Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Joe here, I'm just cutting in before the
Speaker 1: music with a brief editorial insert it's happened before it
Speaker 1: happened again. This is one of those episodes that went long.
Speaker 1: Rob 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, we're going to introduce and illustrate our central
Speaker 1: topic in part one here, and then we'll be going
Speaker 1: deeper into the weeds of subsequent research in part two. So,
Speaker 1: without any further delay, I'll now plunge you back into
Speaker 1: the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production
Speaker 1: of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome who Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and today we're gonna be talking about a concept known
Speaker 1: as the Coolest Shop effect. This is an idea from
Speaker 1: film theory. But I think this will make a really
Speaker 1: interesting episode because it's first of all, it's at that
Speaker 1: that weird intersection space, you know, the midnight at the
Speaker 1: crossroads of of art and science. And then uh, Secondarily,
Speaker 1: I think it's one of those great observations that is simple,
Speaker 1: almost obvious in its implications when when you first grasp it,
Speaker 1: but you the more you think about it, the weirder
Speaker 1: and more powerful it gets, especially in a historical context. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is an interesting topic and one I have to
Speaker 1: admit that I don't think i'd ever really absorbed before.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it ever came up in um
Speaker 1: any of like the film classes that I took, like
Speaker 1: in college. Um same here and uh and and at
Speaker 1: the same time, Yeah, I read about this and then
Speaker 1: went out and actually watched um um, I watched a
Speaker 1: film and watched you know, probably a couple of TV
Speaker 1: shows over the weekend, and so I had it fresh
Speaker 1: on my mind looking for it. And on one hand,
Speaker 1: you do see it everywhere, but then you don't, like
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's this thing that that when you're when
Speaker 1: you first read about it, it sounds like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is like part of the blueprint of how film works,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of that's kind of one of the
Speaker 1: arguments that's made for it, And yet it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: as a parent as you might expect it to be,
Speaker 1: but there are some wonderful examples to be to be
Speaker 1: dwelt upon. Well, the way i'd put it, after having
Speaker 1: done all the research for this episode, is that I
Speaker 1: think it is sort of part of the blueprint of
Speaker 1: how film works, except in the way it's usually explained.
Speaker 1: It's just a few degrees off. Yeah, yeah, that would
Speaker 1: I think that would make sense. But I'll explain more
Speaker 1: about that as as we go on. Another thing that's
Speaker 1: interesting about this though, is it's something that's originally from
Speaker 1: the realm of art and esthetic criticism. You know, it's
Speaker 1: from film theory, but it also has a sort of
Speaker 1: mixed research history within the fields of experiment mental 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 show of effect allegedly is. So, in the
Speaker 1: words of the authors of a two thousand six neuroscience
Speaker 1: paper by mobs at All that I'll refer to later
Speaker 1: in 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,
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 insert,
Speaker 1: that changes the context entirely. Now, uh, As we were
Speaker 1: discussing before we recorded here, this Alfred Hitchcock example, the
Speaker 1: widely cided is also a little imperfect because if you
Speaker 1: want to get right down to the like the core theory,
Speaker 1: it's just it's shot one should be a man looking
Speaker 1: out a window. Shot number three should just be that
Speaker 1: man looking out a window, No smile. But it still
Speaker 1: comes down to what is shot number two, because that
Speaker 1: changes how you think about that man. In shot three, right,
Speaker 1: you seem to see something different in the man, even
Speaker 1: though you could use the exact same footage of him.
Speaker 1: So the editing context changes what we think we see
Speaker 1: in a previous or a subsequent shot, even though you're
Speaker 1: using the exact same shots. So one of the funny
Speaker 1: in Hitchcock example he uh he talks about this in
Speaker 1: a famous interview I think he did with maybe it
Speaker 1: was with the CBC or somebody, but but he was
Speaker 1: using the example of Okay, in the first uh sequence,
Speaker 1: imagine that the middle shot that's intercut there is like
Speaker 1: a mother playing with a baby, and in that case, oh,
Speaker 1: he's a kindly old grandfather man. And then the second
Speaker 1: option is that the middle shot is a woman in
Speaker 1: a bathing suit, in which case he says, then you
Speaker 1: perceive his smile as being that of a dirty old man.
