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A synopsis of psychocinematics...

These Days Do We Really Need a Man of Steel?

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 is that he is too powerful, too righteo

Stories We Tell: How We Reconstruct the Past

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

How Movies Move: The Perception of Motion

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

Directing Eye Gaze: The Filmmaker's Sleight of Minds

Walter Murch, the preeminent editor of such movies as Apocalypse Now (1979), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), The English Patient (1996), and Cold Mountain (2003), wrote an incisive book on film editing called In the Blink of an Eye . In it, he said that editors must be preoccupied with "misdirection" and keep in mind the following questions: "What is the audience going to be thinking at any particular moment? Where are they going to be looking? What do you want them to think about? And, of course, what do you want them to feel?" (Murch, 2001, page 21). In the fast-paced rhythm of current Hollywood blockbusters where cuts are interspersed every 3-5 seconds, film editors must ask themselves these questions about 1200 times per movie. The essential skill of a film editor is to create shot transitions that are so smooth that we are blind to them. In this way, outstanding editors keep us from being aware of their own craft. We are familiar