Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for an older episode
Speaker 1: of the show. This one originally published on January two,
Speaker 1: and it was part one of our series about the
Speaker 1: coolest shov effect and interesting psychological effect having to do
Speaker 1: with film editing. Alright, let's jump right in. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: Joe here, I'm just cutting in before the music with
Speaker 1: a brief editorial insert it's happened before it happened again.
Speaker 1: This is one of those episodes that went long. Rob
Speaker 1: and I originally planned it to be one standalone chat,
Speaker 1: but it started taking on an unwieldy form while we
Speaker 1: were recording, so we decided to go ahead and chop
Speaker 1: it up into two parts. So this is why in
Speaker 1: a few minutes you might hear me make references to
Speaker 1: things I'm going to bring up later in the episode,
Speaker 1: but we actually won't get to them until part two,
Speaker 1: So apologies for any confusion on that front. As a
Speaker 1: general outline, and we're going to introduce and illustrate our
Speaker 1: central topic in part one here and then we'll be
Speaker 1: going deeper into the weeds of subsequent research in part two.
Speaker 1: So without any further delay, I'll now plunge you back
Speaker 1: into the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind. And my name is Robert Lamm
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about a concept known as the coolest Shop effect. This
Speaker 1: is an idea from film theory. But I think this
Speaker 1: will make a really interesting episode because it's, first of all,
Speaker 1: it's at that that weird intersection space, you know, the
Speaker 1: midnight at the crossroads of of art and science. And
Speaker 1: then uh, Secondarily, I think it's one of those great
Speaker 1: observations that is simple, almost obvious in its implication, ends
Speaker 1: when when you first grasp it, but you the more
Speaker 1: you think about it, the weirder and more powerful it gets,
Speaker 1: especially in a historical context. Yeah, this is an interesting
Speaker 1: topic and one I have to admit that I don't
Speaker 1: think i'd ever really absorbed before. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it ever came up in um, any of like the
Speaker 1: film classes that I took, like in college. Um, same
Speaker 1: here and uh and and at the same time, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I read about this and then went out and actually
Speaker 1: watched um um, I watched a film and watched you know,
Speaker 1: probably a couple of TV shows over the weekend, and
Speaker 1: so I had it fresh on my mind looking for it.
Speaker 1: And on one hand, you do see it everywhere, but
Speaker 1: then you don't like, it's, uh, it's this thing that
Speaker 1: that when you're when you first read about it, it
Speaker 1: sounds like, oh, well, this is like part of the
Speaker 1: blueprint of how film works. And that's kind of that's
Speaker 1: kind of one of the arguments that's made for it.
Speaker 1: And yet it's not necessarily as a parent as you
Speaker 1: might expect it to be, but there are some wonderful
Speaker 1: examples to be to be dwelt upon. Well, the way
Speaker 1: I'd put it, after having done all the research for
Speaker 1: this episode, is that I think it is sort of
Speaker 1: part of the blueprint of how film works, except in
Speaker 1: the way it's usually explained, it's just a few degrees off. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that would I think that would make sense. But I'll
Speaker 1: explain more about that as as we go on. Another
Speaker 1: thing that's interesting about this though, is it's something that's
Speaker 1: originally from the realm of art and esthetic criticism. You know,
Speaker 1: it's from film theory, but it also has a sort
Speaker 1: of mixed research history within the fields of experimental psychology
Speaker 1: and neuroscience. You know, there's some empirical experiments that seem
Speaker 1: to find evidence of the effect and others do not
Speaker 1: find it. And I think part of the part of
Speaker 1: the difference there is how you ask the question and
Speaker 1: what kind of stimula you use. But it could be
Speaker 1: interesting to see what the difference is there as well.
Speaker 1: But I guess we should get straight to explaining what
Speaker 1: the coolest Jov effect allegedly is. So, in the words
Speaker 1: of the authors of a two thousand six neuroscience paper
Speaker 1: by mobs at All that I'll refer to later in
Speaker 1: the episode, the coolest Jov effect is the following proposition.
Speaker 1: It is that quote, the manipulation of context can alter
Speaker 1: an audiences perception of an actor's facial expressions, thoughts, and feelings. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is something that is at at the very
Speaker 1: root of everything. Is is based on theory of mind,
Speaker 1: that we as humans look at another person and we
Speaker 1: simulate what's going on in their head, what what are
Speaker 1: their thoughts, what are their motivations, what are their intentions, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Um uh so, Yeah, it's theory theory, theory of mind
Speaker 1: at heart, but it's not just the face. It's also
Speaker 1: something else. And basically this gets into just an into
Speaker 1: filmmaking and editing. Right, it's the the idea of montage.
