## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen Apkon and Martin Scorsese]] - Full Title: The Age of the Image - Category: #books ## Highlights - There is an implied contract between filmmaker and viewer that what is being shown is not only an accurate depiction of what is inside the camera’s frame, but an accurate distillation of the larger story outside it. ([Location 480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=480)) - Yet the printing press was seen as a destabilizing force within Muslim nations, according to Gutenberg biographer John Man, because of the oral beauty of the Quran, which was meant to be heard recited out loud rather than read from a page, its central repository being that of a living human performance rather than a frozen set of marks on a page. ([Location 802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=802)) - The flutter of film was a brilliant piece of visual deception, and one for which the public had already been prepared because of the new speeds afforded by the locomotive. Several early zoetrope viewers remarked on how similar these two new technologies seemed: one moved the body; the other moved the brain. ([Location 901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=901)) - These powerful early studio chiefs—among them William Fox, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, and the Warner brothers—understood that while the means for creating a film were necessarily time-consuming and expensive, the capacity to watch and understand a movie was extremely democratic and appealing. It required much less mental effort than reading a book. ([Location 990](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=990)) - We all have “libraries” in our minds that we access in a fraction of a second. Sigmund Freud tried to explore this in a 1935 essay called “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad.’” He asked the reader to think about a tablet with sheets that have surfaces like film. When we write on the top sheet with a stylus, the writing seems to disappear. But if we lift the sheet and look closely we can see indentations. That second sheet is like our subconscious. Each time we open our eyes and take in new information about the world, it seems as if it is being written on a clean slate, but in actuality, it is in conversation with the traces of everything we have taken in before it. Freud thought that “consciousness arises in the perceptual system instead of the permanent traces.” How we feel about any given work of art, then, is the result of an unseen dialogue between the present stimulus and all that we have read or seen before it. This happens with everything we consume, and increasingly this is delivered in visual portions. ([Location 1052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1052)) - The images are like individual words; the clips and the cuts are like sentences that express a particular meaning and then are broken off to limit that meaning. ([Location 1060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1060)) - We have the capacity both to appreciate the goddess and to understand the alphabet, as Leonard Shlain might have put it, and filmic language speaks to both. That is why it is so effective, and why it, instead of text, has emerged as the means of choice when it comes to communication. ([Location 1065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1065)) - In 2010, researchers from the Knowledge Media Research Center in Germany and Istanbul University examined how the vocabulary of visual language develops when they traveled to a small mountain village south of Isparta, Turkey. There they found a population of adults who were fully sighted, had seen photographs, but hadn’t seen moving images beyond what their eyes had captured in real life. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1082)) - When people in this town were first shown a movie, they weren’t able to follow the story at all. They hadn’t been exposed to the language of visual storytelling. It was as if someone were to speak to us in a language we have never heard. They couldn’t derive meaning or narrative out of what seemed to be disconnected and unrelated images. As the university researchers related in their study, published in December 2010 in the journal Psychological Science, the movie showed the outside of a house and then a second shot of a woman sitting on a couch inside the house. But the video virgins weren’t able to connect these images. They couldn’t understand that the point of that short sequence was that the woman was sitting inside the house depicted in the first shot. ([Location 1087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1087)) - Whether we are aware of it or not, we read not just as readers or receptors of information, but also as “writers one day,” consciously or subconsciously processing and storing that information about how to tell a story when the time comes for us. When we read or consume movies, we prime ourselves as future imitators. ([Location 1103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1103)) - Sight is by far the most trusted of our senses, and the one that has the greatest impact on our conception of reality. Our eyes are the gateway to enormous volumes of data and information, and it is no accident that up to 85 percent of the brain is dedicated to processing and making sense out of the visual stimulation that flows in at an astonishing rate. ([Location 1112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1112)) - Note: michael michael's comment that he has seen things you would not believe, and that he believes things you cannot see - First of all, communicating with images is quicker than with words. Images hit the brain in a shockingly brief sequence of events. Neuroscientists now know that the brain begins to categorize and make sense of an image within 150 milliseconds of the first glimpse. ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1119)) - Vision is an example of exquisite specialization, with different sections of the brain simultaneously processing different aspects of an image and combining these data into one cohesive still image. This is done at an extraordinary speed, as we construct these images in our brains approximately every twenty-fourth of a second. This is the same speed as the typical projection of a movie at twenty-four frames per second, which is the not-coincidental reason that the illusion of motion works so well in the cinema. ([Location 1136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1136)) - It appears that we possess not only a visual “recognition” system but also a visual “action” system, and it is this latter mechanism that takes over when we see compelling images on a screen. The psychologist and philosopher William James, an investigator into the human experience of the spiritual, who also seems to be a spiritual grandfather for many neuroscientists, saw emotion as “preparation for action.” ([Location 1182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1182)) - When