January 7, 2023 • 35 mins
What is the character in the film looking at? How does the object of their vision color how we interpret their countenance? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the Kuleshov effect from film theory and what studies in experimental psychology and neuroscience reveal.(originally published 01/25/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for an older episode
of the show. This one originally published on January two,
and it was part one of our series about the
coolest shov effect and interesting psychological effect having to do
with film editing. Alright, let's jump right in. Hey, everybody,
(00:27):
Joe here, I'm just cutting in before the music with
a brief editorial insert it's happened before it happened again.
This is one of those episodes that went long. Rob
and I originally planned it to be one standalone chat,
but it started taking on an unwieldy form while we
were recording, so we decided to go ahead and chop
it up into two parts. So this is why in
(00:48):
a few minutes you might hear me make references to
things I'm going to bring up later in the episode,
but we actually won't get to them until part two,
So apologies for any confusion on that front. As a
general outline, and we're going to introduce and illustrate our
central topic in part one here and then we'll be
going deeper into the weeds of subsequent research in part two.
(01:08):
So without any further delay, I'll now plunge you back
into the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind
production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. And my name is Robert Lamm
(01:29):
and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking
about a concept known as the coolest Shop effect. This
is an idea from film theory. But I think this
will make a really interesting episode because it's, first of all,
it's at that that weird intersection space, you know, the
midnight at the crossroads of of art and science. And
(01:52):
then uh, Secondarily, I think it's one of those great
observations that is simple, almost obvious in its implication, ends
when when you first grasp it, but you the more
you think about it, the weirder and more powerful it gets,
especially in a historical context. Yeah, this is an interesting
topic and one I have to admit that I don't
think i'd ever really absorbed before. I don't know if
(02:14):
it ever came up in um, any of like the
film classes that I took, like in college. Um, same
here and uh and and at the same time, Yeah,
I read about this and then went out and actually
watched um um, I watched a film and watched you know,
probably a couple of TV shows over the weekend, and
so I had it fresh on my mind looking for it.
(02:35):
And on one hand, you do see it everywhere, but
then you don't like, it's, uh, it's this thing that
that when you're when you first read about it, it
sounds like, oh, well, this is like part of the
blueprint of how film works. And that's kind of that's
kind of one of the arguments that's made for it.
And yet it's not necessarily as a parent as you
might expect it to be, but there are some wonderful
(02:55):
examples to be to be dwelt upon. Well, the way
I'd put it, after having done all the research for
this episode, is that I think it is sort of
part of the blueprint of how film works, except in
the way it's usually explained, it's just a few degrees off. Yeah, yeah,
that would I think that would make sense. But I'll
explain more about that as as we go on. Another
thing that's interesting about this though, is it's something that's
(03:17):
originally from the realm of art and esthetic criticism. You know,
it's from film theory, but it also has a sort
of mixed research history within the fields of experimental psychology
and neuroscience. You know, there's some empirical experiments that seem
to find evidence of the effect and others do not
find it. And I think part of the part of
(03:37):
the difference there is how you ask the question and
what kind of stimula you use. But it could be
interesting to see what the difference is there as well.
But I guess we should get straight to explaining what
the coolest Jov effect allegedly is. So, in the words
of the authors of a two thousand six neuroscience paper
by mobs at All that I'll refer to later in
(03:57):
the episode, the coolest Jov effect is the following proposition.
It is that quote, the manipulation of context can alter
an audiences perception of an actor's facial expressions, thoughts, and feelings. Yeah. Yeah,
And this is something that is at at the very
root of everything. Is is based on theory of mind,
(04:19):
that we as humans look at another person and we
simulate what's going on in their head, what what are
their thoughts, what are their motivations, what are their intentions, etcetera.
Um uh so, Yeah, it's theory theory, theory of mind
at heart, but it's not just the face. It's also
something else. And basically this gets into just an into
(04:41):
filmmaking and editing. Right, it's the the idea of montage.
That's the word that's often used here, but that would
probably give us ideas of a very specific technique of like,
you know, you're like the training montage and Rocky film
or something. You should actually be thinking of montage when
we say it in this episode. More broadly, it's not
just that. It means the the arrangement of different shots
(05:04):
into a sequence through editing. No matter what kind of
technique you're using there, if you're taking different shots and
putting them into a sequence, that is montage for today's purposes. Yeah,
and and again it all comes back to editing. The
way the footage is put together. You can basically think
of it as like face p O V shot face um.
(05:25):
For instance, Alfred Hitchcock described it once as being a
situation where okay, again, think of three shots. First shot,
he says, his man looking out the window. Shot number
three is a man smiling. Now what you put in
that second slot, whatever, that second shot is that you
insert that changes the context entirely. Now, uh, as we
(05:47):
were discussing before we recorded here, this Alfred Hitchcock example,
the widely cided is also a little imperfect because if
you want to get right down to the like the
core theory, it's just it's Shot one should be a
man looking out a window. Shot number three should just
be that man looking out a window, no smile. But
it still comes down to what is shot number two,
because that changes how you think about that man in
(06:09):
shot three, right, you seem to see something different in
the man, even though you could use the exact same
footage of him. So the editing context changes what we
think we see in a previous or a subsequent shot,
even though you're using the exact same shots. So one
of the funny in Hitchcock's example, he uh, he talks
about this in a famous interview I think he did
(06:31):
with maybe it was with the CBC or somebody, but
but he was using the example of Okay, in the
first sequence, imagine that the middle shot that's intercut there
is like a mother playing with a baby, and in
that case, oh, he's a kindly old grandfather man. And
then the second option is that the middle shot is
a woman in a bathing suit, in which case, he says,
(06:51):
then you perceive his smile as being that of a
dirty old man. And I guess it kind of helps
because it's actually Alfred Hitchcock they use in the visual example.
Now we'll come back to more about what this idea
is and what it might mean, but maybe first we
should just do a little bit of biography on the
namesake of this idea. So the Kolashov effect is named
(07:14):
after a guy named Lev Kulashev, who was a Russian
filmmaker and film theorist who I think, I don't know,
you could say it was like a major force in
the history of film theory and uh, and is primarily
responsible for popularizing this alleged effect. Yes, Lev Kulashev, who
(07:34):
lived seventy Russian director film theorist who started out in art,
direction and some acting before moving increasingly into directing, experimental editing,
and scholarship. He was one of the founders of the
world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. And yeah,
he introduced the American film concept of montage into Soviet
(07:55):
cinema based on examining the works of directors such as
DDA be Griffith, and as David Gilevskie points out in
his book Early Soviet Cinema, he quote played a more
significant part in the development of the Golden Age of
Russian cinema than any other figure with the exception of Eisenstein.
And this would refer to Sergei Eisenstein, another big name
(08:19):
and film a big big name Russian film director of
the time period, theorist of the day who listeners might
know from such films as a Battleship Attempkin from that's
the old baby Stroller down the Stairs movie right now.