Speaker 1: That's the word that's often used here, but that would
Speaker 1: probably give us ideas of a very specific technique of like,
Speaker 1: you know, you're like the training montage and Rocky film
Speaker 1: or something. You should actually be thinking of montage when
Speaker 1: we say it in this episode. More broadly, it's not
Speaker 1: just that. It means the the arrangement of different shots
Speaker 1: into a sequence through editing. No matter what kind of
Speaker 1: technique you're using there, if you're taking different shots and
Speaker 1: putting them into a sequence, that is montage for today's purposes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and again it all comes back to editing. The
Speaker 1: way the footage is put together. You can basically think
Speaker 1: of it as like face p O V shot face um.
Speaker 1: For instance, Alfred Hitchcock described it once as being a
Speaker 1: situation where okay, again, think of three shots. First shot,
Speaker 1: he says, his man looking out the window. Shot number
Speaker 1: three is a man smiling. Now what you put in
Speaker 1: that second slot, whatever, that second shot is that you
Speaker 1: insert that changes the context entirely. Now, uh, as we
Speaker 1: were discussing before we recorded here, this Alfred Hitchcock example,
Speaker 1: the widely cided is also a little imperfect because if
Speaker 1: you want to get right down to the like the
Speaker 1: core theory, it's just it's Shot one should be a
Speaker 1: man looking out a window. Shot number three should just
Speaker 1: be that man looking out a window, no smile. But
Speaker 1: it still comes down to what is shot number two,
Speaker 1: because that changes how you think about that man in
Speaker 1: shot three, right, you seem to see something different in
Speaker 1: the man, even though you could use the exact same
Speaker 1: footage of him. So the editing context changes what we
Speaker 1: think we see in a previous or a subsequent shot,
Speaker 1: even though you're using the exact same shots. So one
Speaker 1: of the funny in Hitchcock's example, he uh, he talks
Speaker 1: about this in a famous interview I think he did
Speaker 1: with maybe it was with the CBC or somebody, but
Speaker 1: but he was using the example of Okay, in the
Speaker 1: first sequence, imagine that the middle shot that's intercut there
Speaker 1: is like a mother playing with a baby, and in
Speaker 1: that case, oh, he's a kindly old grandfather man. And
Speaker 1: then the second option is that the middle shot is
Speaker 1: a woman in a bathing suit, in which case, he says,
Speaker 1: then you perceive his smile as being that of a
Speaker 1: dirty old man. And I guess it kind of helps
Speaker 1: because it's actually Alfred Hitchcock they use in the visual example.
Speaker 1: Now we'll come back to more about what this idea
Speaker 1: is and what it might mean, but maybe first we
Speaker 1: should just do a little bit of biography on the
Speaker 1: namesake of this idea. So the Kolashov effect is named
Speaker 1: after a guy named Lev Kulashev, who was a Russian
Speaker 1: filmmaker and film theorist who I think, I don't know,
Speaker 1: you could say it was like a major force in
Speaker 1: the history of film theory and uh, and is primarily
Speaker 1: responsible for popularizing this alleged effect. Yes, Lev Kulashev, who
Speaker 1: lived seventy Russian director film theorist who started out in art,
Speaker 1: direction and some acting before moving increasingly into directing, experimental editing,
Speaker 1: and scholarship. He was one of the founders of the
Speaker 1: world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. And yeah,
Speaker 1: he introduced the American film concept of montage into Soviet
Speaker 1: cinema based on examining the works of directors such as
Speaker 1: DDA be Griffith, and as David Gilevskie points out in
Speaker 1: his book Early Soviet Cinema, he quote played a more
Speaker 1: significant part in the development of the Golden Age of
Speaker 1: Russian cinema than any other figure with the exception of Eisenstein.
Speaker 1: And this would refer to Sergei Eisenstein, another big name
Speaker 1: and film a big big name Russian film director of
Speaker 1: the time period, theorist of the day who listeners might
Speaker 1: know from such films as a Battleship Attempkin from that's
Speaker 1: the old baby Stroller down the Stairs movie right now.
