From the Vault: The Kuleshov Effect, Part 2

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. (01/27/2022)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
it's Saturday. Let's head into the vault this week. It
is part two of our series on the Coolest Jov Effect.
This episode originally aired January. I hope you enjoy Welcome
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey,

(00:34):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two of our series on the Coolest Jov Effect. Now,
as I explained last time, this is one that originally
was going to be one episode. We ended up splitting
it into so we're doing a little time traveling right now.
This is an out of sequence introduction, but I guess
from here we'll just jump right back into the middle

(00:56):
of our conversation from last time. Let's do it well. Anyway,
So I wanted to talk about a very interesting paper
that analyzed the the history and meaning of the cool
Shov effect and then also tried to recreate the Mojukan experiment.
So this paper was published in the Cinema Journal by

(01:17):
Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley called the Coolershov Effect
Recreating the classic experiment your nineteen. I think both of
the authors on this paper were at the time professors
at Virginia Tech. Stephen Prince is a is a film
scholar who I know has done a lot of work
on a Kirakurasawa. And I'm not going to cover the

(01:39):
entire paper, but i just want to note some parts
of it that struck me as as relevant and interesting.
So they start off by telling the story of the
Kolashov effect experiment, the experiment with that actor mojuk In
making the neutral face and then either being intercut with
with soup or with the woman in the coffin, and
the audience is raving about how how expressive and powerful

(02:01):
the emotions in the performance were. Now, one thing they
do at the beginning is they note some differences in
the details of the story that arise from different recountings
of it, and so they end up casting doubt on
whether the accounts of this experiment are first of all,
historically accurate and second analytically valid, and so the author's

(02:21):
right quote. The goal here is to provide a clearer
contextualization of Kolashev's work distinguishing between its incontrovertible importance for
an understanding of how cinema communicates and certain of its limitations,
especially it's incautious merging of theoretical claim and observational assertion.
As we will see, Kulashev may have been right, but

(02:42):
perhaps for the wrong reasons. So the top line of
this paper is that they try to recreate the Majukan
experiment as it is usually described, and they do not
produce the same result. But this doesn't necessarily mean that
the broader implications of the Kolashov effect are wrong theoretically, uh,
but it might mean something about the specific claims about

(03:03):
a neutral face. Um. So they start off talking Aboutkulashev's
belief in the power of montage and his arguments that
editing is far more important the meaning generated by a
film than the contents of the shots. So they talked
about the masou Can experiment and then the other things
we mentioned, creative geography and creative anatomy, and they described

(03:25):
the general takeaway from the masuk And experiment as follows. Quote.
Naturalistic emotive performances by actors were not considered by Kulashev
to be essential to cinema because of the demands of montage,
actors were to provide minimal restraint and fairly unambiguous gestural
and facial expressions. As kola Chev puts it, quote, the

(03:48):
presence of montage necessitated that the shots should be constructed simply, clearly, distinctly.
Otherwise the flickering of a rapid montage would not be
sufficient for a full scrutin any of its contents. And
then the authors go on reacting, partly against the over
emoting found in some silent films. Kulashov noted that quote,

(04:09):
a preoccupation with psychologism rooted in the actor's performance was
quite useless for the cinema. So in a in a
lot of ways, it sounds like Kolashov kind of wanted
to take the acting out of acting. He was like,
there's too much psychology and acting. What we need instead
is just sort of like shots of actors doing kind

(04:29):
of like plain, unambiguous moments that can then be selected
by the editor to insert in a sequence to make
meaning of m Yeah, that's I mean, it reminds me
of so many other discussions we've had about performance and direction. Uh.
I'm always reminded of that that final sequence from A
Geary The Wrath of God, where you have you have

(04:53):
what ends up being a rather balanced and and and
interesting performance by klaus Kinsky. But apparently it's because Vernon
Herzag just wore him out, made him do take after
take until he wasn't doing like a frenzied um uh
you know, over almost you know, overacting overly intense performance.
He's not raging, he's just actually you know, you know,

(05:15):
emoting it at the level that the director wants and
then can therefore be uh be used effectively in the edit. Yeah,
and though if that story is true, it may have
worked in this case. So I want to say I
do not necessarily endorse directing by exhaustion. No. Now that
was a special relationship obviously, But you often see this
brought up, and you know, there's this idea of like,

(05:37):
is this is it the is is this about the
actor and the acting performance? Is it about uh editing?
Is it about the director's vision? And you do often
see that sort of push and pull be a you know,
Klauskinski in vern Or Herzog or Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock. Uh,
you know, the the actor has a certain vision about
how things want need to be, and then the director

(05:59):
had maybe has another eye dea not not only about
like this particular character in this particular performance, but how
it fits into the the overall film, how it fits
into the final edit. And so you could you can
imagine somebody going into it with this this sort of
very kulashav idea of just shoot, all we needed as
neutral actors, we don't really need any of this emotion

(06:19):
one way or another. And um, I don't know, there's
probably some examples of filmmakers who tend to lean in
that direction with very neutral performances. Yeah, you could almost
look at that approach as uh, something that might be
more common saying like music videos and stuff than in
narrative films. Being probably find at some in narrative films
as well, where the filming part of the filmmaking process

(06:43):
is just sort of like creating a bunch of building
blocks that can later be used in various arrangements to
do whatever the director editor later decides to do with them. Yeah,
it also reminds me how, you know, a lot of
the films we're watching weird how cinema will sometimes feature
non actors or you know, very very green actors, But

(07:05):
the right sort of non actor can really excel in
a scene if utilized correctly, you know, like not the
kind of non actor where they're just really outrageous with
you know, but but where they're just sort of very
they're very neutral, they're they're almost barely there at all,
and if enough of the other stuff is in the
right place, it can really work. Now. I gotta say, though,
as this paper ends up describing kola Chev's theory of

(07:28):
film and montage, I think I can't agree with with
what it sounds like Coolshov's vision actually was, because cool
a Show apparently said things like the film shot is
not a still photograph. The shot is a sign a
letter for montage. So I think he's saying like a
still photograph can have meaning on its own, but a

(07:49):
shot in a movie is more like a letter in
a sentence. Something which does not have meaning on its own,
but is combined in sequence to make meaning clearly has
some truth to it, because, as we've said, editing does
constitute a major part of the the sense making or
meaning making of a film. But I think that's also
pretty overstated. You know, a lot of meaning lies in

(08:11):
the editing, but the contents of the shots also stand
alone to a greater extent and and matter a lot
more than Kolashaw was giving credit here. Um. Though, again,
to be fair, I think it's important for us not
to forget that in the nineteen teens and early nineteen twenties,
you know, film was still fairly young, Editing was still
fairly new in cinema, and its powers were still being discovered. Uh.