One thing I do remember from actual film classes that
I took in college was that a lot of early
(08:39):
Soviet cinema does make use of the montage, more in
the sense of the specific film technique where you're like
taking a bunch of different images and and putting them
together to suggest a kind of, uh, a kind of
sequence or progression, more like the training montage. But the
main example I remember there is a movie we watched
by or TV called The Man with the Movie Camera,
(09:02):
which is basically the whole movie is just a montage
of of you know, Russian public life by the way,
if anyone out there wants to hear us talk even
more about silent film. We did an episode of Weird
How Cinema UM at some point in the last year
where we did like a silent film double feature where
we we picked out just a couple maybe three different
(09:23):
silent films and talked about what was neat about them
and just talked about sort of the the challenges to
the modern viewer that that silent film poses, but also
the rewards of watching them. So what one of the
main things Kolashov was doing here was that he was
he wasn't even um even even shooting new footage in
these experiments. UH, he was taking pre existing footage silent
(09:47):
film footage usually um Czarist era silent film, and re
cutting them to to see what could be done with
this montage feature like how how to arrange the uh
the footage to get different, um you know, emotional results.
And a lot of it was based again and looking
at what was going on and what seemed to be
(10:09):
working in uh in in in Western film, in American
film specifically again like the work of d. W. Griffith,
and UH just in general. Kulashofice was it was somewhat
controversial at times, apparently in in these uh, these experiments,
you know, he's looking at American models, Western models, So
he was accused by Communist Party members at times of
(10:31):
appealing to Western ideas and forms too much. And he's
also apparently been accused of living it up during tough
times in Russia and destroying archives silent era films during
this editing work, which again the work that wasn't really
based that so much in shooting new footage and experimenting
with how you might added them together, but taking pre
(10:53):
existing footage from the archive and adding it together. Now,
as a director, Kulashov is apparently and I'm speaking largely
of a director that I really didn't know anything about before,
so me neither. But he's apparently best known for ninety
four's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land
of the Bolsheviks. He also adapted the works of Jack
(11:14):
London and Oh Henry, but especially for this show, we
should really highlight that he also made a death Ray
spy thriller. I thought this was really interesting. Somehow, I
guess this never came up when we did our invention
episodes on the Death Ray or if it did, I've
forgotten about it because this seemed new to me. But
it fits right in there, because if you haven't heard
(11:36):
our episodes of the Invention podcast on the death Ray,
those were some of my favorites that we did, especially
because we got to talk about an invention that never
really existed and yet was the subject of a popular fervor.
You know that, like people were really excited about death
rays for the nineteen twenties and that just there was
never any such thing. Yeah, yeah, the invention it's of
(12:00):
never existed, but you had kind of a global death
ray fever going on, and this is so it's right
smack dab in the middle of it. A film titled
lut Smirty or the Death Ray. Galepsi describes it as
quote a relatively violent film about international espionage. So I
had to look in. I looked at footage the available
(12:20):
footage that I could find out. It wasn't wasn't super
great to watch, but there's some impressive stills that The
plot is spot on for what you might expect from
a Soviet death ray movie at the time period. We
follow a socialist revolutionary who has to flee an unnamed
fascist capitalist country, the socialist revolutionary has to flee to
(12:41):
the Soviet Union, and once there he is introduced to
the new technology of the death ray, which can explode
gunpowder at a distance, which is a key detail because
that's exactly, uh that the sort of thing that was
part of the death ray fever that we discussed in
the Invention episode. That's right. So the brief top line
on that is that, uh, basically a lot of this
(13:03):
death ray fever came from reaction to the horrors of
long range bombing aerial bombing in World War One, and
people wanted the idea of something that could shoot bombers
out of the sky from a great distance before they
got to your cities, and the death ray filled in
that gap exactly. So basically, the evil spy follows them
(13:23):
and steals the death ray technology so that they can
use it to suppress labor strikes. But don't worry, the
labor strikers steal the death ray technology back and use
it to blow up their oppressors bomber aircraft which is
about to be used against the strikers. This almost makes
me want to compile and watch a list of all
(13:44):
the death ray movies of the nineteen twentys. Just put
them all together and see see what kind of picture emerges. Yeah, yeah,
or and I'm curious, like, what is the best death
ray movie? I'm I'm assuming the best death ray movies
came later. Um came in the way of films such
as this, Thank thank Okay, Well, so that's love kol
(14:09):
Ashov and I wanted to get a little bit into
the background of this idea of the cool Ashov effect
by consulting his own words. So I found a book
called cool a Shov on Film Writings. This was published
by the University of California Press in nineteen seventy four.
I'm not positive. I think this might be a reprint
of some earlier writings of Kola Shovs, but the context
(14:32):
is um. I was consulting an early section of this
book where he's discussing a series of investigations he and
his colleagues carried out in the late nineteen teens and
into the twenties, essentially to try to figure out how
film actually works. That they were asking questions like how
do audiences make meaning out of the images they see
(14:53):
over the course of a film? Which is a great question,
and it is something that early filmmakers really had to
fe guar out. We we can take a lot of
film meaning making for granted these days, because uh, you know,
film techniques are so well honed these days that they're
often invisible to us. You know, you you if you
(15:13):
watch a professionally made movie, you will you will not
even notice the fact that, say, all of the eye
lines and it have been aligned correctly so that when
a character looks at something and then it cuts to
that thing, it's lined up so that it's not confusing.
But that's like a technique that had to be learned,
and there are tons of things like that. They're just
invisible to us now, as as a lot of good
(15:35):
filmmaking techniques are I mean ideally, I guess, well, I
mean there are different ideas of this, but you know,
a common view I think among a lot of filmmakers
is that techniques should not call attention to themselves, but
instead should disappear and allow you to just become totally
absorbed in the narrative to help bring about the raw
experience quality of modern cinema. Yeah. Yeah, and that's I mean,
(15:56):
that's something I like to stick to. I mean, unless
the film is so uh poor. It's a execution that
you can't help but but notice it, you know, well
when yeah, And certainly there's plenty of examples of that.
But so Kolashav and colleagues are trying to investigate how
does film work? What what are the techniques that that
(16:17):
cause an audience to think or feel a certain way?
And so famously Kolashov feels that he has achieved a
breakthrough when he starts to discover the power of montage
or editing. He starts to think of editing as a
sort of master key behind the power of cinema, and
he believes that montage has a power greater than simply
(16:38):
showing you a series of moving images in sequence so
that you think, well, one follows the other. Instead, he
comes to think that by ordering shots in a sequence,
you actually change the meaning of the shots themselves, or
change the perception of what is contained in the shots.
And there's a memorable example that Kolashov describes in the book.
(17:00):
I'll just read it directly. He says, I saw this
scene I think in a film by Razumni, a priest's
house with a portrait of Nicholas, the second hanging on
the wall that though that would be the czar right uh,
the village is taken over by the Red Army. The
frightened priest turns the portrait over, and on the reverse
side of the portrait is the smiling face of Lenin. However,
(17:24):
this is a familiar portrait, a portrait in which Lenin
is not smiling. But that spot in the film was
so funny, and it was so uproariously received by the
public that I, myself scrutinizing the portrait several times, saw
the portrait of Lenin as smiling. Especially intrigued by this,
I obtained the portrait that was used and saw that
(17:46):
the expression on the face in the portrait was serious.
