Cinema and cognition - our brain as an unreliable narrator

One of the most famous essays in contemporary philosophy is Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat" from 1974. It is about consciousness, what it is and how we can talk about it, and the question of the mind/body dichotomy. He used the example of trying to comprehend what it would be like to be a bat, something that is close to us (bats are also mammals) but at the same time very alien, to illustrate his point. But I think we might also say that it is difficult to properly know what it is like to be another person, any other person, than ourselves, and that this is relevant for our discussions about films as well.

Something that science tells us is that our brains present us with a subjective, skewed, version of the world. (Sources and links are at the end of the article.) It does not mean that there is no objective truth, there is, only it is often out of our reach. In short, what we perceive of the world is not to be entirely trusted, and is not the whole story. Our brains filter the world for us, and without us being conscious of it doing so it is emphasising some things and ignoring other things. But we are unaware of this, or in denial of it, as we like to think that we (our conscious selves) are in charge. 

A common example, easy to understand, of how our brains adapt our perception of the world for us is the fact that sometimes after you have bought a new car you suddenly discover a lot of other cars of the same model. If you buy a Peugeot 208, it might seem as if many just got the same idea because now you see Peugeot 208s "everywhere". But it is not that it is suddenly more common, it is that your brain has adjusted to the fact that you now own this model and is therefore automatically noticing others like it. This is sometimes referred to as the "frequency illusion" although I do not know whether that is a term used by cognitive scientists. Obviously, the kind of car also matters. You do not have to own a Volvo in dark or grey colours to notice plenty of them on the streets of Stockholm, and even if you buy a new Aston Martin, you are unlikely to see many others.

Another example is the famous one with the dancing gorilla. A short film of people playing basketball is shown and the viewers are asked to consider, for example, the colour of the players' clothes. After the film is over, the viewers are asked if they saw the dancing gorilla that suddenly appears in the middle of the film. Many have not noticed it at all, as our brains filter out information that is superfluous to the given task, such as the presence of a gorilla. Some have likened this to the brain having a spam filter, but like most spam filters it can filter out things we might need.

These things are obviously at work when it comes to experiencing films, and how we approach and remember film history.

When reading a review/article or listening to someone talk about a film, it is often easy to get the impression that they are talking about some other film, not the same one you just saw. And in a way you could say that it is a different film since our individual experiences are not the same. Not just in matters of taste, but in the way our brains engage with the film without us being aware of it. While our brains, for one reason or another, have chosen for us what is most in need of attention, something else might be as important that we will miss, because our brains filtered it out, and since each person's brain will do this in a unique way, each experience will be different.

Your mood also matters, and things like whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, or whether you have eaten, or maybe have eaten something that your stomach disagreed with. Several experiments have shown that we are unduly influenced in our judgements because of such external matters. For example, judges in criminal courts are not consistent in how they pass judgement. One famous investigation into this showed that criminals are more likely to be given parole if the judges have recently eaten. The more hungry or tired they are, the less lenient they become. There is no reason to suppose that it is not the same when we watch films. Whether something irrelevant to the film itself, such as the state of your stomach, influences the feelings towards the film is not something we have reason to dismiss. It probably does. As in, for example, being annoyed with something in the film that would not have annoyed you if you were not distracted by stress, pain, hunger, or something else.

Another way we are misled is by being tricked by prejudices. A colleague once complained about the "excessive use of music" in a film we were discussing (I have forgotten which film) even though the film hardly had any music at all. Before he saw the film, my colleague had convinced himself that it would have lots of music, and the lack of music in the film did not manage to sway his prejudice. This is quite common in how people respond to any new film they watch with a certain actor or by a certain director, or in a certain genre. If they have convinced themselves that films by that filmmaker will have certain traits, they will say that the latest film by that filmmaker had them, even if the traits were not present in this particular film, and this is especially true if these traits were something the person disliked. I have experienced many examples of this. The scientific term for this would probably be anchoring and adjustment heuristic (or bias). And as I have written before, how you present a film for your students or what you ask them to look for, before a screening, will influence how they watch the film, and how they respond to it, and this is something to consider as well. It will not affect all of them in the same way, but it will inevitably be there. Sometimes this is appropriate, but sometimes a more unprejudiced screening, without any introduction, might be more revealing.

Watching a film is difficult for our brains, as there is so much going on simultaneously, the sound, the images, the actors, the story, and these things can work together or be in contrast with each other, intentionally or unintentionally. This means that to grasp the whole of what is going on, you need to pay a lot of attention and probably watch it several times. Not all things attract our attention in the same way. Colours, movement, and text are for example especially good at attracting our attention, unconsciously. Our eyes are automatically drawn to them, on films as elsewhere. Good filmmakers use this to their advantage. But it also means that we are easily distracted by these things, if they happen beside the screen, or even on the screen. Subtitles will draw our eyes, even when we do not need them, and while they are often necessary they have an impact on our ability to take in the entirety of the image, so that it is incomplete in ways that may or may not be meaningful. (A woman once said that she disliked subtitles when watching films because they hid the shoes of the characters.) There are those who claim that focusing on the images and actors' faces and such is immaterial, that the only thing that matters is the story, but they are wrong. There are hardly any films in which vital information is not provided by sounds and images, and if you ignore those aspects you will also deny yourself the full experience and meaning of the film. This is not, despite what some claim, an elitist assumption but a basic acceptance of the way the medium works. It also means that Facebooking or scrolling through your Instagram feed while watching, or watching the film on the phone, will with certainty make you miss things, some of it possibly vital, and you should not assume that you have understood the whole of the film. (Despite what is often said, humans are in general not good at multitasking.)

 

Given all of this, we should always be somewhat suspicious of our reactions to things, including films. Did we get it? Can we with earned confidence say that we have given the film, all aspects of it, the necessary attention? Have we been misled by our prejudices or been distracted by things that are not in the film itself? These are not always easy questions to answer, but any honest discussion about cinema needs to bear them in mind. We cannot trust our brains to provide us with the whole picture.

