scheduled through April 27. “In this year’s [Brainwave] series we will look at the role memory has played in the past,” notes Rubin producer Tim McHenry, “and the debatable role it plays in our contemporary cut-and-paste culture.”
Following a launch party for her book about how she and two fellow Mossad agents in 1964 captured and killed Max Reiner (Edgar Selge), the notorious “Surgeon of Birkenau,” Rachel Brener (Gila Almagor) immediately learns that there is an old man in a Ukrainian nursing home claiming that he is in fact the doctor who performed horrific experiments on Jewish men, women, and children in the German concentration camp during World War II. Rachel is reunited with Zvi (Alex Peleg) and Ehud (Oded Teomi), who come up with a plan to eliminate the doctor once again to protect a secret that has been haunting them for forty years. But they’re no longer the brash, finely chiseled spies they were when they were young, leading to crises of conscience and other physical and psychological dilemmas. Nominated for four Israeli Academy Awards, The Debt is a tense thriller from director Assaf Bernstein, who cowrote the screenplay with Ido Rosenblum. The story weaves back and forth between the present day, as Rachel meets Ehud in Ukraine and they hash out their plan, neither one having done anything like this in decades, and 1964, when Rachel (Neta Garty), Zvi (Itay Tiran), and Ehud (Yehezkel Lazarov) were younger and more idealistic. The scenes in which the young Rachel visits the doctor, who has become a gynecologist, and pretends she is trying to conceive a child are particularly gripping, setting up a powerful conclusion. The Debt, which was recently remade in English by John Madden with Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds, Sam Worthington, Jessica Chastain, and Tom Wilkinson and evokes such films as The Wild Geese, The Boys from Brazil, and QB VII, will open the Brooklyn Israel Film Festival on Thursday night at the Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill, followed on Saturday night by Yossi Madmony’s Restoration, which was named Best Feature at the 2011 Jerusalem Film Festival, and Dolphin Boy on Sunday night, which will be followed by a Q&A with codirector Dani Menkin and producer Judith Manassen-Ramon.
