Sleep is a complex physiologic state, the importance of which has long been recognized. Lack of sleep is detrimental to humans and animals. Over the past decade, an important link between sleep and cognitive processing has been established. Sleep plays an important role in consolidation of different types of memory and contributes to insightful, inferential thinking. While the mechanism by which memories are processed in sleep remains unknown, several experimental models have been proposed. This article explores the link between sleep and cognition by reviewing (1) the effects of sleep deprivation on cognition, (2) the influence of sleep on consolidation of declarative and non-declarative memory, and (3) some proposed models of how sleep facilitates memory consolidation in sleep. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sleep and cognition - WIREs Cognitive Science

Posted 2 weeks ago

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What I envied were what his talent and success had bestowed on him, a sense of the rightness of what he was doing. I wanted what women always want: permission. But he’d had that before this book was even written; it was, after all, the first thing I’d envied about him. It was arguably what enabled him to write the book in the first place.

Envy | Books | The Observer

Posted 2 weeks ago

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Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.” - Andrei Tarkovsky

The Films Of Jia Zhang-Ke (Part 1/2) « The Seventh Art

Posted 1 month ago

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This is one of the suggestions I make to directors: if you think of sound when you’re writing the script, then you’ve really integrated it into your movie. It’s easy to do that since sound is so suggestive and so capable of creating imagery. It’s also a lot cheaper than a complicated shot; not that you can replace a complicated shot, but it’s really best to integrate sound in the beginning. When Pudovkin found out about talking pictures, he said it would be the end of cinema. He thought films would become theatrical. In a way, he’s right, in that that’s a very normal use of sound: to take dialogue and make a stageplay, not have anything going off in a different direction…. I think what happens with Gus’s films and other films we talked about is that you take a sound that’s a complete juxtaposition of what’s going on in the image and it forces you to listen — you have to look to the sound for the cues of what’s going on. Even if the sound doesn’t give you a specific direction, it gives you a sort of broader experience than if it was just the dialogue being repeated over and over again. I think that filmmakers are having trouble making this break. They think of film as a visual medium. I’ve worked with a director recently who said, “I want a soundtrack like Elephant.” I said, “Fine, but you gotta be ready for what that means.” This was a studio film, and I thought, the studio isn’t going to go for this. Sure enough, they didn’t.

FIPRESCI - Undercurrent - # 1 - Sound Auteur

Posted 1 month ago

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The true motivation for Malick’s fascination with The New World lies in his intellectually based insistence that human personalities and behaviors are phenomena no less “natural” than the environments (invariably far from the “normal” terrains of industrialized civilization) that surround them in his films. The New World affords Malick a perfect opportunity to examine contrasts between the Romanticist notion of a timeless “harmony with nature,” represented by Native American society, and the post-Enlightenment ideal of instrumentally taming and harnessing nature to accomplish humanly determined goals, as the English colonists do. Malick doesn’t just ponder the contradiction between “harmonizing with” and “prevailing over” nature, moreover. He explores it within the very fabric of his film, testing whether cinema itself can function as an organic part of the natural world. He thus questions the widely held assumption (articulated most forcefully by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1960 book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality) that film’s essential purpose is to capture and record reality (therefore “dominating” nature) rather than to blend with reality in a seamless, harmonious whole. This assumption has been questioned by filmic philosophers in the past, including the hugely influential André Bazin, who argued in the 1940s that material objects are physically linked with their photographed images by the particles of light that travel between them when a picture is taken. This doesn’t apply to computer-driven techniques, of course, and it’s revealing that Malick bucks the contemporary trend toward heavy use of digital imagery by using it only once in The New World — to show a Carolina parakeet that couldn’t be filmed “live” because its species is now extinct.