Speaker 1: And I guess it kind of helps because it's actually
Speaker 1: Alfred Hitchcock they use in the visual example. Now we'll
Speaker 1: come back to more about what this idea is and
Speaker 1: what it might mean, but maybe first we should just
Speaker 1: do a little bit of biography on the namesake of
Speaker 1: this idea. So the cool Ashov effect is named after
Speaker 1: a guy named Lev Kolashov, who was a Russian filmmaker
Speaker 1: and film theorist who I think, I don't know, you
Speaker 1: could say it was like a major force in the
Speaker 1: history of film theory and and uh and is primarily
Speaker 1: responsible for popularizing this alleged effect. Yes, Lev Kulashev who
Speaker 1: lived nine seventy Russian director film theorists who started out
Speaker 1: in art direction and some acting before moving increasingly into directing,
Speaker 1: experimental editing and scholarship. He was one of the founders
Speaker 1: of the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School.
Speaker 1: And yeah, he introduced the American film concept of montage
Speaker 1: into Soviet cinema based on examining the works of directors
Speaker 1: such as D. W. Griffith. And as David Gillepski points
Speaker 1: out in his book Early Soviet Cinema, he quote played
Speaker 1: a more significant part in the development of the Golden
Speaker 1: Age of Russian cinema than any other figure with the
Speaker 1: exception of Eisenstein. And this would referred to Sergei Eisenstein,
Speaker 1: another big name and film a big big name Russian
Speaker 1: film director of the time. Period theorist of the day
Speaker 1: who listeners might know from such films as a Battleship
Speaker 1: Potempkin from that's the old baby Stroller Down the Stairs
Speaker 1: movie right now. One thing I do remember from actual
Speaker 1: film classes that I took in college was that a
Speaker 1: lot of early Soviet cinema does make use of the montage,
Speaker 1: more in the sense of the specific film technique where
Speaker 1: you're like taking a bunch of different images and and
Speaker 1: putting them together to suggest a kind of, uh, a
Speaker 1: kind of sequence or progression, more like the training montage.
Speaker 1: But the main example I remember there is a movie
Speaker 1: we watched by Vertav 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 challenges to the
Speaker 1: modern viewer that that silent film poses, but also the
Speaker 1: rewards of watching them. So what one of the main
Speaker 1: things Kolosov was doing here was that he was he
Speaker 1: wasn't even uh even even shooting new footage in these experiments. Uh,
Speaker 1: he was taking pre existing footage, silent film footage usually
Speaker 1: um Czarist era silent film, and re cutting them to
Speaker 1: to see what could be done with this montage feature
Speaker 1: like how how to arrange the footage to get different,
Speaker 1: um you know, emotional results. And a lot of it
Speaker 1: was based again in looking at what was going on
Speaker 1: and what seemed to be working in uh in in
Speaker 1: in Western film, in American film specifically, again like the
Speaker 1: work of d. W. Griffith, and uh just in general
Speaker 1: Koulish office was it was somewhat controversial at times, apparently
Speaker 1: in in these uh these experiments, you know, he's looking
Speaker 1: at American models, Western models, So he was accused by
Speaker 1: Communist Party members at times of appealing to Western ideas
Speaker 1: and forms too much. And he's also apparently been accused
Speaker 1: of living it up during tough times in Russia and
Speaker 1: destroying archive silent era films during this editing work, which,
Speaker 1: again the work that wasn't really based that so much
Speaker 1: in shooting new footage and experimenting with how you might
Speaker 1: added them together, but taking pre existing footage from the
Speaker 1: archive and adding it together. Now as a director, Kulashov
Speaker 1: is apparently and I'm speaking largely of a director that
Speaker 1: I really didn't know anything about before, so neither, but
Speaker 1: he's apparently best known for 's The Extraordinary Adventures of
Speaker 1: Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. He also
Speaker 1: adapted the works of Jack London and Oh Henry, but
Speaker 1: especially for this show, we should really highlight that he
Speaker 1: also made a death ray spy thriller. I thought this
Speaker 1: was really interesting somehow. I guess this never came up
Speaker 1: when we did our Invention episodes on the death ray,
Speaker 1: or if it did, I've forgotten about it, because this
Speaker 1: seemed new to me. But it fits right in there,
Speaker 1: because if you haven't heard our episodes of the Invention
Speaker 1: podcast on the death Ray, those were some of my
Speaker 1: favorites that we did, especially because we got to talk
Speaker 1: about an invention that never really existed and yet was
Speaker 1: the subject of a popular fervor, you know that, Like
Speaker 1: people were really excited about death rays for the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: and that just there was never any such thing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the invention itself never existed, but you had kind of
Speaker 1: a global death ray fever going on. And this is
Speaker 1: so it's right smack dab in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: a film titled lut Smirty or the Death Ray. Galetski
Speaker 1: describes it as quote a relatively violent film about international espionage.