(08:34):
You know, it's like, like we talked about the very
earliest films from the eighteen nineties and such, we're usually
not edited at all. They'd just be one continuous shot.
And even after editing was introduced, films of the Silent
era typically did not have as many cuts as movies
were used to today. Furthermore, the authors of of this
paper argue that a theory comparing film to language is

(08:58):
actually not super useful because there's just a lot of
ways in which that doesn't work. Like film does things
language cannot do. So you don't have to learn a
language to appreciate the meanings of films. You you learn
some conventions, but you know, you can just watch a
movie and make some sense of it, even if you're
not familiar with conventions. You to understand the language, you
have to learn the language. Um. Meanwhile, language does things

(09:22):
that film can't do, like photographic images used in a
film cannot be recombined freely to make endless meaning the
way a language can. There's also an interesting digression in
this paper about Kolashaw being influenced by the ideology of
industrial efficiency on the model of the American engineer Frederick Taylor,
who was a big proponent of finding ways to make

(09:46):
you know, production processes and factories more efficient, finding all
the places where waste and and and problems creep in
and eliminating those, And that Taylor's ideas of industrial efficiency
were apparently very popular in the Soviet Union at the time,
and that in a way, the authors say that you
could view Kolashaw's emphasis on economy and acting as a

(10:10):
type of industrial efficiency technique applied to film theory. Yeah,
And based on what I was reading it, it doesn't.
It does seem like a lot of his work was
based in let's figure out what's working, and then how
we can we can do that? How how do we
make how do what is the most economic means of
making effective film now? Ultimately, Prince and Hensley make the

(10:31):
case that Koulishev really was trying to dress up his
theoretical convictions about how film works with the imper mater
of empirical science with this alleged experiment them as you
can experiment, uh, And I think I'm pretty convinced by
their description of it that way. I think this is
something you've always got to be cautious of because obviously,

(10:52):
you know, I don't object in principle to exploring or
building upon artistic theories with empirical methods. But I would
also say, my personal opinion is that a lot of
these efforts to inject scientific methods into esthetics and and
art and stuff can be confusing and unnecessary. Like I

(11:12):
don't think you have to have an empirical scientific justification
for an opinion about where meaning comes from in art
or in film. Obviously, I'm a huge believer in empirical science.
I just don't think it has to pervade every domain,
Like aesthetics and art don't necessarily need scientific evidence and
theories behind them that those fields just you know, work

(11:34):
by different standards. And I think also a lot of
times if you try to generate empirical scientific justifications for
your beliefs about art or aesthetics or whatever, you're often
just gonna end up doing sloppy experiments or drawing unjustified conclusions,
even if you do a good one. Yeah. Um, like
I'm reminded, you know of the fact that obviously you

(11:56):
have a such thing. There's such a thing as outsider
art and oursider cinema. Um, and and examples of outsider
art and outsider cinema can be amazing, uh, you know.
And on the other side of things, you don't hear
as much about maybe outsider architecture, outsider structural engineering, things

(12:16):
of this nature. Outsider medicine is probably you know, best
avoided if you can, no matter how it's being dressed up. Well,
I mean, I think empirical methods are good for fields
in which you are trying to achieve very clearly specified goals,
certain kinds of outcomes and get them as reliably as possible.
And empirical methods are are less important in fields where

(12:39):
you're you're just trying to be expressive or be creative
and see what kind of emergent results come out. But
if it's like like this turns my mind to like
a b testing and focus groups used in film and television. Um.
You know, not not necessarily a bad idea at all,
especially when you're dealing again with a very mainstream product

(12:59):
you want to appeal to a you know, a wide
population of individuals. Um. But you know, there are plenty
of arguments to be made about it as a potential,
you know, sloppy experiment. As you say, perhaps one of
the best critiques of all of this is that that
episode of The Simpsons, the Itchy and Scratchy and Pucci Show,
one of my favorites. It's just an old, creaky mirror.

(13:22):
Sometimes it sounds like it's coughing or talking softly. Yes,
But anyway, to come back to uh, Prince and Henley's
description of methodological problems with the common descriptions of Kolashov's

(13:43):
alleged experiment the Masukan experiment with the neutral face and
the soup and the and the coffin and stuff. And
they list a bunch of questions, they say, quote for
such a seminal and basically uncontested study, there is virtually
no information available about Kolashov's actual method and procedure. Did he,
for example, will interview the subjects individually or in a group.
What did he tell them beforehand about the purpose of

(14:05):
the presentation, What, if anything, did he tell them about
the nature of film editing or montage. What was the
frequency of outlier opinions e g. People who did not
think Masukan was saddened by the dead woman. Published accounts
suggest the responses were uniform. Was this so? Unfortunately we
do not know the answers to any of these questions. So,

(14:27):
given these limitations, they attempt to recreate and try to
replicate as best they can the conditions of the original
experiment to see if they get the same result. So
what they did was they put together a videotape that
had some auditions for actors to produce a close up
shot of a face that was just totally neutral and

(14:47):
expression list And they had to go through a couple
of rounds because in the first round the actor's neutral
face was not perceived as neutral enough by the control group. Um.
But so so they got a neutral face on a
video and they did the same thing. They intercut it
with a woman lying in a coffin, a girl playing
with a teddy bear and a bowl of soup on

(15:08):
a table, and they tried as best they could to
follow Kolashov's cues about what what the cinematography techniques for
making this work the best would be, so it would
be UH people visible on a darkened black velvet background.
Apparently the actors were told that they just needed someone
to uh to model for an instructional video in which

(15:29):
they would be required to do an expressionless or neutral face.
So one difference is that instead of one long sequence
intercutting with all of them, they did separate sequences for
each reaction. So for example, it might go face soup,
face fade out or face coffin, face fade out, and
each shot was seven seconds long. And the separate sequences

(15:51):
make sense to me because you might get a different
reaction with some pairings than you would with others. So
viewers each saw one sequence selected at random, and they
were told that the experimenters needed help evaluating an acting performance.
And then the viewers were supposed to select from a
list of emotions that they thought were being portrayed by
the actor. Options included happiness, sadness, anger, fear, Surprise, discussed hunger,

(16:17):
no emotion, and other Apparently the participants were undergrads at
a mid Atlantic university. I'm going to assume based on
the author's affiliations, this was probably Virginia Tech. They said
that interestingly, film students were excluded from the experiments since
they might detect the connection to Kolashov and understand what