Speaker 1: One thing I do remember from actual film classes that
Speaker 1: I took in college was that a lot of early
Speaker 1: Soviet cinema does make use of the montage, more in
Speaker 1: the sense of the specific film technique where you're like
Speaker 1: taking a bunch of different images and and putting them
Speaker 1: together to suggest a kind of, uh, a kind of
Speaker 1: sequence or progression, more like the training montage. But the
Speaker 1: main example I remember there is a movie we watched
Speaker 1: by or TV called The Man with the Movie Camera,
Speaker 1: which is basically the whole movie is just a montage
Speaker 1: of of you know, Russian public life by the way,
Speaker 1: if anyone out there wants to hear us talk even
Speaker 1: more about silent film. We did an episode of Weird
Speaker 1: How Cinema UM at some point in the last year
Speaker 1: where we did like a silent film double feature where
Speaker 1: we we picked out just a couple maybe three different
Speaker 1: silent films and talked about what was neat about them
Speaker 1: and just talked about sort of the the challenges to
Speaker 1: the modern viewer that that silent film poses, but also
Speaker 1: the rewards of watching them. So what one of the
Speaker 1: main things Kolashov was doing here was that he was
Speaker 1: he wasn't even um even even shooting new footage in
Speaker 1: these experiments. UH, he was taking pre existing footage silent
Speaker 1: film footage usually um Czarist era silent film, and re
Speaker 1: cutting them to to see what could be done with
Speaker 1: this montage feature like how how to arrange the uh
Speaker 1: the footage to get different, um you know, emotional results.
Speaker 1: And a lot of it was based again and looking
Speaker 1: at what was going on and what seemed to be
Speaker 1: working in uh in in in Western film, in American
Speaker 1: film specifically again like the work of d. W. Griffith,
Speaker 1: and UH just in general. Kulashofice was it was somewhat
Speaker 1: controversial at times, apparently in in these uh, these experiments,
Speaker 1: you know, he's looking at American models, Western models, So
Speaker 1: he was accused by Communist Party members at times of
Speaker 1: appealing to Western ideas and forms too much. And he's
Speaker 1: also apparently been accused of living it up during tough
Speaker 1: times in Russia and destroying archives silent era films during
Speaker 1: this editing work, which again the work that wasn't really
Speaker 1: based that so much in shooting new footage and experimenting
Speaker 1: with how you might added them together, but taking pre
Speaker 1: existing footage from the archive and adding it together. Now,
Speaker 1: as a director, Kulashov is apparently and I'm speaking largely
Speaker 1: of a director that I really didn't know anything about before,
Speaker 1: so me neither. But he's apparently best known for ninety
Speaker 1: four's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land
Speaker 1: of the Bolsheviks. He also adapted the works of Jack
Speaker 1: London and Oh Henry, but especially for this show, we
Speaker 1: should really highlight that he also made a death Ray
Speaker 1: spy thriller. I thought this was really interesting. Somehow, I
Speaker 1: guess this never came up when we did our invention
Speaker 1: episodes on the Death Ray or if it did, I've
Speaker 1: forgotten about it because this seemed new to me. But
Speaker 1: it fits right in there, because if you haven't heard
Speaker 1: our episodes of the Invention podcast on the death Ray,
Speaker 1: those were some of my favorites that we did, especially
Speaker 1: because we got to talk about an invention that never
Speaker 1: really existed and yet was the subject of a popular fervor.
Speaker 1: You know that, like people were really excited about death
Speaker 1: rays for the nineteen twenties and that just there was
Speaker 1: never any such thing. Yeah, yeah, the invention it's of
Speaker 1: never existed, but you had kind of a global death
Speaker 1: ray fever going on, and this is so it's right
Speaker 1: smack dab in the middle of it. A film titled
Speaker 1: lut Smirty or the Death Ray. Galepsi describes it as
Speaker 1: quote a relatively violent film about international espionage. So I
Speaker 1: had to look in. I looked at footage the available
Speaker 1: footage that I could find out. It wasn't wasn't super
Speaker 1: great to watch, but there's some impressive stills that The
Speaker 1: plot is spot on for what you might expect from
Speaker 1: a Soviet death ray movie at the time period. We
Speaker 1: follow a socialist revolutionary who has to flee an unnamed
Speaker 1: fascist capitalist country, the socialist revolutionary has to flee to
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, and once there he is introduced to
Speaker 1: the new technology of the death ray, which can explode
Speaker 1: gunpowder at a distance, which is a key detail because
Speaker 1: that's exactly, uh that the sort of thing that was
Speaker 1: part of the death ray fever that we discussed in
Speaker 1: the Invention episode. That's right. So the brief top line
Speaker 1: on that is that, uh, basically a lot of this
Speaker 1: death ray fever came from reaction to the horrors of
Speaker 1: long range bombing aerial bombing in World War One, and
Speaker 1: people wanted the idea of something that could shoot bombers
