Tag Archives: Federico Fellini

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Partial Recall

Memories of the Future, or    
What We Forget to Recollect

Guess what? It may be a good thing that you can’t remember what they’ve told you about your memories. As it turns out, you don’t have to be a savant or try to associate facts with objects, or colors, or smells. It won’t hurt if you do, but either way, it won’t make much of a difference to most, in the big scheme.
Some exercise their recalling skills like a muscle. Others picture things as if in a photograph. People either struggle to remember or choose to forget. And yes, there are those geniuses. But if you’re none of the above, no reason to despair; it’s been quite a while since we too gave up all hope of ever finding that extra set of keys anyway.
We could save some time and say that science has no clue, but that would be an over-simplification. The more researchers dig, the more distractions they find, affecting how we remember things, produce memories, and even adopt somebody else’s recollections. One thing is for sure: some people are really prodigies recalling details of the past.
How we deal with our memories is, of course, highly personal. We strive to portray our private history as an accurate and favorable reflection of who we think we are. But much conspires against such a seamless narrative, the first thing being exactly that: the narrative.
To tell the story, we need to make sense and fill in the blanks, the details that reality, or memory, not always provided. It’s also disturbing to come across someone who has a different take on the same events. But that’s exactly what siblings and spouses often do. Not to go overboard here, but that’s why we sometimes hate them so much.

THE WEATHER ON FEB. 23, 1955
How do you call someone who didn’t walk until he was four, couldn’t button up his own shirt, had trouble with even the most basic motor skills, had an average 87 I.Q. and, nevertheless, could recall every single weather report going back over 40 years? a Rain Man, or his birth name, Kim Peek, to whom the term savant was defined.
When he died in 2009, he’d become worldwide known, thanks to his portrayal by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 movie. And yet, even with such a gifted actor at the helm, the film barely scratched the mystery of what it means to be someone with such an astonishing mental ability and yet living inside a mind of a tween.
Many others with similar uncontrollable talents have been known by science. But there’s a new breed of ‘recallers,’ as we’d call them, who’re functional human beings, unlike Peek and other savants, according to NPR reports. The University of California at Irvine memory researcher James McGaugh, for example, has been studying 11 such individuals. Many are on the autistic spectrum of Asperger’s Syndrome.
They’re no better than anyone else at performing standard memory tests, such as repeating back lists, though. What they excel at is recalling, in piercing detail, events of their own lives. A person in the group could recall, for instance, an assortment of things that happened on a particular day more than 30 years ago, just because that’s when his football team lost. Is that also why you remember ‘that’ so vividly?

EXPERIENCE VS. NARRATIVE
The research itself, which involves brain scans and a thorough psychological evaluation of the participants, breaks new ground into the study of how we remember some things, and completely forget others. In a recent Ted Conference, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman discussed yet another approach to tackle the complex subject.
The founder of behavioral economics finds a distinction between our ‘experiencing selves’ and our ‘remembering selves,’ and how we often fail to fully appreciate either of them. (more)
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Read Also:
* Vessels of Tears
* Two Thursday Tales
* Cursed Gifts

Continue reading →

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Stone Flower

Jobim, Bossa Nova Giant,
Would’ve Been 90 Today

When Antonio Carlos Jobim was born, the stunning beaches of his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, were still nesting grounds to a variety of marine birds and wild life. Some of them would be celebrated later by Brazil’s greatest popular music composer, who’d be 90 today.
The architect of Bossa Nova, the 1960s movement that took the world by a quiet storm, Jobim’s forever linked to his Garota de Ipanema, the classic that became one the most performed songs ever, even as it seems now forever trapped in some sort of an elevator to oblivion.
Which is unfortunate, not just for his varied and profoundly Brazilian output, but also because, in its original João Gilberto and Stan Getz performance, it remains a delicate gem, all intricate harmonies and tender balance of its beat. (On Feb 2, Getz would’ve been 90 too.)
An accomplished musician both on acoustic guitar and piano, Jobim found in João‘s voice the superb phrasing to enhance his delicate melodies. Their musical partnership was not unlike that of Federico Fellini and Marcelo Mastroianni: a esthetic symbiosis, where both seem part of the same creative continuum.
It’s possible that João, now 85, may be still mourning, quietly as is his style, the sudden passing of his lifelong friend, in New York, Dec. 8, 1994. And so may be generations of artists, influenced and inspired by him, grieving his loss and the hole he’s left in Brazil’s culture.
For even as his extensive songbook is still a defining landmark for the rich musical tradition of his homeland, he’s much less regarded there today than his stature as a songwriter would’ve granted. Even today, it
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Read Also:
* 50 Summers
* Multi-Note Samba