The montage was so edited that we involuntarily imbued a
serious face with a changed expression characteristic of that playful moment.
In other words, the work of the actor was altered
by means of montage. In this way, montage had a
colossal influence on the effect of the material. It became
(18:09):
apparent that it was possible to change the actor's work,
his movements, his very behavior in either one direction or
the other through montage. I thought this was a great example,
because I haven't seen the film in question. But but
I can understand exactly the effect he's describing here with
this portrait of Lenin because of the tone of the scene.
(18:30):
The context makes it darkly comedic, like it's funny, but
it's also threatening, that a serious or neutral face could
be perceived as having a kind of wicked grin. M. Yeah,
you know, this reminds me just in general, of any
time you have kind of a a kind of a portrait
he had a painting or a photograph. Um, I guess that.
(18:51):
You know, just in general outside of film, it can
seem to take on different dimensions based on what you
are doing or what your mindset is. If you're sort
of imagining that the that the subject of the painting
or picture can see you, or you're leaning into that
sort of interpretation, like why is Vigo the Carpathian staring
(19:14):
in there like that? Is he? Is he proud? Is
he angry at me? Is he smiling? Oh? That makes
me wonder did they when the film Ghostbusters too, did
they have multiple paintings of Vigo with slightly different expressions
on his face or did they just use one portrait
and and rely on the cool a shov effect? For
I read emotions into it. I wish I thought of
(19:34):
this earlier. Well, anyway, so we're about to get to
the description of the main alleged experiment that establishes the
this that we're about to get into canonical cool Ashov
effect territory. So, following this realization about the power of
editing or montage to change what is perceived within the
shot itself, there's this famous story about an experiment cool
(19:57):
a Shov supposedly carried out to put the idea to
the test. And I want to flag at the beginning
here that multiple sources I have read raised questions about
whether this test ever actually took place in the way
it is described. Um, but I'd say it doesn't especially matter,
because we're going to be just using this story to
illustrate an idea. Then we can look at other tests
(20:18):
later not to provide evidential force that it must be,
as Kolashev says, So whether or not this event actually
took place exactly like this, this is how it's described
in a book called How Movies Work by Bruce Kawen.
This was University of California Press. Kawen writes as follows
about Kolashev's experiment. He found some old footage of a
(20:41):
pre revolutionary actor named Yvonne mujukin a single long take,
probably a makeup test, in which the face showed an
unvarying neutral expression. Kulashev then cut three different shots into
this take, one of a child playing with a toy,
one of a bowl of soup, and one of an
(21:02):
old woman in a coffin the sequence when as follows
face child face, soup face, woman face. When he showed
this short film to an audience, although this may be
a bit of cinematic folklore, they remarked what a great
actor Masukan was. They enjoyed the subtle way he expressed
(21:23):
affectionate delight at the child's playing, hunger for soup, and
grief at the death of the woman whom they assumed
was his mother. The Masoukan experiment, as it has since
been called, had a permanent impact on the theory of
screen acting. It showed that audiences will read shots in
terms of each other, and therefore that a film actor
(21:43):
who ought ideally to under act could allow the montage
to suggest some of his or her emotions and thoughts.
The point for our immediate purposes, however, is simply that
the impression of continuity is often generated by the audience.
Now will come with some additional history of research to
build upon this later, But Kulashov used this alleged experiment
(22:06):
in support of his broader theory of how film worked,
one of the main points of which was that the
soul of a film was in the editing process, and
that the edit of the film actually had more power
over the film's effect than the contents of any individual shot.
I think another way of phrasing this is that the
(22:27):
way you edit your footage together is ultimately more important
than what an actor does while the cameras rolling, because
the meaning of an actor's performance can be totally changed
by the editing context. And in fact, Kolashov allegedly carried
out a couple of other experiments along these lines that
are known sometimes as creative geography and creative anatomy. Creative
(22:50):
anatomy would be using shots of parts of different bodies
from different actors, creating the illusion that they all belonged
to the same person. So you and show a different
person's hands, lips, legs, and so forth, and create an
imaginary composite person that doesn't exist. He also did the
same thing with physical geography, so he would have, for example,
(23:11):
a shot of people walking along a street in Moscow
and then maybe going up a staircase and then going
to a mansion that was actually the White House in Washington,
d C. Creating the illusion that they're all there's just
one continuous walk, all in the same place, but they're
on different continents, which at the time they looked at
(23:31):
that discovery as revelatory. They're like, oh wow, like you
actually don't need to shoot stuff that's in the same
geographic place in order to suggest being in the same
geographic place. You can invent geographies that don't exist out
of different parts, which, of course now it's just this
is just how you make films. You know, you you
(23:52):
you have one exterior and maybe the interior is a
set or it's somewhere on the other side of the country.
You know. Um, you know, you read you read any
behind the scenes making just any of your favorite films,
and you'll find stuff like like the Library and Ghostbusters
the first Ghostbusters film, I think parts of that are
and just you know, they're from all over depending on
whether you're outside or your inside you you're in the basement.
(24:15):
And then uh, and then also when it comes to
the anatomy question here, I mean it's it's why you
have stunt doubles, body doubles. It's why you can finish
a film. Uh, even though Bell Leghosi died whilst shooting it. Right,
So that's probably you're getting into the poor example of it,
and that that does specific example no. Plan nine for
(24:35):
matter space is a is a wonderful example of of
what you can do with the magic of cinema editing.
But but to get back to the core idea here,
these spitting and I think it'll be important for us
to think about the coolest off effect in a couple
(24:57):
of different ways. One is just the broader idea that
editing context can radically change the meaning of individual shots,
which I think we just all know from experiences is
obviously true. This is a fact about how movies work.
But the other thing is the more specific claim of
the alleged MOSU can experiment that you can take a
(25:19):
totally neutral shot of an actor's face displaying no emotion whatsoever,
and by intercutting it with other footage you can change
what the audience perceives. In those shots of the actor's face,
you can the audience will come to think that, you know,
a neutral face intercut with the image of a child
(25:39):
playing is like a happy parental uh, you know, and
like a bowl of soup means they're they're they're filled
with pangs of hunger, even though it's the exact same
neutral footage of the face. So that's the more specific claim.
And I think it's that second one that's more questionable
but but also interesting in its own regard. And we're
gonna look at at least a couple of papers about
that as we go on, but I thought it might
(26:01):
be good to just discuss a few examples that this
uh thinking about this effect calls to mind from uh
from movies that you and I have seen. And one
thing I find very interesting is that, at least personally anecdotally,
I feel a kind of experience of the coolest Shov effect,
even the more specific version, with neutral faces in movies
(26:22):
that don't actually involve real faces. A really great example
I came across was mentioned on the TV Tropes website
for the coolers Shov effect. If you never never been
to that website, it's a great it's like a wiki style,
you know, user submitted content. But it just includes big
lists of different sorts of conventions of of TV and
(26:43):
movies and things like that, narrative conventions, filmmaking conventions, uh,
cliches and such. And so they've got a page on
the cooler shov effect and it mentioned how in two
thousand one of Space Odyssey, which I thought was a
fantastic example. Oh, I absolutely agree, and I wouldn't have
thought of it at first myself. But yeah, you just
have that red light that how has no face at all,
(27:06):
not even the semblance of the face exactly. So yeah,
it's not even a computer screen that kind of looks
like a face. It's just a red light. Uh. And
so that completely removes the possibility of picking up on
queues and micro expressions based on the feelings or mind
state of a human actor. House face is just the light.