(16:37):
the experiment was getting at, which could bias results. And
in support of this decision, I mean, it seems like
a good choice either way. But to justify this decision,
they wrote about another recent attempt to replicate the Monsieur
can experiment in France among film students who allegedly gave
answers like the following quote. We know that the man

(16:58):
does not change his expression, but because of the montage,
we think we see him change or quote. We know
the Cooleshov effect and it works. And then Princeton Hensley
also had a control condition where they showed the face
to twenty four film students, this time but without any
inner cutting. They were just showing them the face by
itself and asking them what emotion it was showing for

(17:21):
the face that they actually used in the experiment. Percent
said there was no emotion on the face. So this
is a very good neutral face. You know that. That
reminds me though of of use of neutral face uh
sort of not still pictures, but just seen sequences where um,
a character and individual is staring directly into the camera. Um.
I'm thinking it's certainly about Ron fricksm Baraka, which features

(17:48):
a number of these uh sequences where you'll you'll just
have an individual from from one culture or another just
staring into the camera. Or Another example that comes to
mind is the film The Mission, where at the very
end of the film there's you who just have several
beats of one of the primary characters, uh staring into
the camera and very neutral expression. And of course you

(18:12):
have the entire film you've just watched to help uh
inform your idea of what's going through that that character's head. Um.
But but but still, it's it's a it's a great
use of neutral expression, Like he doesn't it doesn't look
particularly sad in that case, but you in you can
see sadness in the character. You know. Well, yeah, that's

(18:32):
a good example, but I think it also does raise
questions about something that's supposed to be sort of outside
the the standard interpretation of this of this experiment, which
is like, well, wait, what are the actual contents of
the face? Maybe that does matter. That's going to come
up in the author's interpretation of the results they get.
But so in the actual experiment they did, they had

(18:53):
a hundred and thirty seven participants, including the control group.
In the experimental group. In every condition, whether it was soup, coffin,
or child, the majority of people said there was no emotion.
So they saw the face that was supposedly neutral, they
saw it intercut with whatever it was, the soup or
the coffin, and they said, nope, there is no emotion

(19:13):
on this face. In the soup condition, sixty eight percent
selected no emotion. In both the child and the coffin condition,
sixty one percent said no emotion, and so comparing that
to the control group, in the control eight percent said
there was no emotion, and that dropped down to sixty
eight in the soup and sixty one in the child

(19:35):
and the coffin. So you could say this is a
small increase in perceived emotion, though the authors note that
for the size of the group they tested, it actually
doesn't reach statistical significance, so it might just be a
random fluke. Furthermore, in the cases where the viewers picked
in emotion, it was usually not the expected emotion, so
it was not happiness for the child and so forth.

(19:58):
So either way, this experiment find something somewhere between no
effect and small effect on perceived emotion, which is a
very far cry either way from Kolashev's reports about the
audience is unanimous raving about the actor's subtle emotional performances,
And so the authors say here that you know, in
less contrary evidence emerges, it seems true to say that

(20:19):
quote the Kolashov effect as reported no longer exists, even
if the effect did play a role at one time,
though emphasis there should be on as reported, because some
of the broader implications of it probably do still hold true. Now,
this raises an interesting question. If we assume, for the
sake of argument, that Kolashev was basically reporting the results

(20:41):
of his experiment accurately or with only slight exaggeration, what
could account between the difference. Why did Kolashov get people
raving about the subtle emotion in the neutral face, but
that that didn't really happen in a modern experiment? The
authors offer some ideas here, and I think they're all
pretty possible via and certainly interesting. So one would be

(21:03):
changes in audience expectation. You know, audiences today are accustomed
to highly effective editing techniques that have been perfected over time,
such as, like I mentioned earlier, the preservation of eyelines
to enforce continuity of of perspective and reverse shots. Yeah, yeah,
I think this is this is a big one. And
I mean it comes down to like some of the
basics of what we said earlier about how at least

(21:25):
for many of us and certainly for me, like trying
to watch an actual cooler show film is very difficult.
Like it's just film has come has evolved so much
since then, um, and and the effects are subtle in
a way that you really the film only has to
be even halfway competent to really just draw you in
and create the illusion. Right, So uh so the author's

(21:49):
right quote. It may be that a modern audience, by
virtue of increased media exposure relative to cool A. Shov's day,
has become accustomed to a more systematic and complex set
of associate creational cues, such as those supplied by the
continuity system of editing. And is correspondingly less likely to
respond to a montage sequence that employs a blank face

(22:10):
and minimal, if any associated cues within shots. So maybe
the bar for perceiving emotion in films has has gone up,
you know, it's just harder to do now. And at
the time the Kolashov did his experiment, allegedly maybe the
audiences were just we're just more it was easier for

(22:30):
them to project that emotion now that There could be
a number of ways to read that. One way is
is thinking about how much exposure modern audiences have to
modern editing techniques. Um the other way, I guess, and
the authors don't really favor this explanation, but they say
another way of looking at it is naivete on the
part of the early audiences. There's some kind of projection

(22:51):
going on, because maybe early film audiences were just so
bewildered by moving pictures that they almost like hallucinated projections
of emotion. And uh, the authors don't think this is
a very good explanation for one thing, because they argue
that a lot of the stories that are used to
to illustrate the sort of bewilderment of early film audiences,

(23:12):
like that, you know, the semi mythological things about the
audiences running away from the Loomi air train and stuff
that they say that I mean, there were sort of
events of this kind, but they have been mythologized in
a way that over emphasizes how naive early audiences were,
and that a lot of these kinds of reactions may
have just been audiences playing along there at the theater

(23:33):
having a good time, and they're playing along with what
the suggested reaction was supposed to be. That's true once
you especially when you're dealing with a group of people,
you know, watching watching anything with a group, even even
today with our our modern exposure to cinema, you know,
if one person jumps, everybody can jump. That sort of thing,
you know, you're more maybe you're more likely to to

(23:53):
laugh or scream if you're watching it with with other people.
That sort of thing makes me think about William Castle
and the Tingle are trying to get people screaming in
the movie theaters. Yea, yeah, which which is uh is infectious.
As I think I mentioned in that Tingler episode, I
got to see the Tingler UH in a theater and
people were totally playing into it, like it's still worked today,

(24:15):
so good. Okay. A couple of other possible explanations for
the difference between Kolashov's report and then and then they
failed attempt to replicate those findings. Another one is response bias.
So this seems quite possible to me. Maybe it was
originally a sloppy experiment. Maybe Kolashov primed his test subjects
to react the way they did and they complied. Uh.

