Besides watching Republicans try to dismantle Obama’s medical-care bill and prevent gays from serving openly in the armed forces, you’ll find two items of note in today’s New York Times.
The first is a short video of critic A. O. Scott touting Yasojiru Ozu’s movie Tokyo Story (1953). It was a delight to once again see scenes from this masterpiece. I hold Tokyo Story (and I can’t separate it from the other two films in Ozu’s “Noriko Trilogy“), along with Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), as the greatest of all Japanese films, and among the top ten foreign films of all time. Hell—maybe the top ten of all films. If you have Netflix, and don’t require chase-’em or action movies, by all means rent Tokyo Story or Ikiru. You won’t regret it.
A brief scene from each movie, including the final scene from Ikiru that always makes me blubber—and then try to hide it as I leave the theater:
And, returning to science—for we know that scientists have no appreciation for the arts—Carl Zimmer has a nice report on new studies of consciousness suggesting that it’s simply the agglomoration of bits of neuronal information.
I loved/hated Ikuru. It was a great movie, don’t get me wrong. Possibly one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen.
But it hurt to watch it. I could not shut off the empathy-triggers and I ended up an emotional basket case…
I think the best movies are those that turn you into an emotional basket case!
And you just made me go buy “Ikiru” and two other early Kurosawa films. I’ll be looking forward to watching it! Thanks for the tip.
I’m not quite sure about the emotional basket case thing. Sometimes I can become ridiculously moved by films that are obviously manipulative (My compatriot Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark” for instance. I really didn’t like it, but were still teary in the end. Irritating.) On the other hand I love being “swallowed” by a plot/by characters/by a mood and have that strange feeling that the film is more real than reality … for a short while.
I have to say that I have seen more of the arts than I ever expected on your blog: opera, literature, visual arts, all right here on a science blog. I’m getting a well rounded education here. Thanks!
The bizarre canard that scientists somehow don’t appreciate the arts is crazy. I guess it’s part of an overall effort by apologists and their ilk to paint scientists as unfeeling automatons, or to paint science itself as something that corrupts the mind’s capacity for aesthetic appreciation. It’s a nasty little slander, when you think about it.
Good to see that rag occasionally still carries interesting news.
Oh yeah. My top Kurasawa as well, with High and Low a close second. I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere (nor have I looked really)but I’d be willing to bet that Ikura was somewhat of a parody on Frank Capra’s thematic style, just as High and Low references Hitchcock heavily. That last scene in Ikura though…Man I can’t even THINK about it without…you know….
Sir Coyne…If you do not know this film, please correct ASAP. “Good Morning”. Japanese, 1960. One of the most charming movies I’ve ever seen. Also “Onibaba” same year (I think)…completely different from each other, but wow!
A hypothesis:
1. The more highly educated a person, the more likely they will have greater exposure to literature and the arts.
2. On average, the greater exposure to literature and the arts, the greater the appreciation for literature and the arts.
3. Scientists are, on average, more highly educated than the general population.
4. Therefore, scientists will have, on average, a greater appreciation for literature and the arts.
Testable!
Survey a representative segment of the population on appreciation of literature/arts. Survey scientists.
Compare by educational level attained. Scientists will have a heavy rightward bias (horizontal axis) in education compared to the general population. (I would think it non-controversial to declare that very few working scientists are high school drop-outs.)
Will their appreciation of literature arts show a similar bias? Will it compare favorably or unfavorably with those of similar educational attainment? With the general public?
I’m giving someone a dissertation thesis, probably.
All you have to do is agree on a metric for what qualifies as “appreciative” of literature and the arts. And define those terms, too.
Tough, but do-able, no?
Totally testable. You could also do a study that looks for the number of literary/art/film references in essays or other writing by scientists compared to the number of such references in essays or other writings of non-scientist journalists or writers or bloggers. Or literary references in science books written for the lay person versus business books written for the layman.
Very solid hypothesis, Mr. Kevin:))
These Japanese movies, including the quintessentially Japanese movies of Ozu are indeed brilliant. It is interesting how in one and the same country great creativity often appears through many individuals and then fades away…
It didn’t fade away–the available genre just broadened. Miyazaki’s animated films are some of the best films I’ve ever seen, animated or no (Tonari no Totoro makes me blubber, but mommy hormones were at play there…)
I have known many scientists who were accomplished musicians, writers, and artists. I must agree that educational level should correlate with artistic appreciation/achievement. The stereotypic nerdy scientist is actually the exception, rather than the rule, in my experience.