Speaker 1: out of the sky from a great distance before they
Speaker 1: got to your cities, and the death ray filled in
Speaker 1: that gap exactly. So basically, the evil spy follows them
Speaker 1: and steals the death ray technology so that they can
Speaker 1: use it to suppress labor strikes. But don't worry, the
Speaker 1: labor strikers steal the death ray technology back and use
Speaker 1: it to blow up their oppressors bomber aircraft which is
Speaker 1: about to be used against the strikers. This almost makes
Speaker 1: me want to compile and watch a list of all
Speaker 1: the death ray movies of the nineteen twentys. Just put
Speaker 1: them all together and see see what kind of picture emerges. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: or and I'm curious, like, what is the best death
Speaker 1: ray movie? I'm I'm assuming the best death ray movies
Speaker 1: came later. Um came in the way of films such
Speaker 1: as this, Thank thank Okay, Well, so that's love kol
Speaker 1: Ashov and I wanted to get a little bit into
Speaker 1: the background of this idea of the cool Ashov effect
Speaker 1: by consulting his own words. So I found a book
Speaker 1: called cool a Shov on Film Writings. This was published
Speaker 1: by the University of California Press in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: I'm not positive. I think this might be a reprint
Speaker 1: of some earlier writings of Kola Shovs, but the context
Speaker 1: is um. I was consulting an early section of this
Speaker 1: book where he's discussing a series of investigations he and
Speaker 1: his colleagues carried out in the late nineteen teens and
Speaker 1: into the twenties, essentially to try to figure out how
Speaker 1: film actually works. That they were asking questions like how
Speaker 1: do audiences make meaning out of the images they see
Speaker 1: over the course of a film? Which is a great question,
Speaker 1: and it is something that early filmmakers really had to
Speaker 1: fe guar out. We we can take a lot of
Speaker 1: film meaning making for granted these days, because uh, you know,
Speaker 1: film techniques are so well honed these days that they're
Speaker 1: often invisible to us. You know, you you if you
Speaker 1: watch a professionally made movie, you will you will not
Speaker 1: even notice the fact that, say, all of the eye
Speaker 1: lines and it have been aligned correctly so that when
Speaker 1: a character looks at something and then it cuts to
Speaker 1: that thing, it's lined up so that it's not confusing.
Speaker 1: But that's like a technique that had to be learned,
Speaker 1: and there are tons of things like that. They're just
Speaker 1: invisible to us now, as as a lot of good
Speaker 1: filmmaking techniques are I mean ideally, I guess, well, I
Speaker 1: mean there are different ideas of this, but you know,
Speaker 1: a common view I think among a lot of filmmakers
Speaker 1: is that techniques should not call attention to themselves, but
Speaker 1: instead should disappear and allow you to just become totally
Speaker 1: absorbed in the narrative to help bring about the raw
Speaker 1: experience quality of modern cinema. Yeah. Yeah, and that's I mean,
Speaker 1: that's something I like to stick to. I mean, unless
Speaker 1: the film is so uh poor. It's a execution that
Speaker 1: you can't help but but notice it, you know, well
Speaker 1: when yeah, And certainly there's plenty of examples of that.
Speaker 1: But so Kolashav and colleagues are trying to investigate how
Speaker 1: does film work? What what are the techniques that that
Speaker 1: cause an audience to think or feel a certain way?
Speaker 1: And so famously Kolashov feels that he has achieved a
Speaker 1: breakthrough when he starts to discover the power of montage
Speaker 1: or editing. He starts to think of editing as a
Speaker 1: sort of master key behind the power of cinema, and
Speaker 1: he believes that montage has a power greater than simply
Speaker 1: showing you a series of moving images in sequence so
Speaker 1: that you think, well, one follows the other. Instead, he
Speaker 1: comes to think that by ordering shots in a sequence,
Speaker 1: you actually change the meaning of the shots themselves, or
Speaker 1: change the perception of what is contained in the shots.
Speaker 1: And there's a memorable example that Kolashov describes in the book.
Speaker 1: I'll just read it directly. He says, I saw this
Speaker 1: scene I think in a film by Razumni, a priest's
Speaker 1: house with a portrait of Nicholas, the second hanging on
Speaker 1: the wall that though that would be the czar right uh,
Speaker 1: the village is taken over by the Red Army. The
Speaker 1: frightened priest turns the portrait over, and on the reverse
Speaker 1: side of the portrait is the smiling face of Lenin. However,
Speaker 1: this is a familiar portrait, a portrait in which Lenin
Speaker 1: is not smiling. But that spot in the film was
Speaker 1: so funny, and it was so uproariously received by the
Speaker 1: public that I, myself scrutinizing the portrait several times, saw
Speaker 1: the portrait of Lenin as smiling. Especially intrigued by this,
Speaker 1: I obtained the portrait that was used and saw that
Speaker 1: the expression on the face in the portrait was serious.
Speaker 1: The montage was so edited that we involuntarily imbued a
Speaker 1: serious face with a changed expression characteristic of that playful moment.