may not be easy to tune in any of his songs on Brazilian radio stations.
In these short-attention span times, the relevance of collective memory and the weight a society places on his standard-bearers, depends on constant refreshing, and efforts to preserve them. Popular culture is as good as the next trend, if nothing is done otherwise.
Jobim’s genius may still be part of every positive reference about Brazil’s culture. But less than 20 years from his passing, fresh traces of his work are more likely to be found in the art of international artists than of his fellow brasileiros. That is truly puzzling but some half-seriously think that the reason is obvious.
Although they were all born in the same country, few has the Portuguese word for ‘tone’ as a nickname. Plus, almost no one has, written on their very birth certificate, the term that defines nationality, as Antonio Carlos BRASILEIRO de Almeida Jobim did. No wonder some call him the inventor of Brazilian music. Happy Birthday, Tom.

by

Partial Recall

Memories of the Future, or    
What We Forget to Recollect

Guess what? It may be a good thing that you can’t remember what they’ve told you about your memories. As it turns out, you don’t have to be a savant, or try to associate facts with objects, or colors, or smells. It won’t hurt if you do, but either way, it won’t make much of a difference to most, in the big scheme.
Some exercise their recalling skills like a muscle. Others picture things as if in a photograph. People either struggle to remember or choose to forget. And yes, there are those genius. But if you’re none of the above, no reason to despair; it’s been quite a while since we too gave up all hope of ever finding that extra set of keys anyway.
We could save some time and say that science has no clue, but that would be an over-simplification. The more researchers dig, the more distractions they find, affecting how we remember things, produce memories, and even adopt somebody else’s recollections. One thing is for sure: some people are really prodigies recalling details of the past.
How we deal with our memories is, of course, highly personal. We strive to portray our private history as an accurate and favorable reflection of who we think we are. But many things conspire against such a seamless narrative, the first thing being exactly that: the narrative.
To tell the story, we need to make sense and fill in the blanks, the details that reality not always provides. It’s also disturbing to come across someone who has a different take on the same events. But that’s exactly what siblings and spouses often do. Not to go overboard here, but that’s why we sometimes hate them so much.

THE WEATHER ON FEB. 23, 1975
How do you call someone who didn’t walk until he was four, couldn’t button up his own shirt, had trouble with even the most basic motor skills, had an average 87 I.Q. and, nevertheless, could recall every single weather report going back over 40 years? a Rain Man, or his Continue reading →

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Feral Finder

An Unknown Cat &
A Roman Catacomb

Want proof that the majority of Italians not just couldn’t care less about Silvio Berlusconi’s diatribes, but are actually capable of making us all very proud indeed? Take this stray cat who was being chased the other day by two obviously deeply misguided Rome residents.
Perhaps attempting to show how futile this business of running after animals can be, while at the same time, being utterly gracious about the whole affair, the cat led them to the most important discovery of theirs, and most people’s, entire lives: a 2,000-year-old tomb.
That it happened at the heart of the Eternal City, which has been dug up all over for hundreds of years, only adds to the specialness of such a finding. In fact, one has to go back 40 years to find another discovery as stunning as this one. Fortunately, that one was caught on film.
In 1972, while shooting Roma, Federico Fellini (no pun intended) came across a construction site and the amazing discovery of a first century apartment, with walls full of frescos that were immediately destroyed by air exposure. It was a classic case of happenstance making for a great piece of filmmaking.
This time, the cat played the role of a rabbit and by disappearing through a hole, led the men to Continue reading →

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Storyboard

“In a Mad World,
Only The Mad Are Sane.”

The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, whose centennial is being celebrated this year, was known for creating full-scale paintings to use as storyboards for his films. His masterpieces “Rashomon,” (1950), “Seven Samurai,” (1954), “Kagemusha,” (1980), to which belongs the panel above, and “Ran,” (1985), all benefitted from his richly detailed, high quality storyboards, and resulted in countless international awards.
Along with another superior filmmaker, Italian Federico Fellini, Kurosawa‘s storyboards tell stories of their own and exist independently from the movies to which they were drawn. He tapped into Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Gorky, and his love for American post-war Western directors such as John Ford, to develop highly personal and intensely humanist works, many of them adapted and remade by others.
He died in 1998, not as a household name in Japan but revered the world over as one of the cinema’s great masters.