Sharper Film Quotes

OUR ABILITY TO RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR THINGS At first glance our ability to recognize familiar things may not seem so unusual, but brain researchers have long realized it is quite a complex ability. For example, the absolute certainty we feel when we spot a familiar face in a crowd of several hundred people is not just a subjective emotion, but appears to be caused by an extremely fast and reliable form of information processing in our brain. In a 1970 article in the British science magazine Nature, physicist Pieter van Heerden proposed that a type of holography known as recognition holography offers a way of understanding this ability. * In recognition holography a holographic image of an object is recorded in the usual manner, save that the laser beam is bounced off a special kind of mirror known as a focusing mirror before it is allowed to strike the unexposed film. If a second object, similar but not identical * Van Heerden, a researcher at the Polaroid Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, actually proposed his own version of a holographic theory of memory in 1963, but his work went relatively unnoticed. to the first, is bathed in laser light and the light is bounced off the mirror and onto the film after it has been developed, a bright point of light will appear on the film. The brighter and sharper the point of light the greater the degree of similarity between the first and second objects. If the two objects are completely dissimilar, no point of light will appear. By placing a light-sensitive photocell behind the holographic film, one can actually use the setup as a mechanical recognition system.7 A similar technique known as interference holography may also explain how we can recognize both the familiar and unfamiliar features of an image such as the face of someone we have not seen for many years. In this technique an object is viewed through a piece of holographic film containing its image. When this is done, any feature of the object that has changed since its image was originally recorded will reflect light differently. An individual looking through the film is instantly aware of both how the object has changed and how it has remained the same. The technique is so sensitive that even the pressure of a finger on a block of granite shows up immediately, and the process has been found to have practical applications in the materials testing industry.

For them that evening war wasn’t politics or geography or the mobilisation of forces. It was, as they entered their houses, a special diffidence in the eyes of some of their women. It was a sharper etching of objects around them, as if a film had been scraped from their eyeballs. It was how the kettle was a comfort, the battered chair luxurious, the collapsing of a coal-husk in the fire inexpressibly elegiac.

There are two myths about Hollywood censorship, both the result of wishful thinking. The first is that the censors were predominantly concerned with the way things were expressed; therefore, all one had to do to circumvent censorship was to come up with subtle ways of saying the same things one might expressed overtly. Some have even suggested that censorship made filmmakers sharper. The second myth is that the censors were stupid, that their witlessness made it easy for shrewd filmmakers to slip things by them. Neither could be farther from the truth. Though the Production Code administrators brooked no lewdness or nudity, their main goal was to censor ideas. The censors were absolutely fixated on the messages movies transmitted.

Frowning in concentration, the three of them looked closer. Suddenly, the image came into much sharper focus. Brian stood in an old-fashioned basement, one with a high-bricked ceiling and an earthen floor. In an instant Min knew exactly where he was filming, because everybody knew about the most haunted house in Indiana, especially Min, who lived two short blocks away. She’d grown up hearing the stories: ghost children who ran through hallways, throwing pebbles—three at a time—at anyone who dared to come inside. Whispers of a man who haunted its empty windows, his withered skin as white as bone. Tattered curtains moved by the curl of a skeletal finger. Everyone called that house the Scary Place.