Bringing New Understanding to the Director’s Cut

And now, just in time for Oscar junkies, comes a new statistical mincing of the movies that may someday yield an award category of its own: best fit between a movie’s tempo and the natural rhythms of the brain.

Reporting in the journal Psychological Science, James E. Cutting of Cornell University and his colleagues described their discovery that Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly and can seem more lifelike and immediate than films of the past, even when the scripts are lousier and you feel cheap and used afterward, not to mention vaguely sick from the three-quart tub of popcorn and pack of Twizzlers you ate without realizing it.

According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn, and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps, dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “they turn out to have a one over f characteristic to them.”  Read Article

By Natalie Angier