(24:37):
You know that This is why double blind tests are
very useful. If the person administering the test doesn't know
what hypothesis is being tested, it's harder for them to
behave in a way that would bias, that would bias
the subject response in favor of it. And there is
of course extensive evidence that Kolashov was already committed to

(24:57):
his theory about the power of montage, but for he
allegedly conducted this experiment like he he already had the
result he was looking for in mind. Yeah, like the
neutral face. I keep thinking of examples now of neutral
face or very neutral or or just you know, low
key acting performances, And one that instantly comes to mind

(25:18):
is the sequence in The Godfather where al Pacino's character
is in the restaurant with uh, what is the the
corrupt police officer and Sterling Hayden and yeah, and the turk,
right is that the other character his name also it's
also um And of course what's gonna happen is he's
gonna go to the toilet, he's gonna come back with
a gun, and then he's going to shoot them both.

(25:39):
That's the plan. And there's that great sequence where you
see al Pacino's face and he's he had a very again,
very neutral expression, and I previously just always thought, well,
that's just he's just he was such a great actor
at that point in his career, Like like you can
just see the wheels turning, you can see all the
tension going on behind the scenes. But maybe not, maybe
he's just thinking about, you know what, what what he

(26:01):
needs to pick up at the grocery store later on
in the day, and it's just all about everything else
going on in the scene and how it's been put
together that could be there. They're actually a number of
shots in The Godfather in particular where they're memorable because
of al Pacino's expressionless face, like when when Carlo Ritzie
confesses at the end to having killed Sonny, and Michael

(26:22):
just looks at him with the blank expression. But you
read a lot into that blank expression. It is a
murderous blank expression. But there's another way of reading the
al Pacino example here, and also of possibly interpreting the
original Mojoukan experiment. I really like this explanation. What if
Kulashov's montage was loaded with more conventional emotional content than

(26:45):
he claimed. There could be a million ways this could
be true. But for example, what if there was something
special about the face of Majukin. What if there was
something special about the face that Kulashov used in this
supposedly neutral test film, there was less neutral than we
would be led to believe. The authors of this ninety

(27:06):
two paper note quote there is a difference between an
expressionless face and an ambiguous expression. And they started an
experience from their own experiment. They talked about how the
very first tape they created, if somebody trying to do
a neutral face had to be rejected and replaced with
a different actor because it failed to be rated as
neutral in the control condition. So that was the control

(27:29):
when there were no shots juxtaposed, the control group thought
they perceived a range of emotions in the first neutral
face they looked at, and then the author's got a
different tape, different actor, and it succeeded at being perceived
as more neutral in the original control. This is great
to point out, Yeah, the difference between a neutral face
and an ambiguous face, because obviously this is one of

(27:51):
the arguments for why the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da
vinci Is is such a an admired piece of art.
Is because you can easily read what the Mona Lisa
is um is thinking or feeling, but that she has
this ambiguous countenance, right, And the difference would be that
there there is a difference between ambiguous and neutral. Neutral

(28:13):
is something we look at and we see I I
don't see any emotion on that face. Ambiguous is you
see emotion, but it's not clear what it is. It
maybe suggests something that could go in different directions. Oh,
but then the author's come back to talking about this
more ambiguous, more emotional face that they got the first

(28:33):
time they tried to record a tape, they said quote.
When other viewers were shown this face and sequence, many
attributed a wide range of emotions to the actor, some
consistent with the coolishev effect others not. The sequence with
the soup, for example, elicited interpretations of apathy, disgust, contemplation, detachment, dislike, indifference,

(28:54):
lack of interest, as well as an occasional attribution of hunger.
The ambiguous expression see him to offer a stronger interpretive
cue for the viewer than did the expressionless face. If
cool a Chauvian montage may not be capable of making
an expressionless face emotive, it may very well do with
an ambiguous expression, since the objects like soup, coffin, or

(29:17):
child provide a context for resolving the ambiguity. And I
think this interpretation seems very likely to me because again,
the allegation is that Mozukin was a famed actor, and
so there's naturally you can imagine a famed actor's face
has something special about it's kind of brimming with with

(29:39):
the the implication of emotion, even when they're being relatively
subtle or not, you know, offering a big smile or
frown or whatever, right right that this may well have
been the sort of performer that was highly aware of
what their face is doing. That is, you know, that
is practiced in front of the mirror that knows what
they're projecting, and therefore to you know, to a certain extent,

(30:02):
might be incapable of a neutral face at least when
when when told to pull some sort of face. Right,
So if there's something to this interpretation, I would say
that that the coolest off effect, even in the specific
case of interpreting neutral faces, as you know, based on
the the editing context, it's absolutely tapping into something real,

(30:22):
but there might be like thresholds or limits, like there
is some truth to it, but it can't overcome some
truly deeply blandly neutral faces, you know, like some ambiguous
faces just offer more hooks on which to hang emotional
values created by the context. Yeah. Yeah, I also wonder

(30:44):
what would what would happen if you you took exceptional
faces and you threw them in, you know, and not
necessarily even exceptionally dashing faces, but like just exceptionally evocative faces,
like like I don't know, like a Peter Laurie. You know,
if you put Peter Laurie in there, just even you know,
even though he's gonna do you know, a new traw
ambiguous face. Uh, you know, what would happen to the
experiment of course, in that case, you'd also have to

(31:05):
not know it was Peter Lori, because then you're gonna
you're gonna start typecasting, like, oh, we know what kind
of guys this this this actor plays. Yeah, you'd be suspicious,
you'd be reading negative emotional or suspicious mind content. What
is the planning for that soup? He's going to poison
that soup? Isn't he right? Anyway? I think the authors
make the point in the end that the the broader

(31:26):
implications of the cool A show of myth that that
individual shots, which may be low on meaning or emotion
by themselves, can become highly charged with meaning by the
power of the surrounding editing. This is obviously true, and
it is largely the basis for the magic of cinema,
But the specific claim about supposedly neutral faces appears to

(31:47):
be not true, at least for some audiences or some faces.
But this raises really interesting questions like, what are the
properties of the maximally cool A show ambiguous face? You know, what,
what kind of skills would you want an actor to
have to be able to have these you know, subtle
ambiguous expressions that can be sort of driven any which way.