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Related to this is the fact that our memories are unreliable as well. What we remember are not necessarily how things were. Sometimes a memory is a composite of separate occasions, sometimes it is partial, and sometimes it is invented. Something we believe we distinctly remember can be something that never happened. The challenge is that unless we are able to verify our memories, we cannot know with certainty which ones are accurate and which ones are not, which ones are real and which ones are made up.

I usually say that either the Bond film Thunderball (1965) or Vertigo (1958) was the first film I bought on VHS tape. But I have no idea if this is true. It might have been some other film (Ice Station Zebra (1968) is a possible contender), but even though it might be wrong I still stay with that story because I like what it says about my teenage self. There is another connection between Thunderball and unreliable memory. I watched it, and all other Bond films, regularly as a teenager and in my early 20s but then there was a long gap when I did not pay much attention to them. In my thirties I decided to rewatch them all, and about Thunderball there was one scene in particular that I remembered, of a man being killed. I remembered the characters, their movements, and the space in which the scene took place. But when I rewatched the film, the scene was not in it. There was not even a scene like it. This scene I so vividly remembered did not exist. My brain had invented it. And, as soon as I discovered that, I forgot the scene. When I started writing this paragraph I first wanted to describe the scene in detail, but I soon discovered that I could not. The scene which was once real and tangible to me, despite not existing and me never having experienced it, is now almost completely forgotten. (I have previously written about a memory of going to see a particular film as a child, and then one day discovering that there never was such a film.)

In the recent documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018), David Edelstein mentions how she had seen the release of the re-edited version of Touch of Evil (1958) with him, and how he was amazed by how she remembered exactly what the previous version had been like and therefore could tell immediately what was new. But how would he know if she was right? Unless he wrote down what she said and then went home to watch the other version, comparing it to what she had said, he had no reason to assume that she remembered it correctly. And neither had she.

When people write or talk about films it is rarely with any awareness of these issues. People often talk about films they have not seen in years or decades as if they were fresh in their minds, but even if it feels like it, it may not be, and probably will not be, the case. Whenever I need to write about a film I have not seen recently, I always try to re-watch it or research it, or at the very least read the Wikipedia plot summary. It is often the case that I am surprised, and have to rewrite or, if I have not begun writing yet, re-think what I wanted to write. Sometimes I cannot write about some particular film I had in mind because what I thought was in it turned out to not be there, and hence it was no longer relevant for whatever argument I wanted to make.

Today it is easier to check and double-check the films than it was when film theory got going in earlier decades. Those writers had to rely on their memories to a large extent, as had critics and historians too, and this accounts for some of the many problems with film theory and film history. With our memories being unreliable, they were to some extent writing in the dark. And, as we humans tend to do, they could also inadvertently "choose" how to remember things so that what they remembered fit the theory they were putting forward. I am not saying that they deliberately invented or distorted things (although that happens too) but that our brains play tricks with us in all sorts of ways, and if we need something to be a certain way our brains can easily make sure that we remember it in such a way, whether it is true or not. That might be said to be a form of confirmation bias.

A popular research area in film studies today is to ask people about their memories of cinema-going habits of the past. What it was like for them to go to the movies when they were young for example. This is a minefield, for the reasons given above. Their memories will not necessarily tell you much of how it was like to go to the movies in the past, as their memories are unreliable. I have done such experiments with students, where they have asked their grandparents about what it was like going to the cinema when they were young, or what kind of films and stars they liked. The answers could be completely bananas. They were remembering seeing films when they were ten even though the films in question were released some ten years later. They were remembering going to cinemas that had either closed down by then or had not opened yet. Their memories of how much a ticket cost were make-believe, with the prices being a fraction of what it really was. It was more interesting as a research project into how memories work than as research into how it was to go to the cinema in the 1940s or 1950s or 1960s. But that was not the intention.

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The thing to keep in my mind is that we all, myself included, have fallen victim to all or most of these biases, fallacies, and unreliable memories; it is inevitable. We are humans, and these spring from evolution, and evolution of cognition. So is also the tendency for us to identify these problems more easily when they appear in others, and rarely acknowledge them in ourselves. The purpose of this article is not to blame people for this or that, only to point out that there are aspects to us, as humans, that can trip us up and mislead us, that our brains are unreliable narrators, that we should acknowledge this, and be more careful and diligent in our work.

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I should mention the replication crisis, which has been rippling through the social sciences and psychology for some 15 years now. It refers to the fact that many studies, including some famous and influential ones, have been proved to be wrong, or have severe problems, or are impossible to replicate, i.e. when researchers do the experiment again, they do not get the same results as the first, famous, case. You can read more here and here. One of the more prominent psychologists working on these issues is Daniel Kahneman, famous for his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. You can read his concerns about the replication crisis here and here.

What I am talking about in this article is well-documented and has been replicated. About the gorilla test, you can read more here and here. I suspect though that this gorilla test has lost some of its capability as many have heard of it now. When I first saw it, I already knew about it, and therefore I immediately spotted the gorilla when it appeared, as that is what my brain was focused on. But now, scientists can instead play tricks with it, of people's awareness of it, and adding some other, new, weird thing happening that those who are waiting for the gorilla instead miss.

More about "frequency illusion" here.

 

About "confirmation bias" here, here and here.

 

Research papers about judges and their stomachs here and here.

Research paper on colour psychology here.

 

Some articles about our unreliable memories here, here, here, and here.

 

About the difficulties with multitasking here, here, and here.

Thomas Nagel is a philosopher who is particularly interested in the mind/body issue, and I sometimes wonder if the style/substance issue in film is not a relative of the mind/body issue.

