Art, Tony Kushner said, can be quite powerful.

Kushner, the screenwriter of the 2012 film “Lincoln,” spoke on Tuesday night in Hendricks Chapel, kicking off this year’s University Lectures Series. Detailing the process behind developing a depiction of race in “Lincoln,” he touched on the significance of art, as well as leaving small bits of himself in his work.

“Lincoln” is about the last four months of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, but Kushner said he channeled much of his energy into incorporating race and slavery as major elements of the film’s storyline as well.

The question he struggled with, Kushner said, is whether such narratives about slavery are a way of directly confronting questions, or more about art than reality.

He said he wanted to deal directly with slavery, but struggled with depicting it visually — which presented many more challenges than simply talking about it.

Slavery means physical violence and brutality, as well as “absolutely horrifying” advertisements of slaves on sale, he said.

These advertisements represented a “small insidious destruction” of a person’s status as a human being, Kushner said. The challenge was making these and other horrors of slavery apparent to modern audiences, he said.

Though Kushner discussed his film, he also described his own success and ability as an artist in understated terms.

“I’ve had some kind of success as an artist,” Kushner said, referring to his Academy Award nominations. He laughed when someone in the audience brought up “Kushnerianism” — named after Kushner’s habit of leaving small reflections of his personality in his works.

“There are some jokes in there that I recognize as the way I tell jokes,” Kushner said, adding he didn’t purposely leave pieces of himself in “Lincoln.”

Authors, he said, naturally leave a piece of themselves in all of their work.

As for his craft and art in general, Kushner said his work is a “direct engagement” as a citizen, wielding its own kind of power.

Kushner also said he believes Lincoln would be supportive of how President Barack Obama has run the country thus far and would say he’s a “superlative president working in unimaginably hard times.”

The events taking place today, he said, would never have been imagined in Lincoln’s time, so Kushner believes that Lincoln would have a great deal of respect for Obama.

Kushner himself has a great deal of respect for Obama, who he said “turned out to be a very great president.”

Despite his modesty, Julia Teti, a freshman English and textual studies major, said she was very impressed with both Kushner and “Lincoln.”

“The movie really made you feel like you were in that time period,” Teti said.

Like Teti, Stephen Connors, a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major, said he enjoyed the presentation.

He said he was impressed by how Kushner spoke politically and shared his opinion. Since Kushner is an artist, Connors said, he should have an opinion to “show his side of things.”

What he also liked, he said, was how Kushner sought to connect his plays to young people.

Said Connors: “It’s important to shape the way we think.”

Published on October 9, 2013 at 2:04 am

Contact Nina: nikapur@syr.edu