(32:12):
By the surrounding context, by a bowl of soup or
by a coffin. I guess, you know, I'm just guessing here,
but at the bare minimum, you need to have some
sort of like spark of attention, Like they're saying, it's
not not enough perhaps to just rely solely on the
editing to imply that there's a connection between this shot
and the other. But the person's face appears to be

(32:33):
looking with interest at something. You know, Yeah, that's that's
a good point. I mean, I think sometimes with these studies,
like the face doesn't just look neutral. It looks like
it's not seeing anything, right, Like if it's just like
mug shot and then and then pick a plate of spaghetti,
Like okay, you show me a mug shot, and you
show me some spaghetti. Maybe something that's crucial is that

(32:53):
the even if they're not showing a very clear emotion,
that it looks like they're looking at what ever is
being shown. So Princeton Henley is very interesting, but it
was by no means the last study on the cooler

(33:14):
shop effect, the last attempt to look at it empirically,
And actually since then some other studies have kind of
come back on the other side have found a little
more support for the original alleged finding. So one example
is the is the study by Dean mobs at All
from two thousand six called the Cooler Shop Effect the

(33:35):
influence of contextual framing on emotional attributions. This was in
social cognitive and effective neuroscience, and the test here was
a little bit different, but they did basically look for
the same type of effect and did succeed in producing
it experimentally. So in this case, they didn't use just
a single supposedly neutral face as the stimulus. They used

(33:58):
neutral faces and then what they call faces displaying subtly
fearful or happy facial expressions, which if you want to
look up the study you can see the stimuli they
use the yeah, they're they're play their faces that are
almost neutral. They've just got the barest little hint of
a smile or kind of an apprehensive frown. And then
they put together a task where they would actually they

(34:20):
paired it with neuroimaging in the study, so they'd have
people doing neuroimaging while they gave them the task to
look at this face and then imagine that the person
is watching a movie of various kinds. It could be
a happy movie scene or a scary movie scene. Uh.
And they did find that people were, on average more
likely to interpret neutral or only very subtle expressive faces

(34:44):
more in alignment with the emotion that you would expect
if they believed the person was watching either a scary
or a happy movie. And so it's worth noting that
there is an effect here, but it's not as shockingly
powerful and unanimous as like those original tellings of the
Cooler Show experiment would suggest. Mm hmm, yeah, this is interesting.
This is something we'll continue to look at. I also

(35:06):
like that they were looking at scary and happy movie
scenes because it also brings to mind episodes we've done
in the past on audience reactions too scary movies and
how oftentimes, like like the the reaction you have to
a pleasant movie or certainly a funny movie compared to

(35:26):
that of a scary movie. Uh, that they may be
more like than one might think. Oh yeah, because a
lot of times people laugh when something is scary. Yeah, laughing, Uh,
you know, reacting to the way that people around them
are reacting. And if you are acting frightened during a
frightening movie, it's I feel like, it's very often a
kind of excited frightening you know, that's safe kind of

(35:47):
like I am. I am afraid for the characters, but
I'm not necessarily afraid for myself. You know, I've actually
wondered before if so. A lot of my movie going
entertainment pleasure comes from watching be horror movie is essentially
as unintentional comedies and having a good time laughing laughing
along with them. But I wonder if part of that

(36:08):
grows out of a kind of defense mechanism learned in childhood,
that that I could protect myself from something scary if
I sort of forced myself to see it instead as
something funny. Yeah, I don't know. I I certainly catch
myself going like ah, more like that exact um sound
if it is say a slightly goofy or goofy monster

(36:31):
that is suddenly jumping out as opposed to a more
I don't know, effective looking special effect. Uh there's something
about I don't know, it's probably you know, all this
is highly subjective, but for me at least, uh, you know,
maybe I'm just leaning into the imagination more in those cases. Now,
just very briefly, I wanted to point out a couple

(36:52):
more studies I dug up that looked into the cooler
Shov effect more recently than this one. So there was
a study in the journal Perception in in two thousand
and sixteen by Daniel Barrett at All called does the
cool a Shov effect really exist? Revisiting a classic film
experiment on facial expressions and emotional context. So they note
some of the stuff we already did, doubts about the

(37:14):
original experiment, and then the fact that recent attempts to
reproduce the effect have had conflicting results. So they tried
it out with a group of thirty six participants who
were presented with twenty four film sequences of neutral faces
across six different emotional conditions, so trying to reproduce the
same effect, and they actually did find a correlation. It

(37:37):
may it may not have been huge, but they said
quote for each emotional condition, the participants tended to choose
the appropriate the appropriate category more frequently than alternative options,
while the answers to the valence and arousal questions also
went in the expected direction. So they did find a
mild existence of the cool A Shov effect in their

(37:57):
research here and then there was Another one by Baranowski
and Hate in UH Perception in two thousand seventeen, called
the auditory cool Ashov Effect multisensory integration and movie editing.
The study tried to see if there were any cool
a Show of type effects, not for cross cutting with
visual images, but for music. So the question is does

(38:18):
music affect what emotions people detect on other people's supposedly
neutral faces, And according to the authors of this study,
their results were yes. They found that sad music did
in fact make people more likely to rate a supposedly
neutral face as sad and vice versa. Well that that
that doesn't surprise me at all. I mean, music, especially

(38:41):
music and film, is highly manipulative at times. And uh
and I think we've all seen experiments with this sort
of amateur experiments with this online where you take, um,
Johnny cash Is cover of nine inch Nails Hurt, and
you play it in the background of virtual virtually any uh,
neutral or ambiguous footage, and you're going to get a

(39:02):
sense of like deep personal anguish and and hurt. I'm
just I'm just putting it all together in my mind
right now. I'm seeing I'm seeing clips from like happy
Gilmore or something, but with with the Johnny Cash Yeah,
to see if I still feel. And then finally one
last one there was a paper by mullinicks at All

(39:23):
from twenty nineteen in pl Os one that also looked
at the cool a Shov effect, trying to see if
it existed for still photographs instead of dynamic film sequences.
And the authors say, yes, they did the cool Ashov
type experiment, but just with still photos, and they found
there was in fact a cool Ashov type effect for
just for still images. Okay, also not surprising to me anyway.