On watching films at Fanfaren

Those of you who are active on Facebook might have come across the trend right now to post still images from ten different films that for whatever reason have some special meaning for you. Home isolation makes people both eager to engage with each other online, and also, it seems, make many of us more nostalgic than usual. That made me think about various films that have some special meaning for me, a topic which I have brought up here before. Most of these experiences were in the 1980s, my formative years even though I was only five years old when the decade began. Some of these experiences were at home, watching something on TV, or with friends watching something on video. But there was also the cinema in the suburb where I grew up. The suburb is called Farsta, and the cinema was called Fanfaren. I would like to share some memories of that cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) on the marquee, so before my time.

I was fortunate to be growing up in Farsta because Fanfaren was huge and not some small, second-run theatre. It had over 500 seats, one of the biggest screens in Stockholm, and was a premiere cinema. At least until 1985. Then it became a lot smaller and was no longer a premiere cinema. Instead, cinema screenings had to compete with theatre plays, music performances and other kinds of cultural activities of varying level of competence. It also had a small kiosk where you could get chocolate and assorted candy. I do not remember whether they had popcorn, but they did have Nickel, which is what I would usually get.

I visited this cinema frequently, sometimes several times a week, but I have forgotten most of what I saw there. But there are some exceptions, and in particular there were these seven films that I can vividly recall watching: a re-release of Robin Hood (Wolfgang Reitherman 1973), Herbie Goes Bananas (Vincent McEveety 1980), The Color of Money (Martin Scorsese 1986), The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci 1987), Batman (Tim Burton 1989), The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan 1990) and Miller's Crossing (Joel and Ethan Coen 1990).

Robin Hood is the Disney version, and if I remember correctly I saw it by chance. I was doing some sort of organised outdoor group activity (not the boy scouts but something like it, for small children) when it started to rain, and the man in charge of the event suggested we go to the cinema and watch a film instead, and Fanfaren was showing Robin Hood. As it happens, this is my earliest film memory. I particularly remember a fire, which terrified me. I do not know exactly when I saw it, which year it was, so I do not know how old I was. But despite being terrified, it is a memory I treasure a lot.

When I saw Herbie Goes Bananas, I was older and it was not by chance. I went to the cinema by myself because I wanted to watch this particular film. And I loved it so much, and could not stop talking about it when I came home. Me and dad had a discussion about the use of point-of-view shots, among other things. I do not know if it was the first time I went by myself, but it might have been and this might be one reason why I remember it all so well. It opened in Sweden (including on Fanfaren) in September 5, 1981, just a few days after my birthday. I was only seven, yet already I was going to the cinema by myself. But being out by myself was something I was used to. I would always walk on my own to the nursery (loudly singing Beatles songs), and sometimes I would disappear afterwards, to play, alone or with a friend, so my parents would go out to look for me.

When The Color of Money came out I did not go by myself, but with my dad. I said I wanted to go to the cinema and he asked what I wanted to watch. He was expecting some youth film and was surprised when I said The Color of Money. He was also relieved, because that was something he might also enjoy, so we went together. I do not remember what he thought about it but I liked it a lot, and can still recall each crisply edited pool scene. It is one of the few films by Scorsese I have never re-watched, and this is partly because I feel like it would remove it from its status as a dear childhood memory and become just another film.

I do not remember who I watched The Last Emperor with, but I think it was with my mother. This is also a film I have never watched again, despite thinking after I had seen it that it was maybe the best film I had ever seen. There are plenty of scenes I remember in detail, and the broken chronology, and Peter O'Toole. It is not an easy film for a twelve-year old, but there I was, having a cinematic experience like few others. Unlike The Color of Money, this is a film I would like to re-watch today.

It might be forgotten today, but the marketing campaign for Burton's Batman was exceptional. It was everywhere, all the time, and it was not dissimilar to the MCU films of now. A classmate said excitedly that she was convinced that every human being on the planet was going to watch Batman. (In the photo above of the cinema entrance there is a high-rise in the background. She lived in that building, so she had easy access to the cinema.) The film was not quite that successful, but at least I watched it. Again by myself. I hated it. And not only did I hate it, but it had me so wound up, I could not sleep that night. It was like had some kind of fever, the room was spinning as soon as I closed my eyes, and I felt physically sick. The next morning all was well again, but it was a visit to the cinema I wished could be undone. For a while it made me reluctant to go back to Fanfaren. But not for long.

The following year, in the autumn of 1990, it was time for The Hunt for Red October. I had already watched it with friends at one of the larger cinemas in the city centre, but as I liked it so much, I dragged my mother and brother with me when I wanted to re-watch it. I was as thrilled as the first time, and I remember my mother's gasp of shock when Sean Connery's character was shot. Afterwards though my brother (four years younger) was complaining. He had not enjoyed it at all, although, he emphasised, "it was not a bad film." I appreciated that. I am not sure if he said it just to please me, or if he meant that it was a well-made, well-acted film, but that he found it boring.

The final memory is when I took my dad with me to watch Miller's Crossing, and we were both mesmerised by it. The scene in the forest with John Turturro begging for his life will haunt me forever.

There would be no more visits because Fanfaren closed in 1992, but those were my seven special memories. They are such strong memories for different reasons, but they have stayed with me to this day. I suspect they will remain with me forever. Yet they are also uncertain. Do I remember correctly? Initially I was going to mention an additional film, an English adaptation of one of Enid Blyton's books about The Famous Five that I was convinced I had watched at Fanfaren. But I cannot find any evidence of the existence of such a film. It seems the books have only been adapted into TV-series in Britain, never into films. That is my eight memory, ghost-like and strange, of a film that does not exist.

Nostalgia and scarcity

When I was a teenager, I was in love with the second and the third of the Indiana Jones films. But I had never seen the first, Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg 1981). Then one day when I was checking the new TV-guide for which films would be shown on Swedish television over Christmas (I have forgotten which year this was), I saw that Raiders... was to be shown on Boxing Day, i.e. December 26. Imagine my excitement. When I wrote the list of what I wanted for Christmas, I topped it by writing I wanted us to be home on the evening of the 26th so I could watch it.