Speaker 1: So I had to look in. I looked at footage
Speaker 1: the available footage that I could find out. It wasn't
Speaker 1: wasn't super great to watch, but there's some impressive stills.
Speaker 1: The plot is spot on for what you might expect
Speaker 1: from a Soviet death ray movie at the time period.
Speaker 1: We follow a socialist revolutionary who has to flee an
Speaker 1: unnamed fascist capitalist country. The socialist revolutionary has to flee
Speaker 1: to the Soviet Union, and once there he is introduced
Speaker 1: to the new technology of the death ray, which can
Speaker 1: explode gunpowder at a distance, which is a key detail
Speaker 1: because that's exactly, uh, 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 him
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 twenties. 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 wake of films such
Speaker 1: as this Thank Okay, Well, so that's love kool a
Speaker 1: Shov and I wanted to get a little bit into
Speaker 1: the background of this idea of the Coolershov effect by
Speaker 1: consulting his own words. So I found a book called
Speaker 1: cool a shov on Film Writings. This was published by
Speaker 1: the University of California Press in nineteen seventy four. I'm
Speaker 1: not positive. I think this might a reprint of some
Speaker 1: earlier writings of Cooler Jobs, but the context is um
Speaker 1: I was consulting an early section of this book where
Speaker 1: he's discussing a series of investigations he and his colleagues
Speaker 1: carried out in the late nineteen teens and into the twenties,
Speaker 1: essentially to try to figure out how film actually works.
Speaker 1: That they were asking questions like how do audiences make
Speaker 1: meaning out of the images they see over the course
Speaker 1: of a film, Which is a great question and it
Speaker 1: is something that early filmmakers really had to figure out.
Speaker 1: We we can take a lot of film meaning making
Speaker 1: for granted these days, because uh, you know, film techniques
Speaker 1: are so well honed these days that they're often invisible
Speaker 1: to us. You know, you you, if you watch a
Speaker 1: professionally made movie, you will you will not even notice
Speaker 1: the fact that, say, all of the eye lines and
Speaker 1: it have been aligned correctly so that when a character
Speaker 1: looks at something and then it cuts to that thing,
Speaker 1: it's lined up so that it's not confusing, but that's
Speaker 1: like a technique that had to be learned, and there
Speaker 1: are tons of things like that. They're just invisible to
Speaker 1: us now, as as a lot of good filmmaking techniques are,
Speaker 1: I mean ideally, I guess, uh well, I mean there
Speaker 1: are different ideas of this, but you know, a common
Speaker 1: view I think among a lot of filmmakers is that
Speaker 1: techniques should not call attention to themselves, but instead should
Speaker 1: disappear and allow you to just become totally absorbed in
Speaker 1: the narrative to help bring about the raw experience quality
Speaker 1: of modern cinema. Yeah, yeah, and that's I mean, that's
Speaker 1: something I like to stick to. I mean, unless the
Speaker 1: film is so poor it's a execution that you can't
Speaker 1: help but but notice it, you know, well when Yeah,
Speaker 1: and certainly there's plenty of examples of that. But so
Speaker 1: cool A Chav 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, Kolashaw feels that he has achieved a
Speaker 1: breakthrough when he starts to discover the power hour of
Speaker 1: montage or editing. He starts to think of editing as
Speaker 1: a sort of master key behind the power of cinema,
Speaker 1: and he believes that montage has a power greater than
Speaker 1: simply showing you a series of moving images in sequence
Speaker 1: so that you think, well, one follows the other. Instead,
Speaker 1: he 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 Rezumni, a priest's
Speaker 1: house with a portrait of Nicholas the second hanging on
Speaker 1: the wall, that 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 Lennon
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 movement, his very behavior in either one direction or
Speaker 1: the other through montage. I thought this was a great
Speaker 1: example because I haven't seen the film in question, but
Speaker 1: but I can understand exactly the effect he's describing he
Speaker 1: or with this portrait of Lenin because of the tone
Speaker 1: of the scene. The context makes it darkly comedic, like
Speaker 1: it's funny, but it's also threatening. That a serious or
Speaker 1: neutral face could be perceived as having a kind of
Speaker 1: wicked grin. Mm hmm, yeah, you know that this reminds me,
Speaker 1: just in general, of any time you have kind of
Speaker 1: kind of a portrait. He had a painting or a photograph. Um,
Speaker 1: I guess that. You know, just in general, outside of film,
Speaker 1: it can seem to take on different dimensions based on
Speaker 1: what you are doing or what your mindset is. If
Speaker 1: you're sort of imagining that the that the subject of
Speaker 1: the painting or picture can see you, or you're leaning
Speaker 1: into that sort of interpretation, like why is Vigo the
Speaker 1: Carpathian staring in there like that? Is he? Is he proud?