(39:48):
So it looks like more of the recent studies into
this have found some kind of effect, though I think
sometimes the effects are, you know, the kinds of things
you're more likely to normally see in psychology experiments, kind
of modest effects rather other than the overwhelming unanimous effect
described in the the original Masoukan experiment. Now, I'd like
to take um all these points we've been hitting and

(40:10):
come back around to something that I briefly discussed, and
that was Leonardo da Vinci's famous sixteenth century painting The
Mona Lisa. One of the most intriguing aspects of this
painting is the the ultimate ambiguity of the expression. You know,
the Mona Lisa smile especially, Uh, it's a it's a
it's a it's a slight smile. It's a kind of

(40:31):
an ambiguous smile. What is she smiling about or beginning
to smile about? Um? You know there there there have
been a number of papers written about this, and I'm
certainly not going to do them all justice here, but
I wanted to touch on some findings that I think
can potentially contribute to this conversation. Now, wait, did this
originally come up in our making a distinction between neutrality

(40:53):
and ambiguity and so so that maybe you're suggesting that
the Mona Lisa's face might be one of those famous
face is that is ambiguous but not neutral? Right, it
doesn't look like a death mask. But also you know,
she's not she's not scowling, she doesn't look like Vigo
the compathion. She's not smiling ear to ear. It's a
very interesting expression, to say the least. Um that people

(41:18):
have been discussing and studying for for for decades and
for for ages. Uh So I'm not going to cover
all the studies, but there there've been there's been plenty
but I was looking at one. This was a theory
that was put forth by Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard
University UM. She argues that, UM, a lot of what

(41:43):
fascinates us about this painting is because the smile appears
differently depending on where you're standing in position to the painting.
So if you look at it with your fobial or
direct vision, uh, then arguably there's not really a smile
going on there. But if you view it from your
with your peripheral vision, out of the corner of your eye,

(42:04):
then it seems like there's a pronounced smile. Now this
doesn't This this little tidbit doesn't particularly I have a
lot to reveal about the broader topic we're discussing here,
but I found it interesting just talking about. And indeed,
it's one that you can You can pull up an
image of the Mona Lisa on your computer or your phone,
or if you have a copy hanging in your your

(42:25):
your house. You can do it this way as well,
and you'll find I think that you do get this
effect if you kind of look at out of the
corner of your eye, it seems like there's a pronounced smile.
Look at her directly and uh, it's it's not there.
I see exactly what you mean. Another interesting thing is
that my mental image of the Mona Lisa is smiling
more than the actual image seems to be when I

(42:48):
look at it. Yeah, something about the lower resolution copy
in my brain appears to have accentuated the smile. And
maybe somehow that's picking up on the kind of subtle
shade ding of the contours of her cheeks which looks
like they could be continuing the lines of her mouth,
but it's not her mouth. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I

(43:10):
think that that's that's very much it. And of course
you can get into deeper discussions of you know, to
what extent um you know this is intended and you
know what Leonardo Vinci's trying to do with this, um
Because another another aspect of the smile that's frequently brought
up is that it's um uh, it's it's not a
symmetrical smile. Um. And this is often cited as is

(43:31):
one of the key interesting aspects of the Mona Lisa's smile,
of Mona Lisa's face in general, um. Now, the emotional
impact of her expression has been much debated over the years,
and he is like like a lot of what we
discussed in part one and in this episode. It's one
of those areas where you can you can science it
all day, but you're still working with subjective art rather

(43:53):
than objective principles. But there are some papers that I
think have some revealing information based generally on you know,
small studies looking at asking people to look at the
painting or look at portions of the paintings sometimes they've
been manipulated in a key way, and see what people
have to say about it. And this is where we're getting, uh,
you know, we're getting into something that's more in line

(44:16):
with the broader topic here. When you look at the
Mona Lisa, what kind of emotional um understanding is passing
between the painting and yourself? Does it depend on what
painting is across the room from her on the other wall,
so like what you're perceiving her to be looking at.
They didn't get into that, uh as much, but I
couldn't help but think of it. I kept thinking of

(44:38):
her looking at soup and so forth. But one paper
I was looking at was a twenty nineteen paper from
Marsilli at All published in Cortex, the journal Cortex in
which the researchers asked forty two individuals to rate which
of the six basic emotions as well as a neutral
expression of emotion was related in chimerical images, uh, constructed

(45:02):
from the photos. So chimerical images in this sense are
formed from opposing halves of a pair of same or
different faces, usually in like studies in courtroom settings. But
in this case it would be like you know, um,
my understanding here is like mirroring different parts of the face,
stealing with the with the asymmetry. You know, like what
if you had side A is the and you just

(45:24):
cloned it onto side B. That sort of thing. Now,
the results in this case indicated that happiness is expressed
only on the left side of Mona Lisa's face, not
on the right. Uh. And this actually leans into the
interpretation that the Mona Lisa's smile is not a legitimate
smile at all, but a fake smile uh, something that
is either you know, a noteworthy subject of of the

(45:46):
art in and of itself, or has a more specific,
even cryptic purpose in da Vinci's art here, but and
I think potentially makes it more interesting. Peace it's not
of just a painting of a woman smiling. It's a
painting of a woman pretending to smile, yeah, faintly. This
is interesting because I know that's something I've read, and
I don't know how legitimate this is, but I've I've

(46:07):
at least read um facial expression ambiguity as one of
the features people use to detect fakeery of emotions in others.
So when people look at somebody else and they see
that their smile is asymmetrical, they're more likely to think
they're faking it, right right, um. And this is a
topic we've we've covered on the show before because you

(46:27):
get into that whole topic of of micro expressions and
reading micro expressions and uh, the the idea that that
a fake smile looks one way, but there's a more profound,
pronounced um muscle definition to a legitimate smile. And so that's,
I mean, that's on it on its own, is something
we might take into account when considering ambiguous like semi happy,

(46:52):
semi smiling, ambiguous uh images and ambiguous faces used in
one of these experiments. Now, another study I looked at
here was one from seventeen by leacci at All published
in Scientific Reports. The researchers here manipulated This one's actually
kind of funny. I think manipulated Mona Lisa's mouth curvature. Uh,

(47:16):
and studied how a range of happier and sadder face
variance influenced perceptions of her emotions. So, um, the actual
paper gets into a lot of like they bust out
some equations and math on this, but basically they're just
doing what you're imagining now, like making the smile more
pronounced or making it less pronounced. And um, they were

(47:36):
able to manipulate perception along a sadness happiness um uh spectrum,
but contended ultimately that their data indicates that the natural
Mona Lisa, at any rate, is always happy. But I
found this more telling quote observers recognize positive facial expressions
faster than negative expressions. Uh. This is not a finding,

(47:58):
but just a reality that they were discussing in in
the paper. So in other words, faces spiraling down through neutrality,
ambiguity and into other emotional states require more contemplation. Uh.
And and I'm making assumptions here, but but more nuance.
So like the like the face that's smiling ear to