Today when the whole world is practising social distancing and staying at home, one of the things people are doing is enjoying all the streaming services that are sending films and series to our computers and TV sets. I do it too, although somewhat unexpectedly I am mainly watching Jay Leno's Garage on YouTube. But this abundance of moving images delivered in our homes reminded me of that Christmas memory, when things were not just available at the click of a button. These last two weeks when I have been spending most days almost entirely in my apartment, I have been unusually nostalgic about my teenage film watching habits.

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I often wonder to what extent this constant abundance makes films and series less powerful, meaningful, and special for "content consumers" of today. Nobody has to write on their Christmas present wish list that they want to be home a particular time because it will be their only chance of watching a particular film, and I think that this is a valuable and special aspect of the appreciation of art, of our relationship to it, that might have going missing. Even though it is a myth, frequently repeated, that all is available all the time (it really is not, so please stop saying that), it is true that what is available is incomparably easier to get access to today than before. Netflix has less variety of good things than a good video store had in the 1990s, but I had to go to the video store to get my hands on the films; they did not come to my apartment by themselves.

But that effort, and the fact that you had to wait for things, that things were not instantly available, and might not be available for weeks or months or even years, was also part of the experience. And it added to that experience. If you have to travel to a specific place to get the thing you want, it will have a meaning and a value that will be missing in something that is just automatically there, without any effort. The previous way of watching TV, of each Monday at 20:00 watch the new episode of your favourite TV-series, and only then, was an important part of the experience. The current ritual of bingeing on the whole series during one weekend is something completely different. It might be convenient and fun, but I am not at all convinced that this is a good thing. It satisfies our impatient appetites, but it makes us greedy and jaded. The widespread issue of piracy, of watching films (or series, or reading books and magazines and so on) without paying for it is the most extreme example of this. Lots of people think that they are entitled to anything they want, whenever, and without paying for it. But nobody has such a right. Even though some talk about pirated films as if it was Samizdat literature, demanding that any given film is available to you just this minute is not subversive but spoiled and egocentric. It is another example of how unsustainable our current world is, its fractured and fragile social and financial structures. Everything at once at low or no cost is something people in the richer parts of the world have come to expect and demand, and that is not a good thing, because it devalues everything. It also adds to the increased strain on the environment; it accelerates the commodification of private (personal) information; and it undermines the global economy by making jobs less stable and a few internet companies overbearingly powerful and corrupt.

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It is often said that nostalgia is inherently conservative or reactionary. I do not agree. A refugee from a civil war who is feeling nostalgic for her life before war broke out is not reactionary, and, on a very different scale, me feeling nostalgic over a particular aspect of my childhood is not reactionary either. It does not mean that I think the world was better then, or that I was happier. It just means that I fondly remember one small thing, regardless of the world at large. Nostalgia is not good or bad, in support of one -ism or another, or by default a wish to return to a mythical past. It completely depends on what you do with it, and what you are nostalgic about. Nostalgia can be reactionary, but it can also be a progressive catalyst for necessary change.

This belief that nostalgia is inherently reactionary is probably based on an idea of constant progress, but it is clearly not the case that everything is getting consistently better. Some things get better, some things get worse, and it is always difficult in the moment to know in which direction things are moving on a more general plane.

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It might seem peculiar to feel nostalgic over scarcity, over a time when films were less immediately accessible, but since it ties in with so many other things that are wrong with the world as it is today, my memory of putting a desire to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark on my Christmas wish-list suddenly became a powerful metaphor for me.

The point is of course not that we should all stop streaming and instead sit around waiting for our favourite film to magically appear. That streamship has sailed, to muddle the metaphors. But what we should at least do is pay for what we watch, and pay for what we read, and acknowledge the people who work hard to provide these films, series, books, newspapers and journals. If a person is not willing to sacrifice something (money, time, or effort) for the thing they watch or read, it must mean that the thing has no value for them. And if it has no value, why watch it?

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The original definition of nostalgia has nowadays been more or less forgotten. But it used to refer to feelings of homesickness so powerful it could make you physically ill.

Samizdat refers to the way citizens in East European communist dictatorships were secretly circulating books that were banned by the state.

Some forms of piracy are valid. For example, medical professionals who lack the financial muscles to subscribe to the good journals might illicitly download an article or paper they need to better treat patients. But that is obviously not comparable to a wish to instantly watch a new film for free.

A few words about Jay Leno's Garage might be in order. I found the show by accident the other day, but it is tailor-made for me (except for Leno's tiresome references to wives allegedly being anti-car) since Leno loves the same kind of cars I love, and the cheerful enthusiasm of the show is right now very appealing to me. While I watched an episode focused on a new Aston Martin, I have been mainly drawn to the episodes that looks at older cars, such as Volvo P1800, Saab 93, Jaguar XK120, Jaguar XKSS and Chevrolet Corvette 1957. A kind of nostalgia too in a way, for a kind of older design and craft that I love.

I used to have several model cars on display, but now I have only one. This type of Jaguar, but green.

Young and Innocent (1937)

In 1990 a new TV channel started in Sweden, TV4, and for a while in the early 1990s they were showing Hitchcock's films of the 1930s regularly in the afternoons. I watched them all and recorded them on VHS tapes, so I could watch them whenever I wanted. And I wanted to a lot. I watched them so many times that the colourful logo of TV4 has become part of my memories of these films. While The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) were the best ones, it was another one I re-watched the most: Young and Innocent (1937). It is not a terribly exciting story but it has such generosity and charm, perhaps like no other film by Hitchcock, that I immediately developed a crush on it.

It has a typical Hitchcockian story, a man on the run after having been falsely accused of murder and himself searching for the real criminal. It is also a sort of road movie in the British countryside, interspersed with typical Hitchcockian set pieces. There is for example a children's party which is a feast of looks, mistaken identities and sly wit. There is also an accident in an abandoned mine and the celebrated long take in the end of the film, starting high up in a hotel lobby, moving down across a restaurant, over a band playing, and into the eyes of the drummer.