And I agree, Ikiru is a great film (better than 7 Samuri, for instance) that really draws the emotion out of you- even from a scientist!
Another news pick is from the BBC reporting on a modelling study showing a plausible meterological/oceanographic explanation for the parting of the Red Sea:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11383620
The paper has some competing interests that I’ve never seen before!:
“The lead author has a web site, theistic-evolution.com, that addresses Christian faith and biological evolution. The Red Sea crossing is mentioned there briefly. The present study treats the Exodus 14 narrative as an interesting and ancient story of uncertain origin.”
Thanks, I spewed some coffee when I opened my science refs earlier today.
[And to think this week started so great, with finding out that I’ve missed the earlier success this spring in using (massive gene) phylogenetic methods to tree the entire ToL including bacteria, despite earlier concerns of HGT on average at least ~ 1 time/gene somewhere. And having Phobos as a now much better tested Mars impact ejecta assemblage (phyllosilicates (!) among many other characteristics) making it a cousin to our own Moon, and so the Earth less and less unique.]
I can’t decide if PLoS ONE continues to be the most insane part in persisting to publish christian “science”, or if Drews is: the “theistic evolution” site is labeled “Theistic Evolution – Faith and Science are Compatible” and it starts out with:
Yeah. As a non-superstitious person, I think I skip the whole ‘science’ apologist part, thanks. “Salvation and Eternal Life” wasn’t part of my biology textbooks.
Oh great! I will call information hypotheses of classical systems “information woo” analogous to using “quantum woo” mechanics on them. It is a spurious analogy to take Shannon information, which is about error rates in a channel, as a physical measure of “surprisal” or “entropy”. The first is, like information, a relative character of a system, the later lack physical dimension.
That autocorrelation of neuronal models in vitro (neuronal tissue) or in silico (neuronal nets) show a tendency to self-organized criticality is nothing new. Coincidentally it goes back to the physical system character channel transmission and not “information”: this is what you would expect from a system where neurons function is on average to reliably transmit a stable and useful signal a long way over a net without attenuation or amplification. And as such it is an absolute character!
As the paper shows, this neatly predicts Tononi’s results, such as why “removal of inhibition to increase propagation in the neuronal network … results in epileptic activity”. Epileptic activity inhibits natural signal transfer.
Tononi’s picture of a brain as integrated distributed “mutual information” and of consciousness as the same (so what is the difference; “patterns of cortical activation”, how and why?) is a static one, not predicting what actually emerges dynamically already in the basic level of activity in neuronal tissue.
“The first is, like information, a relative character of a system”
More critical here, information can be defined for channel transmission and the rest of the system both. (The later as algorithmic complexity.)
“Surprisal” inveigles itself in the channel model and its measure but is actually a measure on the rest of the system. That there is an actual physical correlate is the spurious assumption.
I don’t remember that being the final scene of Ikiru. I thought that was about half way through and then it cuts to the flashback scenes.
But like DeSica’s Shoeshine (another movie that turns me into a blubbering idiot) it’s a highly emotional movie. They don’t make them like this anymore and probably can’t without avoiding crass manipulation or sentimentality.
I’m pretty sure it’s the last scene.
Dr. Tononi’s work sounds interesting. I’d be extremely skeptical about future work with Laureys in Belgium though; I still suspect Laureys is a charlatan thanks to his involvement with that “facilitated communication” scam not too long ago.
Why are they so hostile to gays in the army? Don’t they know that among others the Spartans, one of the greatest warrior societies, thought it was absolutely necessary? There is what looks like an interesting book on the topic by Professor Richard Burg of Arizona University, Gay Warriors.
I think – having lived in Japan for 37 years (well over half my life) and having written a fair bit about the Japanese arts – is that perhaps the greatest strength of these arts is an extraordinary, rapt, unsentimental quality of attention to things: you see this in Ozu’s films, in the best of Kurosawa’s films, in the paintings and prints of Sesshu, Hasegawa Tohaku, Ike no Taiga (a wonderful humourist), Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro (the most erotic of all painters), and – a more modern painter who was admired by David Hockney – Fukuda Heihachiro; and, yes, Yokohamamama, in the splendid ‘anime’ films of Miyazaki Hayao, of which, like you, I am a huge fan (especially of ‘Totoro’, ‘Mononokehime’ (‘Princess Monoke’) and ‘Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi’ (‘Spirited Away’). If you can find it, Jerry (if I may) and Yokohamamama, try to watch the film ‘Doro no kawa’ (‘River of Mud’ or ‘Muddy River’) whose director I can’t remember off-hand but which won the Silver Medal at – I think – the Moscow Film Festival back in the eighties. It is a wonderfully observed and delicate film about the friendship that grows (and then is destroyed) between two small boys just after the war.