Speaker 1: In other words, the work of the actor was altered
Speaker 1: by means of montage. In this way, montage had a
Speaker 1: colossal influence on the effect of the material. It became
Speaker 1: apparent that it was possible to change the actor's work,
Speaker 1: his movements, his very behavior in either one direction or
Speaker 1: the other through montage. I thought this was a great example,
Speaker 1: because I haven't seen the film in question. But but
Speaker 1: I can understand exactly the effect he's describing here with
Speaker 1: this portrait of Lenin because of the tone of the scene.
Speaker 1: The context makes it darkly comedic, like it's funny, but
Speaker 1: it's also threatening, that a serious or neutral face could
Speaker 1: be perceived as having a kind of wicked grin. M. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, this reminds me just in general, of any
Speaker 1: time you have kind of a a kind of a portrait
Speaker 1: he had a painting or a photograph. Um, I guess that.
Speaker 1: You know, just in general outside of film, it can
Speaker 1: seem to take on different dimensions based on what you
Speaker 1: are doing or what your mindset is. If you're sort
Speaker 1: of imagining that the that the subject of the painting
Speaker 1: or picture can see you, or you're leaning into that
Speaker 1: sort of interpretation, like why is Vigo the Carpathian staring
Speaker 1: in there like that? Is he? Is he proud? Is
Speaker 1: he angry at me? Is he smiling? Oh? That makes
Speaker 1: me wonder did they when the film Ghostbusters too, did
Speaker 1: they have multiple paintings of Vigo with slightly different expressions
Speaker 1: on his face or did they just use one portrait
Speaker 1: and and rely on the cool a shov effect? For
Speaker 1: I read emotions into it. I wish I thought of
Speaker 1: this earlier. Well, anyway, so we're about to get to
Speaker 1: the description of the main alleged experiment that establishes the
Speaker 1: this that we're about to get into canonical cool Ashov
Speaker 1: effect territory. So, following this realization about the power of
Speaker 1: editing or montage to change what is perceived within the
Speaker 1: shot itself, there's this famous story about an experiment cool
Speaker 1: a Shov supposedly carried out to put the idea to
Speaker 1: the test. And I want to flag at the beginning
Speaker 1: here that multiple sources I have read raised questions about
Speaker 1: whether this test ever actually took place in the way
Speaker 1: it is described. Um, but I'd say it doesn't especially matter,
Speaker 1: because we're going to be just using this story to
Speaker 1: illustrate an idea. Then we can look at other tests
Speaker 1: later not to provide evidential force that it must be,
Speaker 1: as Kolashev says, So whether or not this event actually
Speaker 1: took place exactly like this, this is how it's described
Speaker 1: in a book called How Movies Work by Bruce Kawen.
Speaker 1: This was University of California Press. Kawen writes as follows
Speaker 1: about Kolashev's experiment. He found some old footage of a
Speaker 1: pre revolutionary actor named Yvonne mujukin a single long take,
Speaker 1: probably a makeup test, in which the face showed an
Speaker 1: unvarying neutral expression. Kulashev then cut three different shots into
Speaker 1: this take, one of a child playing with a toy,
Speaker 1: one of a bowl of soup, and one of an
Speaker 1: old woman in a coffin the sequence when as follows
Speaker 1: face child face, soup face, woman face. When he showed
Speaker 1: this short film to an audience, although this may be
Speaker 1: a bit of cinematic folklore, they remarked what a great
Speaker 1: actor Masukan was. They enjoyed the subtle way he expressed
Speaker 1: affectionate delight at the child's playing, hunger for soup, and
Speaker 1: grief at the death of the woman whom they assumed
Speaker 1: was his mother. The Masoukan experiment, as it has since
Speaker 1: been called, had a permanent impact on the theory of
Speaker 1: screen acting. It showed that audiences will read shots in
Speaker 1: terms of each other, and therefore that a film actor
Speaker 1: who ought ideally to under act could allow the montage
Speaker 1: to suggest some of his or her emotions and thoughts.
Speaker 1: The point for our immediate purposes, however, is simply that
Speaker 1: the impression of continuity is often generated by the audience.
Speaker 1: Now will come with some additional history of research to
Speaker 1: build upon this later, But Kulashov used this alleged experiment
Speaker 1: in support of his broader theory of how film worked,
Speaker 1: one of the main points of which was that the
Speaker 1: soul of a film was in the editing process, and
Speaker 1: that the edit of the film actually had more power
Speaker 1: over the film's effect than the contents of any individual shot.
