Perhaps the best known film critic of his time, Roger
Ebert died this year on April 4, 2013 of thyroid cancer. Had he lived he would
have been seventy-one years old today. Writing from the Chicago Sun Times, and
syndicated in more than two hundred newspapers, he was the first movie critic
to win the Pulitzer Prize. His TV show on public television At the Movies with rival critic Gene
Siskel became a template for dialogue for future TV productions.
In 2005 he received a Star on the Hollywood Walk of
Fame and said this:
Movies
are the most powerful empathy machine of all the arts. When I go to a great
movie I can live somebody else’s life. A little bit, for a while, I can walk in
somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a
different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a
different time, to have a different belief.
I couldn’t help but think how psychoanalytic work
allows the same opportunity. Analysts are privileged to hear the inner most
workings of the human soul, its lofty spirit and it heinous or heroic reactions
to the slings and arrows of misfortune.
A lover of film, literature, and theater, I know all these media pale compared
to the privileged observer-participant role of the psychoanalyst. Still, I
continue to have a love affair with the movies. Thanks, Roger, for adding when
I was a girl, the critical dimension to so many beloved movies. I remember you
today.
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