This quality of observation (you find it in Japanese literature, too: particularly in the poetry) does, I think, have quite a bit to do with the disciplined attention to things that is prescribed in certain kinds of Buddhism (though definitely not in the appalling neo-Buddhist cult of Soka Gakkai, with its ‘Great Leader’, Ikeda Daisaku, who is pictured in subway advertisements every week receiving honorary doctorates from cynical or hard-strapped non-Japanese universities to whom he has donated cash, and lots of it).
And all the above is not for one minute to suggest that the Japanese are not capable of the most saccarhine sentimentality; regrettably they are, as all nations are.
They do saccharine sentimentality awfully well, though. I routinely cry at Doraemon:))
What Ozu does so well, and Miayzaki and Kurosawa and others, is what Jane Austen also did well, which is to take a thin slice of life and put it under a microscope to observe what would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. I’m not suprised that Dr. Coyne would be attracted to a film that does artistically what he does scientifically.
(Mr. Harris–thank you! I’ll look for Doro no Kawa. Somehow it seems I’ve heard that title, but can’t place it. Have you seen Takahata Isao’s Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies)? Another animated film that hardly ought to be put in the same category as Disney stuff. It’s a great film that happens to be drawn; a piece of art that happens to be moving. O-susume!)
Yes, ‘The Grave of the Fireflies’ is a wonderful and heart-rending film. But early Disney! Before they got too famous! Things like Pinocchio are so good – but I don’t think Disney would dare make anything so close to the bone nowadays, regrettably.
Sorry: I see you said ‘hardly ought’ not ‘ought’; but some early Disney is definitely good, I think. The stuff they’ve been churning out for the past few decades, though…
…stinks. And Americans tend to lump all animation together under the “children’s” rubric. I guess I’m spoiled over here, being able to watch great animation on tv nearly every night of the week:))
Snow White is the only Disney to do light and shadows well. Maybe Bambi–and I *do* cry at that, it’s the only Disney film that’s “close to the bone.”
And this quality of acute attention to the appearance of things in the Japanese arts is well brought out in that book I mentioned in another post, the English potter Edmund de Waal’s wonderful ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’, which is about the fate of a netsuke collection owned by his Jewish forebears.
Pine-trees in Mist
(after the pair of six-fold
screens by Hasegawa Tohaku)
What conceals, reveals depths drawn
open by trees, half-hidden trunks
plunged in mist. They thrust from it,
the unfigured bass, rise to the abrupt
clarity of pine-needles that declare
no more than themselves in air.
“…this quality of acute attention to the appearance of things…”, which is belied by the extreme simplicity of Japanese things, be it a room, a bowl, a screen, a garden or a building.
Wonderful poem–that’s just it, isn’t it. Ozu’s films are like that–the simplest of stories which are no more than themselves, yet we are suprised by the depths they can reveal.
Mr. Harris, did you write that poem?
Yes. Years ago.
It’s evocative and beautiful–thank you for sharing it.
Ozu and Kurosawa. In that order for me – I think. Tokyo Story, Late Spring and Ikiru would all be in my top ten films. All of them produce an authentic emotional reaction from me, despite repeated viewings. As you do accept book reccomendations, could I mention two books by Donald Richie: Ozu and The Films of Akira Kurosawa.
The Ozu book is especially wonderful – full of analysis and anecdotes.
“for we know that scientists have no appreciation for the arts”.
That’s humourous, right? Most scientists I know actually do like the arts more than all other categories of people except artists themselves (in my experience of course)
Yup–pretty sure it was meant sarcastically:)) Mr. Kevin (#7 above) has a solid hypothesis as to why it might be that “Most scientists I know actually do like the arts more than all other categories of people except artists”.
CP Snow pointed that out, too–that scientists are more literary than artistic types are scientifically minded. That said, my own sister doesn’t fit that typecasting–she’s an artist who’s also a closet physics junkie:))