And yet the editing context, at least for me, absolutely
(27:29):
causes me to read emotional expression and emotional content into
the red light. So sometimes, depending on what it's being
intercut with, the light looks calm. Other times the red
light looks suspicious or even paranoid. Yeah, Yeah, that's I think.
This is this is a this is a great read. Um.
It reminds me of another example that I ran across.
(27:51):
I was I was just looking for at first, I
was just looking for mainstream examples, you know, and h
I ran across um a video from king star Wars
dot net that points to some examples in Star Wars,
the first of which is is just pretty pretty standard.
I imagine, Um, you have the scene where Luke is
surveying the destruction of his aunt and uncle's home, shots
(28:11):
of devastation, shots of of Luke's face. Uh, you know,
so they inform each other. But the more impressive examples,
I thought, we're discussions of how you have shots of
Darth Vader during the final confrontation in UM the Return
of the Jedi. Uh, this is this is where uh,
Emperor Palpatine has has had Luke Invader fight, and then
(28:33):
Luke refuses to kill his father, and so, uh, the
Emperor is just going to force lightning him to death
in front of Vader. And we of course, you know
later in the film we see Vader's face, but you
don't see Vader's face. You just see this, uh, this
emotionless bug skull helmet. But in that scene where we're
(28:54):
seeing what he's seeing, we're seeing shots of Luke's suffering,
writhing under the agony of the force lightning. Um we
we we we see that change Invader, even though we
don't see his face. I totally agree. I think this
is another great example. Yeah, it's just the mask, so
you can't be picking up on human expressions. But yeah,
you read expression into the mask face based on what's
(29:17):
happening to Luke, you start to almost see him feeling compassion. Yeah.
Another example they bring up is the Mandalorian TV show
where through most of it, the title character of the
Mandalorian does not remove his helmet. And you probably have
more room to even explore how this works in that
TV show because you know Vader Vader's you know, you're
(29:39):
generally dealing with severe situations. But in the over the
course of the Mandalorian TV show, you have him interacting
with with light and cute things, with comedic things as
well as serious things, and so there's plenty of opportunity
for that. Again, this you know, emotionless Mandalorian helmet in
this case uh to to seem to convey uh for
(30:00):
an emotions. Uh. And of course that's not to discount
body language and plenty of other you know, cues that
enable us to lean into it. But but still, you know,
all these things work together to help us form that
theory of mind. What's going on inside Vader's mind, what's
going on inside the Mandalorian's mind, or Howe's mind. Absolutely, Yeah,
another great example. Now, one example I was I was
(30:23):
looking into and thinking about two brings us back to Hitchcock.
I was thinking about Psycho, which of course has has
a number of scenes that are very iconic, and you know,
we that easily come to mind, and you may even
be able to picture even if you haven't seen the film. Um,
but there's there's one scene in particular where Janet Lee's
Marian Crane is changing clothes in her room at the
(30:44):
Bates Motel. Norman Bates played by the handsome Anthony Perkins, Uh,
is in an adjacent room. He approaches a picture frame,
he removes it and reveals a peephole. Uh. He puts
his eye to the peepole, and we switched to a
p O V shot of his voice rhythm. Here's Marion
Crane undressing. Then a close up of his eye eyeball
(31:05):
like side view of his eyeball staring through the peephole.
She moves out of you in the in the p
o V shot, and then he places the picture frame
back over the peephole, back still turned to us. But
then he turns and we see his face, and he
in his face is very interesting in this performance and
particularly in the scene because it is I mean, it's
(31:25):
it's hard to to to register exactly what he's feeling like.
It's not like it's kind of blank. I mean, I
end up reading into it if i'm you know, I'm
thinking about it, like what's he thinking? Obviously I know
what's about to happen. He's going to go in there
and kill her while she's in the shower. So it's
easy to read in like grim determination. But he's not like,
you know, snarling and snickering with with with fiendish desire
(31:48):
in this scene or anything. Um. And it's also interesting
to think about this in terms of of subversion, because
you know, we think of Anthony Perkins now, we think
of Psycho. We think of him playing this um, this
very troubled, uh murderous individual. But prior to this film,
he was like a Jimmy Stewart esque leading man in
(32:10):
a former teen heartthrob. So, so Hitchcock was averting this
image in Psycho. So it's it's interesting to think about
that watching a scene like this. Yeah. So I also
have to add that having your character look through a
peopole like this is is hardly like neutral. That gives
us a different idea. I mean, in the scene earlier,
he's he's got a very boy next door kind of energy.
(32:32):
He seems, uh, you know, just kind of like a sweet, shy,
handsome young guy. Yeah. But yeah, once he's looking through
the people, that does charge the way we read his
face very differently. Right now, speaking of Hitchcock and uh
and voyeurism, it's also worth worth noting that Rear Window,
starring the actual Jimmy Stewart, has plenty of examples of
(32:52):
this sort of thing, where, you know, a lot of
that movie is Jimmy Stewart's character looking through a telescope
and then we have po V shots of he is
seeing in other apartments and then he and then cuts
back to him. Yeah, now one one more sort of
it's sort of an example of it, but also kind
of a subversion of it. Is a Spielberg face. This
is the close up of awe and wonder on an
(33:14):
actor's glazed face in reaction to something they're looking at,
like a like a big old shark or a UFO
or a field full of dinosaurs or something. Well, in
the more specific sense, generally, I would say, these are
not neutral faces, but they are faces that are clearly
they're having some kind of powerful inner experience. But it
sometimes might be ambiguous if you were to just see
(33:36):
the face by itself, But then when it's inter cut
with what they're looking at, it's it's very often awe, right,
And and sometimes this is actually manipulated to uh, to
a comedic effect online. For instance, in the Jurassic Park
sequence where they're you know, they're awe, they're getting out
of the car. They're just you know, completely zombified by
something utterly amazing and holy before them. You don't know
(33:59):
what it is yet. I mean, you know it's going
to be dinosaurs, but you haven't seen it yourself yet.
And so I feel feel like there's been a number
of of comedic debts where someone has has inserted something
else there, uh, you know, something maybe more mundane than
than gigantic dinosaurs brought back to life through science the
new Taco Bell menu item exactly. All right, Well, we
(34:21):
ended up having a lot to say about the cool
As shov effect. Actually, so I think we're gonna have
to call part one there. But when we come back,
we can talk about some uh, some attempts to replicate
the original cool As show, study, some interpretations of what
maybe lying behind it to the extent that it's true,
and then maybe a little more research about ambiguous spaces
in general. In the meantime, if you would like to
(34:43):
listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcast feed with core episodes on Tuesday and Thursday,
listener mail on Monday, artifact on Wednesday, and hey, we're
talking about film, so be aware that on Fridays that's
weird how cinema. That's our time to outside most serious
concerns and just talk about a weird or unusual film.