FIPRESCI - Undercurrent - #2 - Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick

Posted 1 month ago

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The true motivation for Malick’s fascination with The New World lies in his intellectually based insistence that human personalities and behaviors are phenomena no less “natural” than the environments (invariably far from the “normal” terrains of industrialized civilization) that surround them in his films. The New World affords Malick a perfect opportunity to examine contrasts between the Romanticist notion of a timeless “harmony with nature,” represented by Native American society, and the post-Enlightenment ideal of instrumentally taming and harnessing nature to accomplish humanly determined goals, as the English colonists do. Malick doesn’t just ponder the contradiction between “harmonizing with” and “prevailing over” nature, moreover. He explores it within the very fabric of his film, testing whether cinema itself can function as an organic part of the natural world. He thus questions the widely held assumption (articulated most forcefully by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1960 book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality) that film’s essential purpose is to capture and record reality (therefore “dominating” nature) rather than to blend with reality in a seamless, harmonious whole. This assumption has been questioned by filmic philosophers in the past, including the hugely influential André Bazin, who argued in the 1940s that material objects are physically linked with their photographed images by the particles of light that travel between them when a picture is taken. This doesn’t apply to computer-driven techniques, of course, and it’s revealing that Malick bucks the contemporary trend toward heavy use of digital imagery by using it only once in The New World — to show a Carolina parakeet that couldn’t be filmed “live” because its species is now extinct.

FIPRESCI - Undercurrent - #2 - Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick

Posted 1 month ago

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This lengthy exposition gives some indication of the novelistic complexity of A One and a Two…, but it barely covers the first hour of its near-three-hour running time. Though the film is packed with incident, it’s mostly of the everyday, emotional variety. Scenes are often viewed at a distance, through windows, half-closed doors, slender openings, in reflections or even from way off. Ting-Ting’s balcony scene, for instance (which happens during the credits), contains just three set-ups. Ting-Ting, while taking the first bag of rubbish out, has just seen Lili meet Fatty by the rubbish bins. From a slightly angled mid-shot of the whole balcony we see Ting-Ting come outside where she drops small rubbish bags into a larger sack. The first cut goes to a full-on long shot of the neighbour’s window, which is at a right angle to the balcony, with a huge motorway overpass system in the background. Lili’s mother opens the window (on the day she’s just moved in) to get a better reception on her mobile phone. The second cut is to a very long shot from the balcony’s POV of Lili and Fatty below, tiny in the distance, embracing beneath the flyover. The third cut returns to the first position, where we see Ting-Ting on the balcony gazing down. Then her father’s voice calls her from within and she forgets the sack. What’s effective about this simple scene is that not only do you get a sense of the neighbour’s neglect of her daughter Lili, but that Ting-Ting’s switch from doing the chores to contemplating the romantic attachment is more of a revelation because it’s divided into separate images, with the moment she notices the couple left off screen. Yang’s script structures insist on such quiet revelation. Each scene peels off like the skin of an onion, giving away only so much at a time. When you get to the core you feel as if you know precisely what it’s like to live in the Jians’ seemingly average Taipei apartment block. As a former engineer and one-time prize-winning cartoonist, Yang prefers to produce scripts of careful shot descriptions backed by comprehensive psychological character profiles, using collaborators to turn these into the conventional screenplays producers need to raise money. The script’s architecture is so strong you feel you understand how each compartmentalised life fits with the others and the way each character achieves a means of escape back into the personal when necessary. Yang keeps sympathy with everyone, without judgement. For instance, though A-Di is shown to be the antithesis of NJ, he is at least a man of action. He makes things happen, even if they are mostly ill thought-out, and the chaos in his wake is churned up with the best intentions.

BFI | Sight & Sound | Emotional Engineering

Posted 1 month ago

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Earlier in the film, Yang-Yang gives his uncle, A-Di, a picture of the back of his head, telling him, “You can’t see it, so I’m helping you.” Yang-Yang, as the artist, reveals the blind spots of others, and shows them what they heretofore have been unable to see. Edward Yang also engages in a similar task in Yi Yi, and showing his audience the Jian family coming together is a revelation of just how far apart they have grown, and how great the need is for artists to show us what we are too blind to see about our own lives. It is only through Yang’s masterful framing in Yi Yi that his spectators are provided with the necessary space, the ability to see the harsh beauty of time’s passage, in all its speed and relentlessness. Yang’s ability to show us the world afresh by virtue of his masterful framing and mise en scène cements his position as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.

Edward Yang

Posted 1 month ago

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The following June, Rothko and his family again traveled to Europe. While on the SS Independence he disclosed to John Fischer, publisher of Harper’s, that his true intention for the Seagram murals was to paint “something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room. If the restaurant would refuse to put up my murals, that would be the ultimate compliment. But they won’t. People can stand anything these days.

Mark Rothko - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted 1 month ago

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