Speaker 1: I think another way of phrasing this is that the
Speaker 1: way you edit your footage together is ultimately more important
Speaker 1: than what an actor does while the cameras rolling, because
Speaker 1: the meaning of an actor's performance can be totally changed
Speaker 1: by the editing context. And in fact, Kolashov allegedly carried
Speaker 1: out a couple of other experiments along these lines that
Speaker 1: are known sometimes as creative geography and creative anatomy. Creative
Speaker 1: anatomy would be using shots of parts of different bodies
Speaker 1: from different actors, creating the illusion that they all belonged
Speaker 1: to the same person. So you and show a different
Speaker 1: person's hands, lips, legs, and so forth, and create an
Speaker 1: imaginary composite person that doesn't exist. He also did the
Speaker 1: same thing with physical geography, so he would have, for example,
Speaker 1: a shot of people walking along a street in Moscow
Speaker 1: and then maybe going up a staircase and then going
Speaker 1: to a mansion that was actually the White House in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Creating the illusion that they're all there's just
Speaker 1: one continuous walk, all in the same place, but they're
Speaker 1: on different continents, which at the time they looked at
Speaker 1: that discovery as revelatory. They're like, oh wow, like you
Speaker 1: actually don't need to shoot stuff that's in the same
Speaker 1: geographic place in order to suggest being in the same
Speaker 1: geographic place. You can invent geographies that don't exist out
Speaker 1: of different parts, which, of course now it's just this
Speaker 1: is just how you make films. You know, you you
Speaker 1: you have one exterior and maybe the interior is a
Speaker 1: set or it's somewhere on the other side of the country.
Speaker 1: You know. Um, you know, you read you read any
Speaker 1: behind the scenes making just any of your favorite films,
Speaker 1: and you'll find stuff like like the Library and Ghostbusters
Speaker 1: the first Ghostbusters film, I think parts of that are
Speaker 1: and just you know, they're from all over depending on
Speaker 1: whether you're outside or your inside you you're in the basement.
Speaker 1: And then uh, and then also when it comes to
Speaker 1: the anatomy question here, I mean it's it's why you
Speaker 1: have stunt doubles, body doubles. It's why you can finish
Speaker 1: a film. Uh, even though Bell Leghosi died whilst shooting it. Right,
Speaker 1: So that's probably you're getting into the poor example of it,
Speaker 1: and that that does specific example no. Plan nine for
Speaker 1: matter space is a is a wonderful example of of
Speaker 1: what you can do with the magic of cinema editing.
Speaker 1: But but to get back to the core idea here,
Speaker 1: these spitting and I think it'll be important for us
Speaker 1: to think about the coolest off effect in a couple
Speaker 1: of different ways. One is just the broader idea that
Speaker 1: editing context can radically change the meaning of individual shots,
Speaker 1: which I think we just all know from experiences is
Speaker 1: obviously true. This is a fact about how movies work.
Speaker 1: But the other thing is the more specific claim of
Speaker 1: the alleged MOSU can experiment that you can take a
Speaker 1: totally neutral shot of an actor's face displaying no emotion whatsoever,
Speaker 1: and by intercutting it with other footage you can change
Speaker 1: what the audience perceives. In those shots of the actor's face,
Speaker 1: you can the audience will come to think that, you know,
Speaker 1: a neutral face intercut with the image of a child
Speaker 1: playing is like a happy parental uh, you know, and
Speaker 1: like a bowl of soup means they're they're they're filled
Speaker 1: with pangs of hunger, even though it's the exact same
Speaker 1: neutral footage of the face. So that's the more specific claim.
Speaker 1: And I think it's that second one that's more questionable
Speaker 1: but but also interesting in its own regard. And we're
Speaker 1: gonna look at at least a couple of papers about
Speaker 1: that as we go on, but I thought it might
Speaker 1: be good to just discuss a few examples that this
Speaker 1: uh thinking about this effect calls to mind from uh
Speaker 1: from movies that you and I have seen. And one
Speaker 1: thing I find very interesting is that, at least personally anecdotally,
Speaker 1: I feel a kind of experience of the coolest Shov effect,
Speaker 1: even the more specific version, with neutral faces in movies
Speaker 1: that don't actually involve real faces. A really great example
Speaker 1: I came across was mentioned on the TV Tropes website
Speaker 1: for the coolers Shov effect. If you never never been
Speaker 1: to that website, it's a great it's like a wiki style,
Speaker 1: you know, user submitted content. But it just includes big
Speaker 1: lists of different sorts of conventions of of TV and
Speaker 1: movies and things like that, narrative conventions, filmmaking conventions, uh,
Speaker 1: cliches and such. And so they've got a page on
Speaker 1: the cooler shov effect and it mentioned how in two
Speaker 1: thousand one of Space Odyssey, which I thought was a
Speaker 1: fantastic example. Oh, I absolutely agree, and I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: thought of it at first myself. But yeah, you just
Speaker 1: have that red light that how has no face at all,
Speaker 1: not even the semblance of the face exactly. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not even a computer screen that kind of looks
Speaker 1: like a face. It's just a red light. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so that completely removes the possibility of picking up on
Speaker 1: queues and micro expressions based on the feelings or mind
Speaker 1: state of a human actor. House face is just the light.