(35:05):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other
to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
You can email us at contact Got Stuff to Blow
Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(35:28):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for an older episode
of the show. This one originally published on January two,
and it was part one of our series about the
coolest shov effect and interesting psychological effect having to do
with film editing. Alright, let's jump right in. Hey, everybody,
(00:27):
Joe here, I'm just cutting in before the music with
a brief editorial insert it's happened before it happened again.
This is one of those episodes that went long. Rob
and I originally planned it to be one standalone chat,
but it started taking on an unwieldy form while we
were recording, so we decided to go ahead and chop
it up into two parts. So this is why in
(00:48):
a few minutes you might hear me make references to
things I'm going to bring up later in the episode,
but we actually won't get to them until part two,
So apologies for any confusion on that front. As a
general outline, and we're going to introduce and illustrate our
central topic in part one here and then we'll be
going deeper into the weeds of subsequent research in part two.
(01:08):
So without any further delay, I'll now plunge you back
into the show. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind
production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. And my name is Robert Lamm
(01:29):
and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be talking
about a concept known as the coolest Shop effect. This
is an idea from film theory. But I think this
will make a really interesting episode because it's, first of all,
it's at that that weird intersection space, you know, the
midnight at the crossroads of of art and science. And
(01:52):
then uh, Secondarily, I think it's one of those great
observations that is simple, almost obvious in its implication, ends
when when you first grasp it, but you the more
you think about it, the weirder and more powerful it gets,
especially in a historical context. Yeah, this is an interesting
topic and one I have to admit that I don't
think i'd ever really absorbed before. I don't know if
(02:14):
it ever came up in um, any of like the
film classes that I took, like in college. Um, same
here and uh and and at the same time, Yeah,
I read about this and then went out and actually
watched um um, I watched a film and watched you know,
probably a couple of TV shows over the weekend, and
so I had it fresh on my mind looking for it.
(02:35):
And on one hand, you do see it everywhere, but
then you don't like, it's, uh, it's this thing that
that when you're when you first read about it, it
sounds like, oh, well, this is like part of the
blueprint of how film works. And that's kind of that's
kind of one of the arguments that's made for it.
And yet it's not necessarily as a parent as you
might expect it to be, but there are some wonderful
(02:55):
examples to be to be dwelt upon. Well, the way
I'd put it, after having done all the research for
this episode, is that I think it is sort of
part of the blueprint of how film works, except in
the way it's usually explained, it's just a few degrees off. Yeah, yeah,
that would I think that would make sense. But I'll
explain more about that as as we go on. Another
thing that's interesting about this though, is it's something that's
(03:17):
originally from the realm of art and esthetic criticism. You know,
it's from film theory, but it also has a sort
of mixed research history within the fields of experimental psychology
and neuroscience. You know, there's some empirical experiments that seem
to find evidence of the effect and others do not
find it. And I think part of the part of
(03:37):
the difference there is how you ask the question and
what kind of stimula you use. But it could be
interesting to see what the difference is there as well.
But I guess we should get straight to explaining what
the coolest Jov effect allegedly is. So, in the words
of the authors of a two thousand six neuroscience paper
by mobs at All that I'll refer to later in
(03:57):
the episode, the coolest Jov effect is the following proposition.
It is that quote, the manipulation of context can alter
an audiences perception of an actor's facial expressions, thoughts, and feelings. Yeah. Yeah,
And this is something that is at at the very
root of everything. Is is based on theory of mind,
(04:19):
that we as humans look at another person and we
simulate what's going on in their head, what what are
their thoughts, what are their motivations, what are their intentions, etcetera.
Um uh so, Yeah, it's theory theory, theory of mind
at heart, but it's not just the face. It's also
something else. And basically this gets into just an into
(04:41):
filmmaking and editing. Right, it's the the idea of montage.
That's the word that's often used here, but that would
probably give us ideas of a very specific technique of like,
you know, you're like the training montage and Rocky film
or something. You should actually be thinking of montage when
we say it in this episode. More broadly, it's not
just that. It means the the arrangement of different shots
(05:04):
into a sequence through editing. No matter what kind of
technique you're using there, if you're taking different shots and
putting them into a sequence, that is montage for today's purposes. Yeah,
and and again it all comes back to editing. The
way the footage is put together. You can basically think
of it as like face p O V shot face um.
(05:25):
For instance, Alfred Hitchcock described it once as being a
situation where okay, again, think of three shots. First shot,
he says, his man looking out the window. Shot number
three is a man smiling. Now what you put in
that second slot, whatever, that second shot is that you
insert that changes the context entirely. Now, uh, as we
(05:47):
were discussing before we recorded here, this Alfred Hitchcock example,
the widely cided is also a little imperfect because if
you want to get right down to the like the
core theory, it's just it's Shot one should be a
man looking out a window. Shot number three should just
be that man looking out a window, no smile. But
it still comes down to what is shot number two,
because that changes how you think about that man in
(06:09):
shot three, right, you seem to see something different in
the man, even though you could use the exact same
footage of him. So the editing context changes what we
think we see in a previous or a subsequent shot,
even though you're using the exact same shots. So one
of the funny in Hitchcock's example, he uh, he talks
about this in a famous interview I think he did
(06:31):
with maybe it was with the CBC or somebody, but
but he was using the example of Okay, in the
first sequence, imagine that the middle shot that's intercut there
is like a mother playing with a baby, and in
that case, oh, he's a kindly old grandfather man. And
then the second option is that the middle shot is
a woman in a bathing suit, in which case, he says,
(06:51):
then you perceive his smile as being that of a
dirty old man. And I guess it kind of helps
because it's actually Alfred Hitchcock they use in the visual example.
Now we'll come back to more about what this idea
is and what it might mean, but maybe first we
should just do a little bit of biography on the
namesake of this idea. So the Kolashov effect is named
(07:14):
after a guy named Lev Kulashev, who was a Russian
filmmaker and film theorist who I think, I don't know,
you could say it was like a major force in
the history of film theory and uh, and is primarily
responsible for popularizing this alleged effect. Yes, Lev Kulashev, who
(07:34):
lived seventy Russian director film theorist who started out in art,
direction and some acting before moving increasingly into directing, experimental editing,
and scholarship. He was one of the founders of the
world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. And yeah,
he introduced the American film concept of montage into Soviet
(07:55):
cinema based on examining the works of directors such as
DDA be Griffith, and as David Gilevskie points out in
his book Early Soviet Cinema, he quote played a more
significant part in the development of the Golden Age of
Russian cinema than any other figure with the exception of Eisenstein.
And this would refer to Sergei Eisenstein, another big name
(08:19):
and film a big big name Russian film director of
the time period, theorist of the day who listeners might
know from such films as a Battleship Attempkin from that's
the old baby Stroller down the Stairs movie right now.
