NATIONAL SCIENCE ON SCREEN DAY
Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder in
EXPERIMENTER
Tuesday, March 28 at 7 pm
Members $11 | Public $16
Guest Speaker:
Howard Ehrlichman who worked with Stanley Milgram!
Join Howard Ehrlichman for an eye-opening lecture and screening of Michael Almereyda’s lively movie exploring the work of his colleague Stanley Milgram, whose radical behavior experiments that tested ordinary humans’ willingness to obey authority, remain controversial to this day.
In 1961, Social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), still coming to terms with the Holocaust, designs the “obedience experiments” on conformity, conscience, and free will. Subjects are told it’s about memory, but it is really designed to observe these
ordinary people’s responses when asked to send harmful electric shocks to an affable stranger (Jim Gaffigan) strapped into a chair in another room. Milgram meets Sasha (Winona Ryder), a former dancer living in New York. Their courtship includes a visit to the Yale lab, where Milgram’s experiment has yielded disturbing results: despite the pleading screams from the supposed victim next door, 65% of subjects obeyed polite commands from a lab-coated authority fi gure (John Palladino). With Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram’s Kafkaesque results hit a nerve, and he and his colleague, Paul Hollander (Edoardo Ballerini) are accused of being deceptive, manipulative monsters. Actors portraying subjects include Anthony Edwards, Taryn Manning, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin and Danny Abeckaser. (USA, 2015, 98 min., English, PG-13, DCP | Dir. Michael Almereyda)
Howard Ehrlichman is a professor, teaching at the Graduate School City University of New York since 1973, and Queens College,
City University of New York, since 1991. Ehrlichman has worked with Stanley Milgram and is a member of the science advisory
board Olfactory Research Fund, New York City, since 1987.
Science on Screen® is an initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre. With major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.