D. Graham Burnett at The Paris Review:
Many filmmakers, going back to some of the earliest experiments with the moving picture, have depicted the intensity of the gazes fixed on their own medium. One thinks of Dziga Vertov’s interwar metacinema, or even a vaudeville-steeped silent classic like D. W. Griffith’s Those Awful Hats (1909). It was something they thought about a lot, early cinematographers—the mesmeric power of their own images. And so it was a very alluring topic to explore.
But it is one thing to shoot an actor who has been told to make a face “as if” he is looking at a movie. It is another to put the camera in the movie screen itself, and then to play the movie and record the actual reaction. This is a much more recent technique. To be sure, shots of people seeing things in the world are a cinematic commonplace. But the majority of such imagery captures these reactions within the established triangle of subject, object, camera. It is much rarer for a filmmaker to close that triangle down into pure bilateral eyeline gaze: to film from the perspective of the thing being seen, where that thing is itself a moving image.
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One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
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Zero-sum bias refers to the tendency to believe that anything gained by one side is lost by the other when in fact win-win outcomes are available. Prior research has documented the bias in several domains but little is known about what triggers it. As politics is a hotbed of zero-sum beliefs, we hypothesized that politicizing problems would act as either a situational trigger or inhibitor for partisans and that this would lead them to propose qualitatively different solutions. We report five studies that find evidence for our hypotheses. We demonstrate that Democrats find less-effective solutions to a problem when it is framed in terms of corporate tax cuts, and more-effective solutions when a formally identical problem is framed in terms of pro-immigration policies, than when it is framed non-politically. Republicans exhibit the opposite pattern. Thus, we find differential problem-solving performance between the two political groups only in the politicized problem frames. We show that the political frames interfere with the process of problem solving per se, as opposed to rendering some solutions socially inadmissible. We also show that this interference impacts participants not by dialing up or down the effort they put in, but by constraining their way of thinking about the space of possible solutions. Finally, we demonstrate that the outcome of the problem-solving process is predicted by the presence or absence of zero-sum beliefs about the particular political frame, but not by participants’ affective response to it.