(48:18):
ear or is in a you know, the vego of
the coppathion scowl. We don't have to think long and
hard about that, like what kind of emotion is this
person having about the soup. We know that they they're
either ecstatic over the soup or they just hate the
soup or something involved with the soup. We don't have
to uh to think about it much. But when you
have that that that ambiguous smile or even a slight

(48:41):
uh frown, you know, that's that's when that's when that
really makes you think, like what is this person thinking?
My my theory of mind has to maybe engage more
to try and figure it out, and then ultimately we
have to remember, I mean, one of the key things
about people's faces is that the face itself is a
communication array. So like we're trying to get information potentially

(49:02):
about that soup, right, like like that this individual might
know of that soup is good. I want to know
like what the inside track is on the soup um
or on other human beings before I myself decide how
I feel about it. I know this is sort of
besides your main point, but it also makes me think
about the strange biological contingency that one of the main

(49:23):
features of that communication arrays also the whole that soup
goes in. It's true. Do you ever think about how
weird that is? You know, didn't have to be that way,
but we just we we cram in, we cram in
nutrition and speak through the same orifice. It's weird. It's true,
it's weird, But you know, it's always a reminder that
we shouldn't try and do both at the same time.

(49:44):
But to bring it back to Koloshov, I do think
this drives home a little bit of the susceptibility of
ambiguous faces. You know that we can if the face
is ambiguous, we have to think more about it, We
have to think more about the context. But you know,
what is the relationship between um shot A and shot B, right?

(50:05):
I mean that would go along with what mobs that
all said in their background again, which is that, you know,
the broad finding of behavioral researches that people rely most
on context to interpret the faces of others when the
clarity of the facial expression is low, so that could
be ambiguity or other things maybe or maybe just like
it's hard to see, and when the clarity of the
context is high, so when there's information in the context

(50:29):
and less information in the face you reach for the context.
Thank you well anyway. I guess this all brings us
back to one of the questions posed by the Prince
in Hensley paper, which is, you know, I wonder if
certain actors are just more likely to um more likely

(50:53):
to give rise to this effect than others are. And
that again drawing on that observation that there's actually a
different ins between a neutral face and an ambiguous face.
I was trying to think of examples of actors who's
what you might call blank or neutral faces might tend
more toward expressive ambiguity rather than true neutrality. So even

(51:17):
when their face is supposedly at rest, you could look
at it and and it would seem valid to interpret
a wide range of intense emotions to them. The best
example I could think of, and I didn't pick him
just because I love him as an actor, though I do.
The best example I could think of was Toshiro Mufune,
who you might know from a cure Kua Sawa movies.

(51:37):
You know, he's the star of your Jimbo and movies
like that. I would say he is somebody who, even
when he's doing something very stoic with his face even
when his face appears to be at rest, you could
easily imagine that it is expressing a range of diametrically
opposing emotions. And Rob I I pasted in a picture
for you to look at here. That's just a portrait

(51:58):
of him. I don't think this is even from a film.
I think this might just be like a studio portrait still,
because this is one where I've seen, you know, like
that he's done autographs on and stuff. To my eye,
in this portrait, he could be happy, he could be sad,
he could be affectionate, he could be hungry, he could
be angry. All seemed totally plausible with the expression on

(52:21):
his face. And I guess this seems to correspond with
the fact that I'd say he's an actor known simultaneously
for having a highly emotionally expressive face and for often
playing kind of stoic characters. Yeah. Yeah, you think about
the especially some of the samurai type characters that he played,
it attends to be an intense stoicism to those characters.

(52:43):
Though at the same time, I mean, you think of
his the McBeth character or the equivalent of McBeth pretty
wise and Throne of Blood, you know, certainly he's you know,
there's plenty of wide eyed crazy shots in that film,
especially towards the end. But yeah, a lot of a
lot of the characters he plays, how have a certain sternness,
a certain stoic quality. Uh that that has ultimately has

(53:06):
an intense ambiguity to it, And it makes me think
about a difference that. You know, sometimes you read psychological
studies that are measuring emotions in some context, and they
measure emotions in terms of both valence and intensity, where
valence means what the emotion is, so it could be
like positive emotion or negative emotion, and intensity is how

(53:30):
strongly it is felt. Thinking about this makes me wonder
if maybe there are some people whose emotional expression naturally
tends to be high in intensity, even when the valence
is unknown or unclear, If that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah,
so I wonder if that's especially the kind of person

(53:50):
that you use a picture of, that kind of actor
trying to do a neutral face. But then you do
a Coolishov type experiment and people would be like, yes,
you know, you show them looking at the coffin, they're
very sad. You show them looking at the soup, they
are ravenous, whereas there are other actors who whose face
is just more successfully convey a blank neutrality where people

(54:13):
see it and they say, I don't think this person
is feeling anything. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good
point and to try and sort of prove it out
for our own purposes. You posted this picture of a
man in our notes, and I posted a picture of
soup next to him. And indeed, if I look at
the two and I sort of go back and forth,
if yeah, I can read, I can lean into different
interpretations like is he he is angry that the soup

(54:36):
has been served, maybe it was served too early, or
it's you know, it's clearly cold, or he just had
the soup yesterday and therefore he has uh he is
I rate? But he also could be like, yes, now
it's time to to really get into this soup. Yeah, yeah,
or or various other interpretations. You know. Weirdly, some of
the other actors I know who fit into this mold

(54:57):
are not just film actors. I mean a lot them
are film actors, but especially people who have done like modeling,
like fashion modeling or art modeling like Grace Jones comes
to mind as somebody who could have have a facial
expression that is ambiguous in valence but high in intensity. No, yeah,
I definitely, yeah, I definitely can see that with Grace Jones.

(55:21):
I was thinking, I was trying to think of good
examples of this, and uh, like my mind turned to
some actors who certainly, you know, have kind of like
a smoldering uh stare or have you know, good at
the stoic type characters are especially the sort of Joe
cool characters, you know, as I think of them, where
you know, it's like it's playing some cool, cool dude
is like a detective or something, and he's you know,

(55:43):
he's acting pretty much unfazed by everything around him. But
I think the better example I ended up turning to
is Harry Dean Stanton, who often played very you know,
very sort of emotionally muted characters. I would say, though
not Joe cool characters, you know, not not a character
or that's so far above it all that he feels
completely at ease. Oh, I think Harry Dean's potentially another

(56:05):
great example. Yeah. Yeah. And another like actually kind of
like a suite of answers that came to mind were
from the uh, the the Alien film franchise. The various
actors that you had playing androids. UM, specifically thinking of
Ian Holme, Um, Lance Hendrickson, and Michael Fassbender, all three

(56:29):
very talented actors, um but um, But in all cases
they're supposed to be playing this artificial human type of
being that has no emotions but but has an intent
and in depending on which film you're landing on, in
which particular incarnation of of the android, that intent maybe

(56:50):
um benevolent or or might lean more neutral or might
be malicious. UM. And Yeah, I don't know if i'd
go there with Ian Holme actually, because Ian Holmes seems
unusually capable of projecting absolute blank neutrality where you don't
get that that ambiguity that spins off in all the directions.