Children in Hitchcock's films are usually eccentric.

While anybody watching it would instantly recognise the man behind it, the tone is different. There is no darkness or neuroses, or paranoia; instead it is a lovely tale of the growing romance and love between the two young leads: Derrick de Marney as the fugitive and Nova Pilbeam as the chief constable's daughter who helps him. Their banter and flirting are what keeps the film together, and gives it its charm. That most of the people they encounter are distinct characters also adds to the overall sense of bonhomie. Despite the seriousness of the situation, nobody seems to take things too seriously, and the real murderer is not a threat or a menace but only appears briefly in the beginning and for a few minutes in the end (where he is only a threat to himself).

According to Patrick McGilligan's book Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, Hitchcock was under a lot of stress and in a bad mood when he made the film because of his economic situation and contractual reasons (it was about to expire): he had gained a lot of weight, he was tired, and used humour and sarcasm as a defence mechanism. Maybe he wanted to make something light and playful to counter his inner turmoil.

The film is based on a book, but they have little in common other than that there is a murder in the countryside. Instead Hitchcock completely re-imagined it, working with a lot of people on the script, including his recurring partners Joan Harrison, Charles Bennett and Angus MacPhail. Another key collaborator was, as always, his wife Alma Reville.

The set designer was Alfred Junge, otherwise known for his work on the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and it is particularly the mine that stands out. It is a good, effective scene. Perhaps the only scene in the film of real danger, shot almost like it was a silent film.

Doing the complicated long take.

It is often said that Hitchcock was discovered by the French in the 1950s, but this claim is undermined by the fact that he was celebrated as an important filmmaker on both sides of the Atlantic early on, and in the mid-30s some leading critics, including Otis Ferguson, suggested that he was one of the greatest directors currently working. Young and Innocent is not a work of greatness but it has great charm, and it shows how even under stress and difficult working conditions, and without the financial resources he would later have, he could, seemingly effortless, pull off a fully accomplished and recognisable film of pure Hitch.

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A good analysis of the film is by Charles Barr in his book English Hitchcock (1999), drawing out the connections with later films like Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963), and emphasising the importance of Charles Bennett in Hitchcock's development.

Metropolitan (1990)

Tom and Audrey discussing Jane Austen and Lionel Trilling.

This film has always been special for me, somehow even before I had seen it. I saw the trailer during the Christmas break of 1990 at the cinema Sergelteatern in Stockholm. I was there with my mother and after the trailer I turn to her and said "I want to see that one. It looks really good." I do not remember which film it was we were there to watch, and it is the only memory I have of seeing a trailer for the first time. For unknown reasons the trailer for Metropolitan (Whit Stillman 1990) made an unforgettable impression.

When the film did come out in Sweden in early 1991 I saw it but I have no memory of that, or of where I saw it and with whom. The trailer had had a more powerful impact. Maybe it was just timing.

Now, after having watched the film so many times over the years, it has become a part of me, frequently on my mind. The acting is a bit stiff, or awkward, at times but the dialogue is wonderful and so is the film's general sense of melancholia. There is a quiet sadness to the film, and to several of its characters, sprung from a desperate belief that there must have been better times then these, because what kind of life is this? If this is all we have got then finding pleasure in thinking about an imagined past might be what keeps depression at bay.

But maybe all is not lost. The last scene, of three friends lost by the beach at Southampton, is both wistful and hopeful. One era is definitely over but maybe their friendship will survive. At least it is pretty to think so.

Video nostalgia

The VHS tape became a popular way by which to watch films around the same time I was old enough to watch films for grownups, even though my parents refused to let a VCR darken our apartment. But my friends had the means to play the tapes so I spent many hours in their homes (sometimes when I was supposed to do other things such as taking flute lessons) watching acknowledged classics like Miami Supercops, with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, or the Australian nuclear waste thriller The Chain Reaction from 1980. Although mostly we would be watching James Bond, constantly and excessively. When I had trouble falling asleep at night I did not count sheep, instead I quoted dialogue from Bond films. The one I knew best was Live and Let Die, where I could all lines up until "A genuine Felix lighter. Illuminating." which would be the first 30 minutes of the movie perhaps.

At that time I was not able to explore film history, and none of my friends shared my burgeoning cinephilia. For older films, or films not in English or Swedish, I had to make do with whatever was shown on Swedish television, on one of our two channels. On odd occasions I would rent a moviebox and then I could watch a film of my own choosing, such as Hannah and Her Sisters. To clarify, a moviebox was a portable VCR without the ability to record and you rented it along with the films and returned them simultaneously. But I would say that it was always a gamble as to whether those movieboxes would actually work. They were not of sturdy quality. But eventually I got my own room and my own VCR, and things began to brighten up.

There were two video stores in the suburb where I lived; a big one, part of a chain, called Videobutiken Premiär and a small one, owned by an older woman and her 30-something son, in the basement of a high-rise. There were six of those high-rises, the video store was in the one next to the tube station and I lived in the third of them, so it was very close. I would not say I was there every day, but not far from it. I would sit at home and go through the video guides such as Leonard Maltin, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever and whatever else I could get my hands on, and then search for the titles in the aisles. For a long time I was only interested in renting, but finally I bought two, Ice Station Zebra and Vertigo. I do not recall which I bought first, but those two were the only ones I had for some time. Later, in the early 90s, I discovered the Time Out Film Guide, which is where I came to know the criticism of Geoff Andrew and Tom Milne, both of considerable importance for me. Alas many of the films they championed were not necessarily to be found in my video stores, especially not old, black and white films. When I went to London for the first time however... I could barely contain myself. Although neither Andrew nor Milne would have been impressed by the first VHS I bought there, Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai. Then one day London came to Stockholm, in the form of Velvet Video on Birkagatan in the centre of Stockholm (so not walking distance from home). They had VHS you could either rent or buy, and all were directly imported from England. I was their most loyal and consistent customer, working my way through their stock. My first day there I rented Ford's Rio Grande. That was a good day.