Speaker 1: Is he angry at me? Is he smiling? Oh? That
Speaker 1: makes me wonder did they when the film Ghostbusters too?
Speaker 1: Did they have multiple paintings of Vigo with slightly different
Speaker 1: expressions on his face? Or did they just use one
Speaker 1: portrait and and rely on the kool a Shov effect
Speaker 1: For us, I read emotions into it. I wish I
Speaker 1: thought of this earlier. Well, anyway, so we're about to
Speaker 1: get to the description of the main alleged experiment that
Speaker 1: establishes the this that we're about to get into canonical
Speaker 1: kool Ashov effect territory. So, following this realization about the
Speaker 1: power of editing or montage to change what is perceived
Speaker 1: within the shot itself, there's this famous story about an
Speaker 1: experiment kol Ashov supposedly carried out to put the idea
Speaker 1: to the test. And I want to flag at the
Speaker 1: beginning here that multiple sources I've 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 later,
Speaker 1: not to provide evidential force that it must be, as
Speaker 1: Kolashov says, So whether or not this event actually took
Speaker 1: place exact like this, This is how it's described in
Speaker 1: a book called How Movies Work by Bruce Kawen. This
Speaker 1: was a University of California press. Kawen writes, as follows
Speaker 1: about Kulashev's experiment. He found some old footage of a
Speaker 1: pre revolutionary actor named Yvonne majukin 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 Majukin was. They enjoyed the subtle way he expressed
Speaker 1: affectionate delight at the child's playing hunger soup, and grief
Speaker 1: at the death of the woman whom they assumed was
Speaker 1: his mother. The Masoukan experiment, as it has since been called,
Speaker 1: had a permanent impact on the theory of screen acting.
Speaker 1: It showed that audiences will read shots in terms of
Speaker 1: each other, and therefore that a film actor who ought
Speaker 1: ideally to under act could allow the montage to suggest
Speaker 1: some of his or her emotions and thoughts. The point
Speaker 1: for our immediate purposes, however, is simply that the impression
Speaker 1: of continuity is often generated by the audience. Now we'll
Speaker 1: come back with some additional history of research to 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 can show a different
Speaker 1: person's hands, lips, legs, and so forth and create an imaginary,
Speaker 1: composite person that doesn't exist. He also did the same
Speaker 1: 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 all call 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 is just
Speaker 1: this is just how you make films. You know, you
Speaker 1: you you have one exterior and you maybe the interior
Speaker 1: is a set or it's somewhere on the other side
Speaker 1: of the country. You know. Um, you know, you read
Speaker 1: you read any behind the scenes making just any of
Speaker 1: your favorite films, and you'll find stuff like like the
Speaker 1: Library and Ghostbusters the first Ghostbusters film. I think parts
Speaker 1: of that are and just you know, they're from all over,
Speaker 1: depending on whether you're outside or your inside or you're
Speaker 1: in the basement. And then uh, and then also when
Speaker 1: it comes to the anatomy question here, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's why you have stunt doubles, body doubles. It's why
Speaker 1: you can finish a film. Uh, even though Bello would
Speaker 1: oc died whilst shooting it, right, So that's probably you're
Speaker 1: getting into the poor example of it, and that that
Speaker 1: does specific example No. Plan nine for matter space is
Speaker 1: a is a wonderful example of of what you can
Speaker 1: do with the magic of cinema editing. But but to
Speaker 1: get back to the core idea here the spit and
Speaker 1: I think it'll be important for us to think about
Speaker 1: the coolest show effect in a couple of different ways.