the straight subjects were shown straight porn, and the gay subjects shown gay porn, an interesting thing happened in their brains, especially the ventral striatum and the ventral premotor cortex. This latter region is the home to a set of neurotransmitters called mirror neurons, which are responsible for imitative behavior in humans—as in when we watch a person eating an apple and we can taste a little of the apple in our own mouths. The conclusions of the German researchers was that when we watch people of our own preference having sex, it is not merely the suggestion of sex that arouses us. It is that the section of our own minds that provides the intense pleasure associated with having sex is tickled into believing that we are having sex in that moment. ([Location 1200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1200)) - What did it say about the future of the moving image if one short clip about a Chilean social worker—made by a few students with equipment that cost a few hundred dollars—could engage me more on a neurological level than a trailer for a state-of-the-art production that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, plus a human army of technicians, actors, sound operators, executives, marketers, theater operators, and thousands of others? It told me that the possibilities for a more democratic form of expression were dazzling. ([Location 1467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1467)) - marketing expert Martin Lindstrom—author of Buyology and chairman of a consulting company with the same name. Named one of Forbes’s “Most Promising Companies” in 2011, Buyology says that it “utilizes its global neuroscience database to develop rigorous tools that bridge science and business so as to provide a provocative and proprietary understanding of consumer decision-making.” This global neuroscience database is in part constructed through fMRI scans of people viewing corporate logos, products, and advertisements. ([Location 1474](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1474)) - Note: it would be interesting to scan brains of burners looking at corporate logos - Not only is the sheer volume of images, in news and politics, and in advertising increasing at a staggering pace, but their effectiveness is increasing as well. Makers of these images are becoming more and more proficient at manipulating us. There is one clear path in response. We must develop the skills and proficiency with the grammar and tools of visual media to be better consumers—and to produce our own images. ([Location 1484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1484)) - Note: would love to interview him about whether burning man can be an antidote to this - In his Atlantic article, Fallows concludes: “The images intensify the self-righteous determination of each side. If anything, modern technology has aggravated the problem of mutually exclusive realities. With the Internet and TV, each culture now has a more elaborate apparatus for ‘proving,’ dramatizing, and disseminating its particular truth.” ([Location 1625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1625)) - After analyzing the way negative ads get a lot more steam from free media, Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania proposed a different kind of “visual grammar” for covering negative television ads. She suggested framing them inside a graphic of a television set and then using a rubber stamp–like graphic to brand them as either “accurate” or “misleading.” To cover the ad by playing it in the full screen runs the risk of giving it an unintended free ride, as the audience might not even listen to what the fact check has concluded. ([Location 1772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1772)) - A tawdry episode from 2010 shows the fuzzy line between the spontaneous and the constructed. A U.S. Department of Agriculture employee named Shirley Sherrod was giving a talk at an NAACP Freedom Fund dinner when she described how she came to help a white farmer secure some assistance. She did so reluctantly, she says, explaining, “What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland. And here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do.” Later on in the speech, she explained that she had come to realize that his skin color did not matter, and that her government service was about helping all people in need. But the video was leaked to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who chose not to tell the whole story, but rather manipulated the experience for viewers by posting only the first section, which, taken out of context, is damning, as Sherrod appears to be saying the white man’s skin color had worked against him. Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly broadcast the video on his program the same day Sherrod was forced to resign by nervous White House officials. ([Location 1846](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=1846)) - Howard says that while he still values team sports, he has recognized that they mostly teach children how to react quickly. Yet the skills that seem to be most important in our adult life, regardless of profession, are centered more on slower decision making, collaborative problem solving, planning, and communication—in short, skills emphasized in the experience of filmmaking. ([Location 3021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=3021)) - Albert Maysles said the following, which I have tacked above my computer: “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away when they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.” ([Location 3209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=3209)) - The public schools consultant Frank W. Baker has cited five core concepts for media literacy that he believes all students should be required to understand. They are: • All media messages are constructed. • Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules. • Different people experience media messages differently. • Media have embedded values and points of view. • Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power. ([Location 3221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=3221)) - George Washington took up this emphasis in a democratic citizenry in his Farewell Address as president. He urged, “Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” ([Location 3299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=3299)) - Thomas Jefferson proposed a public education system for Virginia in 1779, only three years after the establishment of the United States. Though the language is wordy, his prescription seems modern: To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts in writing; to improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; to know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains, to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgment; and in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed. ([Location 3302](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009LRWHWC&location=3302))