James and Noah Charney on the Campbell Conversations

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. We're about to head into a series of election related programs, so today, I'm changing the subject. Two guests, who have been on the program in the past to talk about their respective books, are back with me today to talk about a new book they've written together. James Charney and Noah Charney have coauthored, “The 12-Hour Film Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Movies”. Dr. James Charney is a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist on Yale University's medical school faculty and he's the author of, “Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film”. Dr. Noah Charney is an art history professor at the University of Ljubljana and specializes in art crime. And among his many books is, “The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art”. James, Noah, welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you both.

James Charney: Thanks for having us.

Noah Charney: It’s good to see you too.

GR: Well, so congratulations on this book. And before we get into the book itself, there's just something, it's not a question, I just wanted to say it. I wanted to tell you both I was very touched with your acknowledgments and where you each write while you're grateful for the other. It was a very nice tonic, particularly these day, so thank you for that. And James, I'll start with you. A basic question, why is it important to have a deeper understanding of film rather than just watching them and saying, I like this, I don't like it. What do we gain with a deeper understanding?

JC : I think to understand how something works to affect your emotions and affect your level of interest and to be kind of tuned in to the mastery of the better films, and helps you kind of kind of distinguish between a film that might be a casual entertainment and one that is going to be that thought provoking or touch you in a more personal way. And so I think watching a movie just for the fun of it is wonderful. But very often, I think it's often better for you to go back and watch it the second time and at that point start noticing some things, the kind of things that we point out in our book.

GR: Well, on that note, you've convinced me to go back and re-watch a movie that stayed with me for a very long time, ”Memento”, because you trace the lineage of that back to Citizen Kane, which is a movie I'm very familiar with. So I'm very keen to go back and do exactly what you just said. On the book itself, Noah, the two of you, you divide up your lessons into subject based categories like Comedy, Western, Suspense and so on. And when I first thought of this topic before I actually saw the book, I imagined that the two of you might have more abstract topics like using dialog, flashbacks, using spoken narrative, special effects, that kind of thing. So just explain why you made the choices that you did in terms of dividing the book up in the way that you the two of you did.

NC: Well, the idea was to have the one-stop book for anyone interested in a deeper appreciation of film. So it's not meant to be in that zooming level of detail for any one of the particular genres or subcategories of things that we could study when we look at film, but meant to be that first gateway drug, shall we say, if you're interested in the subject. So the way we divided it is largely by genres, and but we didn't have time to include every genre in the book, not enough space. But I think people search by genres. If you go on to Netflix, for example, the categories are based on genres and I think it's the way that most people tend to think about movies, but they don't necessarily know what goes into the genres, even if they know what they like.

GR: Now, that makes sense. And so, well, I'm going to use the ho