But what is the nostalgia about? Well, it is not about the quality of the images. VHS is nothing compared to any streaming service available now. It is about other things, such as the personal touch. When you went to a video store you would meet other people, you would get personal recommendations, and not only deal with an algorithm. For someone like myself, who did not know anybody with a similar interest, the staff in the video stores became like secondary friends. It would have been a lonely life having only Netflix and iTunes to engage with. It was part of a community instead of a solitary home activity. To some extent it is part of a healthy democracy and society, to engage with others and interact face to face, rather than only through a computer. And besides, going out and leaving your apartment is in itself a good thing. A video store might also, as opposed to a streaming service, give you a job.

In 2003 the guy who once was running Velvet Video called me up and asked if I wanted to work with him in his new video store at the Swedish Film Institute. I obviously said yes immediately. It was stressful work at times but also a lot of fun, and many celebrities paid it a visit, like Jan Troell, Bibi Andersson, Josef Fares, Nina Persson and Thommy Berggren (who told me the story about how he was supposed to have played the part of Noodles in Once Upon a Time in America but for some reason I have now forgotten it eventually landed in Robert De Niro's lap instead). Eventually I became the manager of the store after the guy from Velvet Video lost all interest and turn to professional poker instead.

When I was working there the death and decline of the video store was already taking place and there were only two great video stores left in Stockholm besides mine, Casablanca and No 1. Video. One day I answered the phone in my video store and there was a man asking about a particular film. I said that we did not have it but he might try Casablanca. "Do you know where it is?" He answered "Yes. I'm actually calling from them. They didn't have it and suggested I call you." As I said, it was like a community.

But I too lost interest in managing a video store. I quit at the end of 2006 and began working at the Ingmar Bergman Archives, which in a way is when the present phase of my life began. Today my video store is no more, and neither is Casablanca nor No 1. Video. I miss them all.

The note on the window says "Thanks"

One reason to miss the stores is the wide selection they would have. Not just the latest blockbusters but also things like French New Wave, Italian Giallo, Akira Kurosawa and American independent cinema. In the late 1990s for example I was bingeing on indie films like the collected work of Tom DiCillo, Alexandre Rockwell's astonishing In the Soup or Gas, Food Lodging by Allison Anders, and such lesser fare like Pie in the Sky. Most importantly, this is how I discovered Nicole Holofcener, who continues to go from strength to strength. I am not saying that such films are not available today, but not all in the same place, you have to look for them and might have to take up a subscription or there might be rights issues that prevent them from being streamed in your country, or they might suddenly disappear. The video store was more stable and dependable. And more adventurous.

Catherine Keener and Anne Heche in Holofcener's Walking and Talking

In the bigger of the two video stores in Farsta, my suburb, one of the staff members was a stern woman with curly hair. After the store in Farsta closed she too disappeared from my life. Until last year. The last proper video store in central Stockholm, called Buylando, was closing down and on its very last day I went in, primarily for old time's sake but also to see if there were any good deals on DVDs. I found the whole Back to the Future trilogy for a negligible price and went to the cashier to pay for it. Behind the counter was the woman with the curly hair. It was like my whole life flashed before my eyes; she was potentially the first person to serve me in a video store and she would also be the last person to do so. She did not smile this time either.

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I felt inspired to write this post after listening to a Film Comment podcast about New York video stores, and after reading Tom Roston's I Lost it at the Video Store, reviewed by Glenn Kenny here. They are about the past, as is my post. For an investigation of the present and the future, The Economist have eight articles to read: http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21716467-technology-has-given-billions-people-access-vast-range-entertainment-gady

Among the many films in which video stores play an important part (including some of the above mentioned) I would like to recommend Bleeder, a great early film by Nicolas Winding Refn where Mads Mikkelsen plays a video store clerk. I also have a soft spot for Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl, although I know I am rather alone on this one.

SCSMI conference 2011

Two weeks ago I attended the annual SCSMI (Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image) conference, which was held in Budapest this year. There have been some requests for a report and here, belatedly, are my thoughts.

This was my second SCSMI conference, and I had almost as much fun this time as last year in Roanoke, US. The reason it was more fun last year was that we all stayed in the same hotel and Roanoke is much smaller than Budapest so the communal feeling was much stronger, more like a fieldtrip than a conference. This time we were all scattered across the city, making it less intimate and cosy. But that's just the order of things. Let's focus on the papers and presentations instead. I will not dwell on all the things I went to, in some cases I have nothing in particular to say and in some cases I feel I don't know enough to engage critically, but here are the presentations I can and will say something about, presentations all of which I enjoyed. All of these ideas presented here are things I'm interested in and will come back to in later postings, and eventually in a book.

Stanley Kramer is not a filmmaker with a high standing these days, but one of his more tolerable films are The Defiant Ones (1958), a drama about racial intolerance. It is stiff and ponderous but it has one thing going for it that almost makes it great. The use of natural sound. The sounds of rain, wind, grass, mud, birds, insects, voices (and an annoying portable radio) gives the film a life and a richness which isn't in the story, the images or most of the direction. If ever the importance of sound in cinema needed to be proved, this would be a great film to start with. But the list of films to include would be a long one. Luis Rocha Antunes, in his presentation about "The Multisensory Film Experience", didn't mentioned The Defiant Ones, but he gave a lot of sound examples from other films to underline his argument that film is more than just a visual experience. He talked of many things that heightens our experience of a film besides what we see with our eyes but I felt that sound was his main point in this particular presentation, which was a good one. As you may recall from my report from last year's conference I then also applauded the many presentations that discussed sound and the importance of it.