(57:11):
Like I think he would be he would be great
to have people like absolutely fail to reproduce the coolish
of results have him doing blank face. But other ones
you're saying, I agree, Yeah, so I don't. I don't know.
Like I was just thinking back on those films, and
even though these are the characters that are not supposed
to have emotional states, in some cases, I feel like

(57:33):
I have a better handle on their emotional states versus
other human characters in those pictures. Yeah, but I have
to admit I did not paste all of their photos
into our document and put them opposite soup, so I
haven't tested it myself. Oh you did put fast spender
next to soup, though, And I gotta say, he looks hungry. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he looks. He does look like he is, um, he's

(57:53):
about to dine on some soup. Can't you just imagine
a scene of him sensually teaching his twin how to
peel above or nut squash. Yeah, that would be good,
feeding each other's soup with wooden spoons. Yeah. Well, anyway,
all this is just to say, and to be fair,
maybe some studies have done this and I didn't realize it,
but it seems like maybe one good move to try

(58:15):
to avoid the the the the interactor effects of the
of the stimulus you use in Kolashov type experiments is
to just like get a whole lot of pictures of
neutral faces and then serve them up at random, and
so you can get kind of the neutral face photo
averaged out over a big population, instead of having it

(58:37):
fluctuate based on like how truly neutral your supposedly neutral
face looks. I'd be delighted to hear from listeners out
there what their thoughts are and their specific examples, uh,
from cinema and from you know, the faces of various actors.
You know, I wanted to come back to something that
which which I thought is kind of interesting about this. Uh.

(58:59):
Even if you'll accepted that the cool as show of
effect is rather modest or only applies sometimes, it is
still pretty interesting that it indicates how flexible the human
brain is at constructing artificial scenarios and still applying like
human logic to them. That like, you know, you're not

(59:20):
observing a real scenario in life where you're trying to
guess if somebody is hungry. You're looking at a photo
or you're looking at an image on a on a screen,
and then it's being intercut with a you know, a
coffin that they might be sad at, or a just
a picture of soup or something, and we we start
applying the same logic we apply to real life to
these obviously artificial stimuli. Yeah. Yeah, And I think it's

(59:45):
a great reminder of just how film works and and
and other mediums of virab but especially film, how you
know there they still require a viewer. And if there's
not a viewer, uh, there's not a movie go or
there's no film experience, since therefore there's no film, and
so there's no matter how polished the thing on the
screen is, there's something that takes place not only between

(01:00:09):
the film and the viewer, but inside the viewer's mind.
That's that's critical, and that a lot of times we
don't notice how many gaps were filling in as film viewers, Like, Yeah,
you don't realize how much work you're doing, and it's
work that is apparently pretty easy to do. It's just
something we we tend to do pretty much automatically while
we're watching movies is fill in those gaps of logic,

(01:00:31):
make connections between one image and another, make assumptions about
what's going on in an actor's head when they're portrayed
on screen based on the context or the music, you know,
what was shown just before after. But it's one of
those things where it gets pretty weird when you start
to notice all of those like assumptions you're having to
make and mental work you're having to do for a

(01:00:52):
movie to make sense, which in reality is a flickering
succession of moving images, which you know, sometimes if you
were to be very literal roll about them, are are
totally unconnected. Like you see like a staircase that's from
one state and then a house that's from another, and
then somebody's coming in through a front door, and you
just connect it all is this is all in the
same place, persons just moving through their their daily routine. Yeah.

(01:01:15):
We often think of of viewing films and watching TV
programs as being kind of a shut your brain off
kind of a situation, at least with certain types of
of film and TV. And you know, we think that, Okay,
if it's a it's a highly crafted product, we're not
gonna have to mainstream product, we're not gonna have to
do much thinking. It's gonna hold our hand the whole way.
But but yeah, even even in the case if you're

(01:01:37):
sort of you know, by the numbers summer Blockbuster, uh,
you know, very much repeating a plot you've seen before,
with the sort of characters you've seen before, your brain
is still filling in these little gaps, like you say.
But on the same hand, I think one one thing
we can drive home based on what we've been discussing
here is that that the opposite, uh, in a way
is true, is that if you're dealing with a film

(01:01:59):
that's say, is uh, you know of a of a
genre you're not that familiar with, or a time period
of filmmaking and out of familiar with. Um, perhaps it's
a you know, more more of an art film, or
it's you know, foreign language, etcetera. A lot of it
is still going to come down to human or humanoid
entities interacting with things in each other, and then our

(01:02:21):
brain is going to make presumptions about their mental state
and their emotional state. Oh yeah, yeah, you you infer
drama even when the thing you're looking at is almost
actively resisting it, and that that goes beyond movies. In fact,
I mean what is drama. Drama is somebody wanting something
or trying to get something and then coming up against

(01:02:41):
resistance in some way. Uh. People infer those kinds of
dramas on like balls rolling around on the table. They're
literally studies of that. You know, people will say, like
the ball wanted to go down in this hole, but
it you know, it couldn't get there because something was
preventing it. All Right, we're gonna go ahead and close
it out there, but we would love to hear from

(01:03:03):
everybody if you have particular thoughts on the clue Shov effect.
Various examples and studies we've discussed in these episodes. Uh,
some of the various examples from film and acting that
we have alluded to. Perhaps you have some better examples
that you would like to bring to our attention. Just
write in and let us know. In the meantime, if

(01:03:25):
you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, check it out in this Stuff
to Blow your Mind podcast feed. You'll find that wherever
you get your podcasts. We have core episodes on Tuesday
and Thursday. We have a listener mail on Monday, short
form artifact episode on Wednesday, and on Friday we do
Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most
serious matters and just discuss a weird film. Um. If

(01:03:48):
you want a quick way to get to our podcast,
you can just go to Stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. That should still redirect you over to the
I heart listing for our page. Huge thanks as always
to our excellent audio producers Seth and Pollis Johnson. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello. You
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your

(01:04:10):
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listening to your favorite shows.