Styles of Filmmaking And Brain Activity: Responding To Hitch And Leone

[Noodles_SlowStir]

I came across an article about researchers combining neuroscience and film studies.  It summarizes a study by NYU neuroscientists analyzing how different styles and aesthetics of filmmaking affect and engage regions of the brain of viewers.

In the study, the participants were shown a 30 minute segment from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode (Bang! You’re Dead), a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode and a random 10 minute clip of a concert in New York’s Washington Square Park (as a sample of unstructured reality).  While the participants viewed the clips, the scientists used two methods in their research.  The first being a form of MRI to analyze and study activity in the brain.  The other method is called inter-subject correlation analysis or ISC to measure and compare brain activity amongst viewer participants.  They found that there was a greater percentage of shared activity or ISC, in the neocortex (the region responsible for cognition and perception) and other regions of the brain, amongst the participants while watching the Hitchcock program and GBU.  Hitchcock and Leone were able to stimulate a greater percentage of similar responses in the viewers (Hitchcock rated highest on their ISC scale), possibly suggesting that their filmmaking styles achieve a greater control over brain activity and their viewers.

In the detailed study, researchers also measured eye movement and glances.  They found a high level of shared visual responses among study participants when watching the GBU segment.  For example, the researchers were able to quantify how successful Leone was with his framing to direct the vision of viewers toward specific parts of the screen. The researchers also talk about the results and discuss how it could relate to the Bazin/Eisenstein debate of realistic cinema versus structured cinema.  I found that part of the article interesting.  It seemed to be an important component of how they set up their study; the selections of clips and part of the reason why they chose their video samples.

 It would of been interesting if they had also included in their study a segment from a popular recent film which was deficient in story and character development and filled with special effects.....to see how it contrasted to the viewer results for Hitchcock and Leone.

I had seen the article sometime last month, and found variations of it in quite a few places, so perhaps some have seen it.  If not, and interested....here is a link. (Or, if you’ve seen one of the summary articles, and interested...check out the last link)

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/110376.php

similar article in pdf form as it appears in an NYU newspaper
http://www.nyu.edu/nyutoday/pdf/1213723593.pdf            

If you’ve seen one of the articles somewhere, perhaps the original study results would be of interest.  Recently, I found a pdf of the study results in the referenced article in Projections:The Journal For Movies And Mind.  At times the study is clinically detailed with scientific terminology.... brain physiology, but I think overall a good portion is still quite readable and interesting.  It goes into greater detail about their research and findings (responses to editing, responses to audio and visual aspects of film). 
 
http://www.cns.nyu.edu/labs/heegerlab/content/publications/Hasson-Projections2008.pdf

[dave jenkins]

This is an interesting study, and its findings are naturally preliminary, but it does cause me to wonder a few things. First, had any of the subjects ever seen GBU before? Hopefully, that was controlled for, either by making sure all had never seen it before, or all had (ideally, you'd run two different groups, new viewer and old viewers, and compare responses). The other thing I'd like to know is, what happens to viewer responses after repeated viewings of the same material. Do responses alter as the viewers become more familiar with the film, and if they do, do they alter in the same way?

[Noodles_SlowStir]

I found the research interesting as well.  I definitely didn’t absorb everything.  It does get detailed at times. My interest was definitely captured by the fact that in their selections they chose Leone and Hitchcock.  I was very curious to understand the basis for their selections.  I found the articles made me think more about the styles of Hitchcock and Leone.  Particularly when they were framing the discussion of the results with the Bazin vs Eisenstein debate.   

I think the other thing that appealed to me was how their scientific approach highlights the differences and similarities in how individuals experience a film.  As individual film goers we have our own unique preferences and tastes.  There are differences in how we think, analyze and understand a film.  Yet despite this, physically, there are similarities we share in the sensory and even cognitive areas of experiencing a film.
 