Johannes Riis of University of Copenhagen gave a presentation on Mad Men, and the question of his talk was why we admire and look up to Don Draper even though he is not really a nice guy with his bullying, extramarital affairs and condescending attitude. Why is it that we can admire people on the screen (or in fiction in general) which we might not like at all in real life? This is a common question, that pops up now and then, sometimes with moral undertones ("these films are bad because they make us like bad people") but more often just out of curiosity. There's a lot to be said about this.

What I suggested as an explanation to audience appreciation of "bad" characters was two things. First that there might be other characters in the film that are even worse, and that their function is to say "yes, the main character is bad, but not as bad is this guy here." and so the issue becomes relative. Like the character Waingro in Heat (1995). Compared to him Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro's character) isn't so bad. Secondly, a way of making it easier for us to like characters is to not show the consequences of their actions. In Mad Men for example, if every scene of Don Draper behaving badly was followed by a scene when the person he had cheated on, or bullied, was shown quietly sobbing, or accusing Draper for behaving badly, then that might considerably lessen the warm feelings we might have for him. And in Heat; if after the opening sequence, when the security guards are shot by McCauley and his crew, we were shown a sequence of the guards grieving widows and children, then it would be tough to like them. Instead all victims are alone and without (acknowledged) friends or relatives, except the victims of Waingro's crimes.

But we needn't necessarily explain this phenomenon by narrative conventions. We like people in real life even though they might do bad things, it is just that they are not bad to us. Everybody have friends, liars, cheaters, embezzlers, perhaps even mass murderers, and if that is a possibility in real life then of course it can happen with fictional characters as well.

The University of Copenhagen is a major player in cognitive studies of the moving image, and besides Johannes Riis, Casper Tybjerg is another scholar from that school (Luis Rocha Antunes has been there too). Tybjerg's presentation was on the moral aspects of storytelling. He criticised an evolutionary psychology approach that reduces all character behaviour to the essential hunt for food and sex. Tybjerg suggested that one reason for storytelling is that it is a way to "teach" us humans about how to behave, that this is why the good guys win and the bad guys are punished, and that this is as old as storytelling itself. He quoted from William Flesch's book "Comeuppance" (a word which always makes me think of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Orson Welles's narration of it) to substantiate his theory. I suggested though that the audience sometimes prefer the bad characters (or the "immoral" ones), i.e. "rooting for the bad guy", and that what might for one spectator be seen as good behaviour might be seen as the opposite for another spectator. But the idea that storytelling, as part of human evolution, is involved with helping us understand the world and inspire us to behave ethically, is one that I subscribe to. (Here's a review of Flesch's book.)

The last Dane in this report is the man who started it all in Copenhagen, professor Torben Grodal. At the conference last year he spoke about violence and terror in Se7en (1995). Perhaps to compensate for the relentless gloom he this year spoke about comedies and laughter. He was arguing that laughter is related to anger and that it comes from playing, which most mammals do (and some non-mammals as well), as a safe way of doing things similar to what we do when we are angry or genuinely aggressive, such as when hunting. It was a lot more complex than that of course, but this'll do for now. Grodal also emphasised the social aspects of laughter, and suggested that this is a reason why comedies are more popular on a local market, whereas action films and melodramas have a more global reach.

This raises some questions for me. If laughter is a social function, on what level? Social in the sense that it binds two individuals together, or a whole group, by laughing a the "other", somebody else, or another group? Or is it social in the sense that it is a way for humans, all humans, to socialise together, like when we meet strangers we might use laughter as a way of bonding, not at the expense of somebody else but for everybody's benefit? I might for example, to break the ice, make a joke about myself. I would suggest that both uses of laughter are at play, and this might help explain why, contrary to what Grodal seemed to suggest, some comedies are in fact very much popular on a global scale, such as the slapstick humour of Chaplin and Keaton, whereas some other form of humour works only on a local market. The same is true for melodramas I would argue, and possibly action films as well.

One of the bigger stars within the field of cognitive studies is Tim Smith, presently at Birkbeck, University of London (He also also blogs (infrequently) at continuityboy.blogspot.com.) His speciality is tracking eye-movements of spectators, but in his presentation he focused on memory, on what we remember after having seen a scene or a whole film, and why it is that we remember that which we remember. He suggested that we remember the logical continuity of the story and specific plot points, and that verbal details were more important to us than visuals. He highlighted our preference for words by noting the fact that we usually watch the mouth of the person speaking, even though it doesn't make it easier to understand what the person is saying, we might as well look at the eyes (or feet for that matter) since we hear the words, we don't see them, unless we're lip-readers. (I have sometimes consciously tried to look at other parts of the face when somebody is speaking but it is harder than it sounds. The speaker's eyes are fairly easy to focus on though, if you're close to them. But sooner or later the gaze turns towards the mouth again.)

One comment I made is that we often remember things that were not actually in the film, i.e. we don't remember them at all but have made them up. My own favourite example is a scene from Thunderball (1965) that I had very strong memories of, I can even "see" it in my head, still today. Only there is no such scene in the actual film. And neither is it in Ian Fleming's novel the film is based on. My surprise when I re-watched it a couple of years ago and found out that the scene wasn't there hasn't settled yet. To this Smith said that we include scenes in our memory that wasn't there in the film because these imaginary scenes help to make logical continuity. But this was not the case with my scene. It was a whole murder sequence, which didn't have anything to do with the continuity of the film. No, in my case, and most likely in others as well, there's something else going on. The scene/sequence might for example be a composite of several scenes and images, possibly from different films, that have been created by our ever so self-sufficient brains. Or I might have dreamt it, and then in my brain the memory of the dream has merged with the memory of the real.

