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March 7, 2010
Pink
As I procrastinate on preparing a new snippet of journalism for Filmmaker Magazine's site, I took note of Scott Maccaulay's link to this article by Nancy Angier in the Times science pages last week concerning a study on the evolving semantics of film language - in particular, the way in which the editorial process has grown increasingly congruous to the cognizant patterns of our own brains.
"Reporting in the journal Psychological Science, James E. Cutting of Cornell University and his colleagues described their discovery that Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly and can seem more lifelike and immediate than films of the past..."
Pink noise is what it's called, this wavelength cinema ha been conforming itself to; a ratio of 1 over f, "seated somewhere between random and rigid," to which filmmakers have subconsciously begun to adhere. This sensory verisimilitude has been complimented by developments not just in editing but in lenses, film stocks, moral codes and software - the article called to mind Chris Wisniewski's essay in Reverse Shot about how the advent of nonlinear editing over the past two decades has affected Terrence Malick's filmmaking (he being the rare filmmaker whose body of work is largely free of graduation.
What I'm curious about is whether we've always thought that way, or if the very media which has mapped itself to the contours of our brains also helped develop that landscape. Have we always responded in the same way to different stimuli? To be sure, our pattern-recognition abilities in and of themselves have developed exponentially, as chronicled by Maryanne Wolf in her excellent book Proust and the Squid; hence, one might surmise that, as much as modern film may have caught up with modern thought, they'll both be as antiquated to future generations as a Technicolor opus is to we audiences on the cusp of the YouTube generation. Or, conversely, did John Ford movies look the way people used to think?
Posted by David Lowery at March 7, 2010 1:19 AM
Comments
Unfortunately, the article link is broken above; but, I think I catch the gist. It's intriguing, though I'm not sure I know what "pulsatile" means and I've nowhere near my dictionary. Ignorance makes me imagine.
Posted by: Maya at March 10, 2010 3:39 AM
Oops, thanks for pointing out the broken link - it's fixed!
Posted by: David Lowery at March 10, 2010 12:43 PM