I think you raise a lot of good questions.  I didn’t see anywhere in that detailed article where they discussed whether the participants had seen the films or clips before.  The only thing it did say was that the study group consisted of college students (similar age group-young) and it was 50% male, 50% female and 30% minority. They admit they “ignored individual and inter-group differences”. In the conclusion they do consider that gender, ethnicity and cultural differences could be variables in the data and should be investigated in future research.  Also stating that research in this area could allow researchers to obtain a greater understanding of responses by specific groups which could be helpful to the film industry.  They also say that the participants were “all experienced film viewers, and overall should perceive and interpret this particular set of films in a similar way”.  Leads me to think that they were not just a random sampling of students taken from the NYU student body.  They were most likely NYU film studies students and there would be a strong likelihood many would of been familiar with GBU.

The only place where I saw mention of effects of repeat viewings was the section where they talked about editing (From Single Shots to Juxtaposition of Shots to Coherent Movie Sequences, pg 10).  They omitted the details of the results in that part of the study.  That discussion is more a study of “temporal coherency” and analyzing activity in particular regions of the brain when the participants view variations of a film segment in which the sequence of shots has been randomly shuffled to varying degrees. But I don’t think that meets your question head on.  If you think about it on a personal level, rewatching a film that you know very well (almost committed to memory), I find sometimes my thoughts or attention can drift from a scene because I’ve seen it so often.  I think you’re right, it would be interesting to quantify that with their research tools.

[Noodles_SlowStir]

I've seen another batch of articles and stories on the research being conducted at NYU.  U.S. News And World Report had a write up in the last week and a half or so.  This article spotlights the NYU research and the thoughts of researcher Uri Hasson.  Some of the other new issues it raises are...how the MRI process in the isolation tube during the study could be cumbersome and an unnatural environment for film viewing.  From there it takes the opportunity to discuss another marketing company, Neurofocus, which has a different approach (electrodes and EEG instead of MRI) but the same type of objectives.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/technology/2008/08/22/hollywood-gets-inside-the-minds-of-moviegoers.html?PageNr=1

To control or not control

Not all visual sequences have such a high level of control over our brains. When viewers watched 10 minutes of people coming and going in Washington Square Park on NYU's campus, people's brain scans and eye movements fell all over the map.

"You can think of it as real life, or the most boring movie ever," Hasson joked.

However, Hasson pointed out that some independent or art film directors might not want to cause a similar response in moviegoer's brains.

"They like to leave things open-ended and ambiguous for different kinds of feelings, so if director sees a strong correlation, maybe he or she thinks they failed," Hasson told LiveScience. "But then if you think about other movies, they don't leave anything open. They want to control as much of the brain as possible."

Such research does not answer the question of whether greater control over the brain means that a movie is better. But many directors clearly pride themselves on the way that their movies uniquely shape a viewer's emotional and cognitive experience in the movie theater.

This part of the article caught my eye.  I think it was one of the things that appealed to me in the earlier articles about the selection of Leone and Hitchcock.  I thought it was interesting that two European directors were chosen.  Both directors went through journeys of finding their styles and unique voice in film possibly somewhere between European filmmaking and Hollywood.  With SL, he knew that he wanted no part of continuing in the Neorealist tradition.  His cinema rates high in the control index of their research results.  His style of framing, slow camera and pace, sound, use of music, extreme close ups in contrast to long shots of landscape and characters within them...all contribute to his "controlling" style of filmmaking.  Yet one can't put him totally in that camp.  He's a hybrid.  He also includes in his films the ambiguity talked about in reference to independent, art films and realist filmmaking like Neorealist films.  He was concerned about not making the same predictable stories.  Besides unexpected plot twists and subverting material at times, his stories can be open and  interpreted on multi levels which would seem to allign him with his European filmmaking roots.   

[dave jenkins]

I wouldn't call Hitchcock a European director. He started out that way, but immigrated, and his mature work is clearly in the Hollywood mold.