Another star in these circles is professor James Cutting from Cornell University. His presentations are always immensely enjoyable because he is such a natural speaker and entertainer. His thing is collecting data, data consisting of things like average shot lengths, number of shots, number of sequences, changes of luminance, movement in shots, number of cuts, and so on, in Hollywood films made from 1935 and onwards. He then present this figures to others to do with it what they see fit. There are a lot of things you can do with this figures. One thing is to compare different genres, different filmmakers and different eras. Another is to track changes over time. Another is to analyse the structures of films, and see the striking similarities between wildly different films, and ponder upon how much is intentionally done and how much is unconsciously. The mere avalanche of numbers and figures can feel a bit over-whelming, but if you dig in to them there's no telling what you will find. (The reason why Cutting and his colleagues and students begin with the year 1935 is that before this there were too much inconsistency and randomness. The language of film was still evolving so much that it is difficult to get a handle on it, but from approximately 1935 things began to settle down. This makes for an interesting nuance to the widely held idea that classical storytelling was pretty much established in 1917.)

The presentation I regarded as the best from last year was by Robert Blanchet, and this year he was at it again, but now together with a colleague from Norway, Margarethe Bruun Vaage. Their presentation was about the difference in engaging with TV-series as opposed to engaging with films, more specifically the fictional characters. In short what they argued were that due to the long-time exposure to the characters in TV-series we come to regard them, in a way, as friends, and we are hence reluctant to leave them. Blanchet and Bruun Vaage were drawing from media studies, psychology and economics in a very rich and fruitful way. A concept they used, that comes from social psychology, was the "familiarity principle", which is also called the "mere exposure effect" which means that the more familiar something is, or becomes, the more likely is it that we like it. It is true for a lot of things in life, and they argued that this too is a factor in explaining audience engagement with TV-series as being different from films, at least on part of the characters. The familiarity principle works in films as well though, with actors, filmmakers, genres or film series such as the James Bond films.

I can only vouch for the friendship aspect myself. After I had seen the last episode of The West Wing (1999-2006) I felt abandoned and sadden, the sense of loss was palpable after having spent several years with this characters, in a way akin to a feeling of saying goodbye to friends or colleagues. But the familiarity principle is more problematic. It doesn't help explain how we engage with the first episodes of the first season, it only helps to explains why we continue to watch in the fifth season even though we might not think it is as good as it once was. Also, it would seem to suggest that we would like any TV-series were we exposed to it long enough but I'm not so sure about that.

One presentation I was particularly tickled by was professor John Bateman's, especially when he talked about the need for new approaches to genre studies. As I find most of traditional genre studies deeply flawed this is something I will be coming back to in later postings, but what Bateman and his colleagues want to argue is that we need to acknowledge that discourses and genres are much more fluent and dynamic than we give them credit for. (The focus of the presentation though was on the beginnings of films, in particular so called "puzzle films".)

And that concludes my summary. As I said I went to more presentations, for example professor Carl Plantinga's on folk psychology and Monika Suckfüll's on audience participation, but although I enjoyed them I don't have anything in particular to add. I do have a lot to add though to the presentation given by professor Murray Smith of University of Kent, but so much that I will have to save it for another blog post.

My own presentation was about storytelling and prejudices (prejudices scholars and critics have when approaching films). I will eventually explaining my theories and ideas on storytelling in writing but that too will have to wait. The prejudice part might be summed up in this quote from V.F. Perkins: "Our viewpoint is not given solely by the image because what we see is so much a question of what we're looking for." (From "Film as Film").

I'll keep you dangling until August because I'm giving myself a blog vacation now. In July you'll have to settle for some clips and quotes.

Herbie and me

I grow up in a suburb south of Stockholm, and we had a movie theatre there, called Fanfaren. In the autumn of 1981 a film opened in Sweden called Herbie Goes Bananas (1980), and eventually it found it's way to Fanfaren. And I went to see it. I was very young and it was the first time I ever went to the movies on my own. And even though it's almost 30 years ago I remember it vividly, everything about it. I was thrilled! I remember the film, me sitting there watching it, me walking home afterwards, and then discussing it with my father when I got home. I even remember some of the things he asked me, like if it had been shot with a camera looking out through the front windscreen so the audience would feel like they were driving the car.

It's easy to see the appeal. A young boy and a cute car being manhandled by evil adults, and a lot of slapstick in between, what's not to like?

Very few movie experiences has been in the same league as that one, perhaps none can compete. And it doesn't matter that I saw all the Herbie films again a couple of years ago, not being particularly impressed. When I was seven years old, it was the best thing in the world.

There were four films made about Herbie back then, from 1968 to 1980, and they were created by Gordon Buford. The first two was directed by Robert Stevenson, the last two by Vincent McEveety. Stevenson had a long and eclectic career, doing both noirs in the 1940s and children's films in the late 1960s and 1970s, including the Irish classic Darby O'Gill and the Little People already in 1959 and Mary Poppins in 1964. McEveety on the other hand mostly made TV action series, like Airwolf, Simon & Simon and Magnum P.I. as well as various episodes of Dallas, Murder, She Wrote and The Rockford Files. I was addicted to all of those shows so perhaps McEveety has shaped me more than any other director. Or maybe not. The director wasn't exactly the major force in those TV series.

But to get back to Herbie. I'm delighted to have found that Herbie, the car, has his own page on imdb (click here), and that apparently there are more Swedes who have experienced the Love Bug as young impressionable children.

About four years ago I went to see a new version of Herbie, Herbie Fully Loaded (2005), with a friend of mine and her son Alex. Unlike me, he didn't see it on his own, but even so, I wonder if it would've made as big on impression on him as my first experience did on me. I don't remember what he said about it after. I myself found it moderately entertaining. But it felt rather nice to see it with a young boy, even if it wasn't my own son.

Why did I suddenly start to think about this? Because of a random remark by Kent Jones, or was it Barry Putterman, on Dave Kehr's blog. It was like a Madeleine cake. And now, when thinking about it, it's with nothing but joy. It was a happy day, a happy time, a happy memory. And I still get a bit misty-eyed when thinking about it all. Maybe I should call my father, or Annie and Alex, and see what they remember.