Speaker 1: One is just the broader idea that editing context can
Speaker 1: radically change the meaning of individual shots, which I think
Speaker 1: we just all know from experiences is obviously true. This
Speaker 1: is a fact about how movies work. But the other
Speaker 1: thing is the more specific claim of the alleged MOSU
Speaker 1: can experiment that you can take a totally neutral shot
Speaker 1: of an actor's face, displaying no emotion whatsoever, and by
Speaker 1: intercutting it with other footage, you can change what the
Speaker 1: audience perceives in those shots of the actor's face. You
Speaker 1: 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 least a couple of papers about that
Speaker 1: as we go on, but I thought it might be
Speaker 1: good to just discuss a few examples that this UH
Speaker 1: thinking about this effect calls to mind from UH, from
Speaker 1: movies that you and I have seen. And one thing
Speaker 1: 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 cooler 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 shop 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 this is a great read. Um it.
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 making star Wars
Speaker 1: dot net. It 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. Have
Speaker 1: shots of devastation, shots 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 we see Vader's face, but
Speaker 1: you don't see Vader's face. You just see this, uh,
Speaker 1: this emotionless bug skull helmet. But in that scene where
Speaker 1: we're seeing what he's seeing, we're seeing shots of Luke 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 different emotions. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course that's not to discount body language and
Speaker 1: plenty of other, um, you know, cues that enable us
Speaker 1: to lean into it. But but still, you know, all
Speaker 1: these things work together to help us form that theory
Speaker 1: of mind. What's going on inside Vader's mind, what's going
Speaker 1: 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 Hitchcot.
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,
Speaker 1: is in an adjacent room. He approaches a picture frame,
Speaker 1: he removes it and it reveals a peephole. Uh. He
Speaker 1: puts his eye to the peephole, and we switched to
Speaker 1: a p o V shot of his voyeurism. 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 peepole, 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 just do exactly what he's feeling
Speaker 1: like it's not like it's kind of blank. I mean,
Speaker 1: I end up reading into it if i'm you know,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about it, like what's he thinking? Obviously I
Speaker 1: know what's about to happen. He's going to go in
Speaker 1: there and kill her while she's in the shower. So
Speaker 1: it's easy to read in like grim determination. But he's
Speaker 1: not like, you know, snarling and snickering with with with
Speaker 1: fiendish desire in this scene or anything. Um. And it's
Speaker 1: also interesting to think about this in terms of of
Speaker 1: subversion because you know, we think of Anthony Perkins now
Speaker 1: we think of Psycho, we think of him playing this, um,
Speaker 1: this very troubled, uh murderous individual. But prior to this film,
Speaker 1: he was like a Jimmy Stewart esque leading man and
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. So I also have
Speaker 1: to add that having your character look through a peepo
Speaker 1: like this is is hardly like neutral. That gives us
Speaker 1: a different idea. I mean, in the scene earlier, he's
Speaker 1: 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 what he's
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 alle 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 intercut with
Speaker 1: 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 odd, 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 Coolest
Speaker 1: Shov Effect. Actually, so I think we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: call part one there. But when we come back, we
Speaker 1: can talk about some uh, some attempts to replicate the
Speaker 1: original cool is show study, some interpretations of what maybe
Speaker 1: lying behind it to the extent that it's true, and
Speaker 1: then maybe a little more research about ambiguous faces in general.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you would like to listen to
Speaker 1: other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can
Speaker 1: find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast
Speaker 1: feed with core episodes on Tuesday and Thursday, listener mail
Speaker 1: on Monday, artifact on Wednesday, and hey, we're talking about film,
Speaker 1: so be aware that on Fridays, that's weird how cinema.
Speaker 1: That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a weird or unusual film. Huge thanks
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact that Stuff to Blow
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