Speaker 1: And yet the editing context, at least for me, absolutely
Speaker 1: causes me to read emotional expression and emotional content into
Speaker 1: the red light. So sometimes, depending on what it's being
Speaker 1: intercut with, the light looks calm. Other times the red
Speaker 1: light looks suspicious or even paranoid. Yeah, Yeah, that's I think.
Speaker 1: This is this is a this is a great read. Um.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of another example that I ran across.
Speaker 1: I was I was just looking for at first, I
Speaker 1: was just looking for mainstream examples, you know, and h
Speaker 1: I ran across um a video from king star Wars
Speaker 1: dot net that points to some examples in Star Wars,
Speaker 1: the first of which is is just pretty pretty standard.
Speaker 1: I imagine, Um, you have the scene where Luke is
Speaker 1: surveying the destruction of his aunt and uncle's home, shots
Speaker 1: of devastation, shots of of Luke's face. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: so they inform each other. But the more impressive examples,
Speaker 1: I thought, we're discussions of how you have shots of
Speaker 1: Darth Vader during the final confrontation in UM the Return
Speaker 1: of the Jedi. Uh, this is this is where uh,
Speaker 1: Emperor Palpatine has has had Luke Invader fight, and then
Speaker 1: Luke refuses to kill his father, and so, uh, the
Speaker 1: Emperor is just going to force lightning him to death
Speaker 1: in front of Vader. And we of course, you know
Speaker 1: later in the film we see Vader's face, but you
Speaker 1: don't see Vader's face. You just see this, uh, this
Speaker 1: emotionless bug skull helmet. But in that scene where we're
Speaker 1: seeing what he's seeing, we're seeing shots of Luke's suffering,
Speaker 1: writhing under the agony of the force lightning. Um we
Speaker 1: we we we see that change Invader, even though we
Speaker 1: don't see his face. I totally agree. I think this
Speaker 1: is another great example. Yeah, it's just the mask, so
Speaker 1: you can't be picking up on human expressions. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you read expression into the mask face based on what's
Speaker 1: happening to Luke, you start to almost see him feeling compassion. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another example they bring up is the Mandalorian TV show
Speaker 1: where through most of it, the title character of the
Speaker 1: Mandalorian does not remove his helmet. And you probably have
Speaker 1: more room to even explore how this works in that
Speaker 1: TV show because you know Vader Vader's you know, you're
Speaker 1: generally dealing with severe situations. But in the over the
Speaker 1: course of the Mandalorian TV show, you have him interacting
Speaker 1: with with light and cute things, with comedic things as
Speaker 1: well as serious things, and so there's plenty of opportunity
Speaker 1: for that. Again, this you know, emotionless Mandalorian helmet in
Speaker 1: this case uh to to seem to convey uh for
Speaker 1: an emotions. Uh. And of course that's not to discount
Speaker 1: body language and plenty of other you know, cues that
Speaker 1: enable us to lean into it. But but still, you know,
Speaker 1: all these things work together to help us form that
Speaker 1: theory of mind. What's going on inside Vader's mind, what's
Speaker 1: going on inside the Mandalorian's mind, or Howe's mind. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: another great example. Now, one example I was I was
Speaker 1: looking into and thinking about two brings us back to Hitchcock.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about Psycho, which of course has has
Speaker 1: a number of scenes that are very iconic, and you know,
Speaker 1: we that easily come to mind, and you may even
Speaker 1: be able to picture even if you haven't seen the film. Um,
Speaker 1: but there's there's one scene in particular where Janet Lee's
Speaker 1: Marian Crane is changing clothes in her room at the
Speaker 1: Bates Motel. Norman Bates played by the handsome Anthony Perkins, Uh,
Speaker 1: is in an adjacent room. He approaches a picture frame,
Speaker 1: he removes it and reveals a peephole. Uh. He puts
Speaker 1: his eye to the peepole, and we switched to a
Speaker 1: p O V shot of his voice rhythm. Here's Marion
Speaker 1: Crane undressing. Then a close up of his eye eyeball
Speaker 1: like side view of his eyeball staring through the peephole.
