Experimenter: how and why we obey authority? – Daily News – Lisbon

is one of the major film of the summer events: Experimenter evokes the scientist’s work Stanley Milgram on human conscience and obedience to authority

Strange and fascinating film: from the independent area of ​​American cinema, produced with the support of festivals of Sundance and Tribeca, Experimenter (opening today) is indeed one of the great events of this cinematic summer – moreover with thematic, political and symbolic resonances deep current.

the screenwriter and director Michael Almereyda (signed in 2000, a bold update of Hamlet, starring Ethan Hawke) starts for the present experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) in 1961 at Yale University. Essentially, it is put two people in adjoining rooms, but separated in the position of “teacher” and “learner”. The first question the second of some word associations that were read at the beginning of the experiment; through an electrical circuit previously assembled, each incorrect answer should be punished with an electric shock administered by the “teacher” – the requirement that punishment is even one of the basic principles of organization of the whole experience. The accumulation of errors implies power shocks ever higher, settling the feeling that the “apprentice” can have your life threatened …

What is at stake, after all? What is the central aim of the experiment? Important to preserve the suspense that the situation involves. In any case, we can say that Milgram was interested in the tension between the moral conscience of each individual and their availability (or resistance) to conform to a particular system of authority. Very concrete and dramatic way: to what extent the “teacher” will continue to obey the rule to punish the “apprentice” with electric shocks, even though the possibility to experience the kill

? realism & amp; Fireworks

American Jew, born in New York in 1933, Milgram was especially marked by the Holocaust memories, transmitted by members of his own family, concentration camp survivors. More than that, the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eich-mann, at the time of his experiences, was decisive in its commitment to analyze the sense of responsibility and accountability mechanisms of the human (remember that Eichmann tried to justify its involvement in the Final Solution, “arguing” that had simply manage the transport of that would be killed in the camps).

what is frankly unusual in Almereyda film is the ability to expose us ideas and experiences Milgram, not as a curiosity “technical” rather as a process that marks all his relationships with others, beginning with the wife and collaborator, Alexandra “Sasha” Milgram (Winona Ryder). More: strict realism of experimental situations arises subtly articulated with a calculated deception that places the film somewhere halfway between the didactic evocation of Milgram and a certain playful derivation of the conditions of their work

means. production obviously reduced Almereyda even explores some “dramatization” of the spaces that recalls the work of veterans of independent production as Mark Rappaport (author of the legendary the Scenic Route, 1978). In all respects, the memory is a good counselor.