One thing I do remember from actual film classes that
I took in college was that a lot of early
(08:39):
Soviet cinema does make use of the montage, more in
the sense of the specific film technique where you're like
taking a bunch of different images and and putting them
together to suggest a kind of, uh, a kind of
sequence or progression, more like the training montage. But the
main example I remember there is a movie we watched
by or TV called The Man with the Movie Camera,
(09:02):
which is basically the whole movie is just a montage
of of you know, Russian public life by the way,
if anyone out there wants to hear us talk even
more about silent film. We did an episode of Weird
How Cinema UM at some point in the last year
where we did like a silent film double feature where
we we picked out just a couple maybe three different
(09:23):
silent films and talked about what was neat about them
and just talked about sort of the the challenges to
the modern viewer that that silent film poses, but also
the rewards of watching them. So what one of the
main things Kolashov was doing here was that he was
he wasn't even um even even shooting new footage in
these experiments. UH, he was taking pre existing footage silent
(09:47):
film footage usually um Czarist era silent film, and re
cutting them to to see what could be done with
this montage feature like how how to arrange the uh
the footage to get different, um you know, emotional results.
And a lot of it was based again and looking
at what was going on and what seemed to be
(10:09):
working in uh in in in Western film, in American
film specifically again like the work of d. W. Griffith,
and UH just in general. Kulashofice was it was somewhat
controversial at times, apparently in in these uh, these experiments,
you know, he's looking at American models, Western models, So
he was accused by Communist Party members at times of
(10:31):
appealing to Western ideas and forms too much. And he's
also apparently been accused of living it up during tough
times in Russia and destroying archives silent era films during
this editing work, which again the work that wasn't really
based that so much in shooting new footage and experimenting
with how you might added them together, but taking pre
(10:53):
existing footage from the archive and adding it together. Now,
as a director, Kulashov is apparently and I'm speaking largely
of a director that I really didn't know anything about before,
so me neither. But he's apparently best known for ninety
four's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land
of the Bolsheviks. He also adapted the works of Jack
(11:14):
London and Oh Henry, but especially for this show, we
should really highlight that he also made a death Ray
spy thriller. I thought this was really interesting. Somehow, I
guess this never came up when we did our invention
episodes on the Death Ray or if it did, I've
forgotten about it because this seemed new to me. But
it fits right in there, because if you haven't heard
(11:36):
our episodes of the Invention podcast on the death Ray,
those were some of my favorites that we did, especially
because we got to talk about an invention that never
really existed and yet was the subject of a popular fervor.
You know that, like people were really excited about death
rays for the nineteen twenties and that just there was
never any such thing. Yeah, yeah, the invention it's of
(12:00):
never existed, but you had kind of a global death
ray fever going on, and this is so it's right
smack dab in the middle of it. A film titled
lut Smirty or the Death Ray. Galepsi describes it as
quote a relatively violent film about international espionage. So I
had to look in. I looked at footage the available
(12:20):
footage that I could find out. It wasn't wasn't super
great to watch, but there's some impressive stills that The
plot is spot on for what you might expect from
a Soviet death ray movie at the time period. We
follow a socialist revolutionary who has to flee an unnamed
fascist capitalist country, the socialist revolutionary has to flee to
(12:41):
the Soviet Union, and once there he is introduced to
the new technology of the death ray, which can explode
gunpowder at a distance, which is a key detail because
that's exactly, uh that the sort of thing that was
part of the death ray fever that we discussed in
the Invention episode. That's right. So the brief top line
on that is that, uh, basically a lot of this
(13:03):
death ray fever came from reaction to the horrors of
long range bombing aerial bombing in World War One, and
people wanted the idea of something that could shoot bombers
out of the sky from a great distance before they
got to your cities, and the death ray filled in
that gap exactly. So basically, the evil spy follows them
(13:23):
and steals the death ray technology so that they can
use it to suppress labor strikes. But don't worry, the
labor strikers steal the death ray technology back and use
it to blow up their oppressors bomber aircraft which is
about to be used against the strikers. This almost makes
me want to compile and watch a list of all
(13:44):
the death ray movies of the nineteen twentys. Just put
them all together and see see what kind of picture emerges. Yeah, yeah,
or and I'm curious, like, what is the best death
ray movie? I'm I'm assuming the best death ray movies
came later. Um came in the way of films such
as this, Thank thank Okay, Well, so that's love kol
(14:09):
Ashov and I wanted to get a little bit into
the background of this idea of the cool Ashov effect
by consulting his own words. So I found a book
called cool a Shov on Film Writings. This was published
by the University of California Press in nineteen seventy four.
I'm not positive. I think this might be a reprint
of some earlier writings of Kola Shovs, but the context
(14:32):
is um. I was consulting an early section of this
book where he's discussing a series of investigations he and
his colleagues carried out in the late nineteen teens and
into the twenties, essentially to try to figure out how
film actually works. That they were asking questions like how
do audiences make meaning out of the images they see
(14:53):
over the course of a film? Which is a great question,
and it is something that early filmmakers really had to
fe guar out. We we can take a lot of
film meaning making for granted these days, because uh, you know,
film techniques are so well honed these days that they're
often invisible to us. You know, you you if you
(15:13):
watch a professionally made movie, you will you will not
even notice the fact that, say, all of the eye
lines and it have been aligned correctly so that when
a character looks at something and then it cuts to
that thing, it's lined up so that it's not confusing.
But that's like a technique that had to be learned,
and there are tons of things like that. They're just
invisible to us now, as as a lot of good
(15:35):
filmmaking techniques are I mean ideally, I guess, well, I
mean there are different ideas of this, but you know,
a common view I think among a lot of filmmakers
is that techniques should not call attention to themselves, but
instead should disappear and allow you to just become totally
absorbed in the narrative to help bring about the raw
experience quality of modern cinema. Yeah. Yeah, and that's I mean,
(15:56):
that's something I like to stick to. I mean, unless
the film is so uh poor. It's a execution that
you can't help but but notice it, you know, well
when yeah, And certainly there's plenty of examples of that.
But so Kolashav and colleagues are trying to investigate how
does film work? What what are the techniques that that
(16:17):
cause an audience to think or feel a certain way?
And so famously Kolashov feels that he has achieved a
breakthrough when he starts to discover the power of montage
or editing. He starts to think of editing as a
sort of master key behind the power of cinema, and
he believes that montage has a power greater than simply
(16:38):
showing you a series of moving images in sequence so
that you think, well, one follows the other. Instead, he
comes to think that by ordering shots in a sequence,
you actually change the meaning of the shots themselves, or
change the perception of what is contained in the shots.
And there's a memorable example that Kolashov describes in the book.
(17:00):
I'll just read it directly. He says, I saw this
scene I think in a film by Razumni, a priest's
house with a portrait of Nicholas, the second hanging on
the wall that though that would be the czar right uh,
the village is taken over by the Red Army. The
frightened priest turns the portrait over, and on the reverse
side of the portrait is the smiling face of Lenin. However,
(17:24):
this is a familiar portrait, a portrait in which Lenin
is not smiling. But that spot in the film was
so funny, and it was so uproariously received by the
public that I, myself scrutinizing the portrait several times, saw
the portrait of Lenin as smiling. Especially intrigued by this,
I obtained the portrait that was used and saw that
(17:46):
the expression on the face in the portrait was serious.
The montage was so edited that we involuntarily imbued a
serious face with a changed expression characteristic of that playful moment.
