Satoshi Kon’s inventive animated feature Paprika is an adaptation of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s science-fiction novel about a sleep researcher whose alter-ego investigates criminal cases by entering her subject’s dreams. A preview screening of the film provided the starting point for a wide-ranging discussion about the science of dreams and the art of film. Dr. Robert Stickgold is a renowned Harvard scientist known for his work on sleep and dreaming. Gilberto Perez is a Sarah Lawrence film scholar, author of The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. The discussion was moderated by Chief Curator David Schwartz. Film clips are courtesy Sony Pictures Classics.

The inventive and ambitious film The Fountain is a love story that deftly moves between fantasy and science as it tells the story of a doctor trying to find a cure for his wife’s cancer. The film won the Sloan Foundation’s Feature Film Prize in Science and Technology at the 2006 Hamptons International Film Festival. In this panel discussion, moderated by journalist and producer Rob Feld, director Darren Aronofsky and his screenwriting partner Ari Handel, who has a PhD. in neuroscience, discussed how they balance their genuine interest in science with the narrative demands of cinematic storytelling.

The prolific directing-producing team of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer has made more than 25 films since they founded Image Entertainment in 1986. Their movies Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind – which explore the worlds of physics, engineering, mathematics, and psychology – are the two most acclaimed and popular films made in the past decade that depict the lives and the working methods of scientists. The films earned a combined seventeen Academy Award nominations, and won six Academy Awards. The day before the Museum’s gala Salute to Ron Howard at the Waldorf-Astoria, Howard and Grazer spoke at the Museum of the Moving Image with Chief Curator David Schwartz in a discussion about science and film, and their collaborative filmmaking process.

Disguised as a time-travel science-fiction movie, Primer is also a vivid portrayal of a fascinating subculture, a suburban Dallas fraternity of innovators who toil late into the night in their garage-laboratories. Significant for its filmmaking style and for its scientific content, Primer won both the Grand Jury feature film prize and the Alfred P. Sloan Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. In October 2004, Moving Image presented a screening of Primer and a discussion with Shane Carruth (writer and director, Primer), George van Buskirk (independent film producer and co-founder, Holedigger Films), Jerome Swartz (co-founder and chairman, Symbol Technologies, and inventor of bar-code scanning technology), and moderator David Schwartz (Chief Curator, Museum of the Moving Image).