Speaker 1: She moves out of you in the in the p
Speaker 1: o V shot, and then he places the picture frame
Speaker 1: back over the peephole, back still turned to us. But
Speaker 1: then he turns and we see his face, and he
Speaker 1: in his face is very interesting in this performance and
Speaker 1: particularly in the scene because it is I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to to to register exactly what he's feeling like.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's kind of blank. I mean, I
Speaker 1: end up reading into it if i'm you know, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about it, like what's he thinking? Obviously I know
Speaker 1: what's about to happen. He's going to go in there
Speaker 1: and kill her while she's in the shower. So it's
Speaker 1: easy to read in like grim determination. But he's not like,
Speaker 1: you know, snarling and snickering with with with fiendish desire
Speaker 1: in this scene or anything. Um. And it's also interesting
Speaker 1: to think about this in terms of of subversion, because
Speaker 1: you know, we think of Anthony Perkins now, we think
Speaker 1: of Psycho. We think of him playing this um, this
Speaker 1: very troubled, uh murderous individual. But prior to this film,
Speaker 1: he was like a Jimmy Stewart esque leading man in
Speaker 1: a former teen heartthrob. So, so Hitchcock was averting this
Speaker 1: image in Psycho. So it's it's interesting to think about
Speaker 1: that watching a scene like this. Yeah. So I also
Speaker 1: have to add that having your character look through a
Speaker 1: peopole like this is is hardly like neutral. That gives
Speaker 1: us a different idea. I mean, in the scene earlier,
Speaker 1: he's he's got a very boy next door kind of energy.
Speaker 1: He seems, uh, you know, just kind of like a sweet, shy,
Speaker 1: handsome young guy. Yeah. But yeah, once he's looking through
Speaker 1: the people, that does charge the way we read his
Speaker 1: face very differently. Right now, speaking of Hitchcock and uh
Speaker 1: and voyeurism, it's also worth worth noting that Rear Window,
Speaker 1: starring the actual Jimmy Stewart, has plenty of examples of
Speaker 1: this sort of thing, where, you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: that movie is Jimmy Stewart's character looking through a telescope
Speaker 1: and then we have po V shots of he is
Speaker 1: seeing in other apartments and then he and then cuts
Speaker 1: back to him. Yeah, now one one more sort of
Speaker 1: it's sort of an example of it, but also kind
Speaker 1: of a subversion of it. Is a Spielberg face. This
Speaker 1: is the close up of awe and wonder on an
Speaker 1: actor's glazed face in reaction to something they're looking at,
Speaker 1: like a like a big old shark or a UFO
Speaker 1: or a field full of dinosaurs or something. Well, in
Speaker 1: the more specific sense, generally, I would say, these are
Speaker 1: not neutral faces, but they are faces that are clearly
Speaker 1: they're having some kind of powerful inner experience. But it
Speaker 1: sometimes might be ambiguous if you were to just see
Speaker 1: the face by itself, But then when it's inter cut
Speaker 1: with what they're looking at, it's it's very often awe, right,
Speaker 1: And and sometimes this is actually manipulated to uh, to
Speaker 1: a comedic effect online. For instance, in the Jurassic Park
Speaker 1: sequence where they're you know, they're awe, they're getting out
Speaker 1: of the car. They're just you know, completely zombified by
Speaker 1: something utterly amazing and holy before them. You don't know
Speaker 1: what it is yet. I mean, you know it's going
Speaker 1: to be dinosaurs, but you haven't seen it yourself yet.
Speaker 1: And so I feel feel like there's been a number
Speaker 1: of of comedic debts where someone has has inserted something
Speaker 1: else there, uh, you know, something maybe more mundane than
Speaker 1: than gigantic dinosaurs brought back to life through science the
Speaker 1: new Taco Bell menu item exactly. All right, Well, we
Speaker 1: ended up having a lot to say about the cool
Speaker 1: As shov effect. Actually, so I think we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to call part one there. But when we come back,
Speaker 1: we can talk about some uh, some attempts to replicate
Speaker 1: the original cool As show, study, some interpretations of what
Speaker 1: maybe lying behind it to the extent that it's true,
Speaker 1: and then maybe a little more research about ambiguous spaces
Speaker 1: in general. In the meantime, if you would like to
Speaker 1: listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind podcast feed with core episodes on Tuesday and Thursday,
Speaker 1: listener mail on Monday, artifact on Wednesday, and hey, we're
Speaker 1: talking about film, so be aware that on Fridays that's
Speaker 1: weird how cinema. That's our time to outside most serious
Speaker 1: concerns and just talk about a weird or unusual film.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other
Speaker 1: to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: You can email us at contact Got Stuff to Blow
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