In other words, the work of the actor was altered
by means of montage. In this way, montage had a
colossal influence on the effect of the material. It became
(18:09):
apparent that it was possible to change the actor's work,
his movements, his very behavior in either one direction or
the other through montage. I thought this was a great example,
because I haven't seen the film in question. But but
I can understand exactly the effect he's describing here with
this portrait of Lenin because of the tone of the scene.
(18:30):
The context makes it darkly comedic, like it's funny, but
it's also threatening, that a serious or neutral face could
be perceived as having a kind of wicked grin. M. Yeah,
you know, this reminds me just in general, of any
time you have kind of a a kind of a portrait
he had a painting or a photograph. Um, I guess that.
(18:51):
You know, just in general outside of film, it can
seem to take on different dimensions based on what you
are doing or what your mindset is. If you're sort
of imagining that the that the subject of the painting
or picture can see you, or you're leaning into that
sort of interpretation, like why is Vigo the Carpathian staring
(19:14):
in there like that? Is he? Is he proud? Is
he angry at me? Is he smiling? Oh? That makes
me wonder did they when the film Ghostbusters too, did
they have multiple paintings of Vigo with slightly different expressions
on his face or did they just use one portrait
and and rely on the cool a shov effect? For
I read emotions into it. I wish I thought of
(19:34):
this earlier. Well, anyway, so we're about to get to
the description of the main alleged experiment that establishes the
this that we're about to get into canonical cool Ashov
effect territory. So, following this realization about the power of
editing or montage to change what is perceived within the
shot itself, there's this famous story about an experiment cool
(19:57):
a Shov supposedly carried out to put the idea to
the test. And I want to flag at the beginning
here that multiple sources I have read raised questions about
whether this test ever actually took place in the way
it is described. Um, but I'd say it doesn't especially matter,
because we're going to be just using this story to
illustrate an idea. Then we can look at other tests
(20:18):
later not to provide evidential force that it must be,
as Kolashev says, So whether or not this event actually
took place exactly like this, this is how it's described
in a book called How Movies Work by Bruce Kawen.
This was University of California Press. Kawen writes as follows
about Kolashev's experiment. He found some old footage of a
(20:41):
pre revolutionary actor named Yvonne mujukin a single long take,
probably a makeup test, in which the face showed an
unvarying neutral expression. Kulashev then cut three different shots into
this take, one of a child playing with a toy,
one of a bowl of soup, and one of an
(21:02):
old woman in a coffin the sequence when as follows
face child face, soup face, woman face. When he showed
this short film to an audience, although this may be
a bit of cinematic folklore, they remarked what a great
actor Masukan was. They enjoyed the subtle way he expressed
(21:23):
affectionate delight at the child's playing, hunger for soup, and
grief at the death of the woman whom they assumed
was his mother. The Masoukan experiment, as it has since
been called, had a permanent impact on the theory of
screen acting. It showed that audiences will read shots in
terms of each other, and therefore that a film actor
(21:43):
who ought ideally to under act could allow the montage
to suggest some of his or her emotions and thoughts.
The point for our immediate purposes, however, is simply that
the impression of continuity is often generated by the audience.
Now will come with some additional history of research to
build upon this later, But Kulashov used this alleged experiment
(22:06):
in support of his broader theory of how film worked,
one of the main points of which was that the
soul of a film was in the editing process, and
that the edit of the film actually had more power
over the film's effect than the contents of any individual shot.
I think another way of phrasing this is that the
(22:27):
way you edit your footage together is ultimately more important
than what an actor does while the cameras rolling, because
the meaning of an actor's performance can be totally changed
by the editing context. And in fact, Kolashov allegedly carried
out a couple of other experiments along these lines that
are known sometimes as creative geography and creative anatomy. Creative
(22:50):
anatomy would be using shots of parts of different bodies
from different actors, creating the illusion that they all belonged
to the same person. So you and show a different
person's hands, lips, legs, and so forth, and create an
imaginary composite person that doesn't exist. He also did the
same thing with physical geography, so he would have, for example,
(23:11):
a shot of people walking along a street in Moscow
and then maybe going up a staircase and then going
to a mansion that was actually the White House in Washington,
d C. Creating the illusion that they're all there's just
one continuous walk, all in the same place, but they're
on different continents, which at the time they looked at
(23:31):
that discovery as revelatory. They're like, oh wow, like you
actually don't need to shoot stuff that's in the same
geographic place in order to suggest being in the same
geographic place. You can invent geographies that don't exist out
of different parts, which, of course now it's just this
is just how you make films. You know, you you
(23:52):
you have one exterior and maybe the interior is a
set or it's somewhere on the other side of the country.
You know. Um, you know, you read you read any
behind the scenes making just any of your favorite films,
and you'll find stuff like like the Library and Ghostbusters
the first Ghostbusters film, I think parts of that are
and just you know, they're from all over depending on
whether you're outside or your inside you you're in the basement.
(24:15):
And then uh, and then also when it comes to
the anatomy question here, I mean it's it's why you
have stunt doubles, body doubles. It's why you can finish
a film. Uh, even though Bell Leghosi died whilst shooting it. Right,
So that's probably you're getting into the poor example of it,
and that that does specific example no. Plan nine for
(24:35):
matter space is a is a wonderful example of of
what you can do with the magic of cinema editing.
But but to get back to the core idea here,
these spitting and I think it'll be important for us
to think about the coolest off effect in a couple
(24:57):
of different ways. One is just the broader idea that
editing context can radically change the meaning of individual shots,
which I think we just all know from experiences is
obviously true. This is a fact about how movies work.
But the other thing is the more specific claim of
the alleged MOSU can experiment that you can take a
(25:19):
totally neutral shot of an actor's face displaying no emotion whatsoever,
and by intercutting it with other footage you can change
what the audience perceives. In those shots of the actor's face,
you can the audience will come to think that, you know,
a neutral face intercut with the image of a child
(25:39):
playing is like a happy parental uh, you know, and
like a bowl of soup means they're they're they're filled
with pangs of hunger, even though it's the exact same
neutral footage of the face. So that's the more specific claim.
And I think it's that second one that's more questionable
but but also interesting in its own regard. And we're
gonna look at at least a couple of papers about
that as we go on, but I thought it might
(26:01):
be good to just discuss a few examples that this
uh thinking about this effect calls to mind from uh
from movies that you and I have seen. And one
thing I find very interesting is that, at least personally anecdotally,
I feel a kind of experience of the coolest Shov effect,
even the more specific version, with neutral faces in movies
(26:22):
that don't actually involve real faces. A really great example
I came across was mentioned on the TV Tropes website
for the coolers Shov effect. If you never never been
to that website, it's a great it's like a wiki style,
you know, user submitted content. But it just includes big
lists of different sorts of conventions of of TV and
(26:43):
movies and things like that, narrative conventions, filmmaking conventions, uh,
cliches and such. And so they've got a page on
the cooler shov effect and it mentioned how in two
thousand one of Space Odyssey, which I thought was a
fantastic example. Oh, I absolutely agree, and I wouldn't have
thought of it at first myself. But yeah, you just
have that red light that how has no face at all,
(27:06):
not even the semblance of the face exactly. So yeah,
it's not even a computer screen that kind of looks
like a face. It's just a red light. Uh. And
so that completely removes the possibility of picking up on
queues and micro expressions based on the feelings or mind
state of a human actor. House face is just the light.
