Psychocinematics: With Movies in Mind

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This entry also appears on the Oxford University Press blog site . As a child, I encountered the Man of Steel in the   Adventures of Superman , the 1950s TV series that I watched as morning reruns a decade later. My Superman was "faster than a speeding bullet" and fought for "truth, justice and the American way." My 26-year-old son, Thomas, encountered a similarly invincible superhero in   Superman: The Movie , the 1978 blockbuster which starred Christopher Reeve. Truth be told, neither of us are avid readers of the   Superman   comics, in which his backstory and demeanor have been remodeled over the years to align more closely with a changing culture. As we watched this year's reboot,   Man of Steel , in glowing IMAX 3D there was certainly delight in seeing a familiar action hero, though we both left the theater trying to figure out why the movie was so disappointing.          The problem with Superman...

This entry was also posted on the Oxford University Press blog site. Our memories, in many ways, define who we are as an individual or at least who we think we are. In the recent documentary, "Stories We Tell," filmmaker Sarah Polley presents her own tale of the search for her biological father. Through interviews with relative and friends, snapshots, and re-enactments of pertinent events that look like old home movies, the documentary moves like a real-life  Rashomon , wherein bits of the "truth" are revealed from various points of views. The stories revolve around Sarah's mother, Diane Polley, a stage actress who died of cancer when Sarah was 11 years old. The "seminal" event, if you will, took place nine months before Sarah's birth, when Diane took an extended leave and moved hundreds of miles away from home and family to perform in a play in Montreal. As such, there was opportunity and several prime suspects in the mystery of S...

On a recent trip to Princeton University, I had the opportunity to visit the Thomas Edison National Historic Park , in West Orange, New Jersey (about an hour drive from the campus). At this large laboratory complex, Edison invented the Kinetoscope, one of the first commercially successful motion picture viewers (the one in the photo is from the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY). Edison's interest in moving pictures was sparked in 1888 by a visit from Eadweard Muybridge who had already built a motion picture projector but one that could only present a dozen or so images in succession (e.g., a galloping horse). Edison's device was not a movie projector but instead a large one-person viewing console in which about 40 ft of 35 mm film strip passed by a peephole. The film was illuminated by stroboscopic flashes that were produced by a spinning opaque disk with an open slit that was placed between the film strip and a lamp. In this way, frames were flashed as ins...