And yet the editing context, at least for me, absolutely
(27:29):
causes me to read emotional expression and emotional content into
the red light. So sometimes, depending on what it's being
intercut with, the light looks calm. Other times the red
light looks suspicious or even paranoid. Yeah, Yeah, that's I think.
This is this is a this is a great read. Um.
It reminds me of another example that I ran across.
(27:51):
I was I was just looking for at first, I
was just looking for mainstream examples, you know, and h
I ran across um a video from king star Wars
dot net that points to some examples in Star Wars,
the first of which is is just pretty pretty standard.
I imagine, Um, you have the scene where Luke is
surveying the destruction of his aunt and uncle's home, shots
(28:11):
of devastation, shots of of Luke's face. Uh, you know,
so they inform each other. But the more impressive examples,
I thought, we're discussions of how you have shots of
Darth Vader during the final confrontation in UM the Return
of the Jedi. Uh, this is this is where uh,
Emperor Palpatine has has had Luke Invader fight, and then
(28:33):
Luke refuses to kill his father, and so, uh, the
Emperor is just going to force lightning him to death
in front of Vader. And we of course, you know
later in the film we see Vader's face, but you
don't see Vader's face. You just see this, uh, this
emotionless bug skull helmet. But in that scene where we're
(28:54):
seeing what he's seeing, we're seeing shots of Luke's suffering,
writhing under the agony of the force lightning. Um we
we we we see that change Invader, even though we
don't see his face. I totally agree. I think this
is another great example. Yeah, it's just the mask, so
you can't be picking up on human expressions. But yeah,
you read expression into the mask face based on what's
(29:17):
happening to Luke, you start to almost see him feeling compassion. Yeah.
Another example they bring up is the Mandalorian TV show
where through most of it, the title character of the
Mandalorian does not remove his helmet. And you probably have
more room to even explore how this works in that
TV show because you know Vader Vader's you know, you're
(29:39):
generally dealing with severe situations. But in the over the
course of the Mandalorian TV show, you have him interacting
with with light and cute things, with comedic things as
well as serious things, and so there's plenty of opportunity
for that. Again, this you know, emotionless Mandalorian helmet in
this case uh to to seem to convey uh for
(30:00):
an emotions. Uh. And of course that's not to discount
body language and plenty of other you know, cues that
enable us to lean into it. But but still, you know,
all these things work together to help us form that
theory of mind. What's going on inside Vader's mind, what's
going on inside the Mandalorian's mind, or Howe's mind. Absolutely, Yeah,
another great example. Now, one example I was I was
(30:23):
looking into and thinking about two brings us back to Hitchcock.
I was thinking about Psycho, which of course has has
a number of scenes that are very iconic, and you know,
we that easily come to mind, and you may even
be able to picture even if you haven't seen the film. Um,
but there's there's one scene in particular where Janet Lee's
Marian Crane is changing clothes in her room at the
(30:44):
Bates Motel. Norman Bates played by the handsome Anthony Perkins, Uh,
is in an adjacent room. He approaches a picture frame,
he removes it and reveals a peephole. Uh. He puts
his eye to the peepole, and we switched to a
p O V shot of his voice rhythm. Here's Marion
Crane undressing. Then a close up of his eye eyeball
(31:05):
like side view of his eyeball staring through the peephole.
She moves out of you in the in the p
o V shot, and then he places the picture frame
back over the peephole, back still turned to us. But
then he turns and we see his face, and he
in his face is very interesting in this performance and
particularly in the scene because it is I mean, it's
(31:25):
it's hard to to to register exactly what he's feeling like.
It's not like it's kind of blank. I mean, I
end up reading into it if i'm you know, I'm
thinking about it, like what's he thinking? Obviously I know
what's about to happen. He's going to go in there
and kill her while she's in the shower. So it's
easy to read in like grim determination. But he's not like,
you know, snarling and snickering with with with fiendish desire
(31:48):
in this scene or anything. Um. And it's also interesting
to think about this in terms of of subversion, because
you know, we think of Anthony Perkins now, we think
of Psycho. We think of him playing this um, this
very troubled, uh murderous individual. But prior to this film,
he was like a Jimmy Stewart esque leading man in
(32:10):
a former teen heartthrob. So, so Hitchcock was averting this
image in Psycho. So it's it's interesting to think about
that watching a scene like this. Yeah. So I also
have to add that having your character look through a
peopole like this is is hardly like neutral. That gives
us a different idea. I mean, in the scene earlier,
he's he's got a very boy next door kind of energy.
(32:32):
He seems, uh, you know, just kind of like a sweet, shy,
handsome young guy. Yeah. But yeah, once he's looking through
the people, that does charge the way we read his
face very differently. Right now, speaking of Hitchcock and uh
and voyeurism, it's also worth worth noting that Rear Window,
starring the actual Jimmy Stewart, has plenty of examples of
(32:52):
this sort of thing, where, you know, a lot of
that movie is Jimmy Stewart's character looking through a telescope
and then we have po V shots of he is
seeing in other apartments and then he and then cuts
back to him. Yeah, now one one more sort of
it's sort of an example of it, but also kind
of a subversion of it. Is a Spielberg face. This
is the close up of awe and wonder on an
(33:14):
actor's glazed face in reaction to something they're looking at,
like a like a big old shark or a UFO
or a field full of dinosaurs or something. Well, in
the more specific sense, generally, I would say, these are
not neutral faces, but they are faces that are clearly
they're having some kind of powerful inner experience. But it
sometimes might be ambiguous if you were to just see
(33:36):
the face by itself, But then when it's inter cut
with what they're looking at, it's it's very often awe, right,
And and sometimes this is actually manipulated to uh, to
a comedic effect online. For instance, in the Jurassic Park
sequence where they're you know, they're awe, they're getting out
of the car. They're just you know, completely zombified by
something utterly amazing and holy before them. You don't know
(33:59):
what it is yet. I mean, you know it's going
to be dinosaurs, but you haven't seen it yourself yet.
And so I feel feel like there's been a number
of of comedic debts where someone has has inserted something
else there, uh, you know, something maybe more mundane than
than gigantic dinosaurs brought back to life through science the
new Taco Bell menu item exactly. All right, Well, we
(34:21):
ended up having a lot to say about the cool
As shov effect. Actually, so I think we're gonna have
to call part one there. But when we come back,
we can talk about some uh, some attempts to replicate
the original cool As show, study, some interpretations of what
maybe lying behind it to the extent that it's true,
and then maybe a little more research about ambiguous spaces
in general. In the meantime, if you would like to
(34:43):
listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcast feed with core episodes on Tuesday and Thursday,
listener mail on Monday, artifact on Wednesday, and hey, we're
talking about film, so be aware that on Fridays that's
weird how cinema. That's our time to outside most serious
concerns and just talk about a weird or unusual film.
(35:05):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other
to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello,
You can email us at contact Got Stuff to Blow
Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
(35:28):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
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