Silent Film Research Articles

YUNUS EMRE DİVANI’NDA OKAZYONELLİĞİN OLGUSAL TEZAHÜRÜNÜN TARİHİ-KARŞILAŞTIRMALI SUNUMU («Karaman» nüshası bağlamında)

There are many personalities who stand out with their services in the world arena. Many of these people, who have different creative aspects, are also masters of words. It is also a fact that their services do not end with the literary and artistic language examples they leave to future generations. More importantly, with their unique works, they inform us about the phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic landscape of our language at that time. All this is learned in a silent language by going back to the past and passed on to future generations. Although artistic examples that do not go unnoticed by the researcher cover all language levels, historical lexicography is particularly interesting among these language levels. As a result, we have close and comprehensive information about the ways of enriching the vocabulary of Turkish at that time. One of such artists is the 13th century poet, prominent thinker of his time Yunus Emre. The study of Yunus Emre's vocabulary generally reveals the historical and lexical picture of the 13th century Turkish language. He is a Sufi poet of his time. As one of the leading representatives of the philosophy of Sufism, Yunus Emre not only brings the word into communication with its etymonic meaning, but also presents it by defining the new meaning of the word that he later brought to the word. In this way, the poet “proves” that he did not spare his skills and efforts to enrich the vocabulary of the language. Of course, the close connection between language and thought plays a solid role in the creation of a new vocabulary. All this is possible due to the factual reliance on the word while following the poet's creative heritage. In this enrichment, it has been determined as a result of the research that especially the lexical-semantic word groups, especially the words in the synonymy dimension, the words expressing the opposite concepts and the lexical language examples that have spelling parallels but are semantically differentiated exhibit a special weight. Particularly interesting is the scientific analysis of the lexical units recorded in the language of Yunus Emre’s works, providing a factual presentation and confirmation of the enrichment of the language’s vocabulary through homonyms. Keywords: Historical Lexicography, Vocabulary, Semantics, Homonyms, Archaisms, Phonoform

The Historical and Source-Based Aspects of Studying Early Russian Silent Film Posters of 1908—1919

The Russian State Library holds one of the largest collections of Russian posters. Film posters from the time before the cinematography nationalization in 1919 are presented there in more than 250 sheets. Most of them advertise Russian films, more than a third — foreign ones, 25 sheets — documentary cinematography and newsreels of the Russian branch of the French firm “Pathé Brothers”.Recently, there has been a growing researchers’ interest in this period. Active popularization is being carried out by holding exhibitions and publishing catalogs of the largest collections, this phenomenon is discussed in detail at the beginning of the article.As well as cinematography, a film poster is a synthetic work. It represents a piece of graphic art, which is a commercial advertisement for another type of art. This research is aimed at studying film posters as a historical source that can tell us a lot: about characteristic social trends, about filmmaking as a process and about films themselves, about tendencies in the visual arts, about advertising of that period in general and about itself as a new type of advertising in particular.The article shows the history of the film poster formation as a product of commercial advertising and its subsequent development into a separate type of spectacular poster. There is analyzed its potential as a source on the history of cinema. In conclusion, the film posters are presented as a reflection of the era and society, which reacts to fundamental changes in the country.

Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)

Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)

Darkened Cinema of Elvira Notari

In recent years, a process of historical revision (by way of re-evaluating archival materials) has uncovered the stories of silent cinema’s women pioneers, whose legacies and contributions had previously gone uncredited. Amongst these figures is Elvira Notari, Italy’s first woman director and production company founder. Her taking on of different roles led to a rich production catalogue of which only a few traces remain. In examining the features and contexts of Notari’s cinema, and the causes for its subsequent neglect, this paper argues for her central importance in Italian cinema as a director and considers how her omission from the archives can be addressed.

Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew

Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew

The Witch in the Closet: Disney's Frozen as Adaptation and Its Potential for Queer and Feminist Readings

The Witch in the Closet: Disney's <i>Frozen</i> as Adaptation and Its Potential for Queer and Feminist Readings

Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades! Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture

Around the globe, sports have dominated the twenty-first century in many ways, and the seeds for this cultural sports takeover were sewn by the dawn of the Cold War. While historians and sports fans are familiar with the athletic realms in the US and probably some other nations as well, not many quite understand the twentieth-century origins of sports as a sociocultural phenomenon in Russia. Thankfully, Bryn Mawr provost Tim Harte—in his academic capacity as a professor of Russian in Comparative Literature—provides tremendous insight and analysis with the publication of his latest book, Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades! Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture. Harte argues athletics (as an extension of culture, and “spirit”) and art symbiotically thrived as a dynamic part of contemporary life in both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, giving readers understanding of fizkul'tura (symbolizing “physical fitness and collective goals above competition”) and idealism during a turbulent period in the nation's history. As a result, Harte's book is complex, albeit fascinating and succinctly focused, in exploring the multifaceted presence of sports in Russian and Soviet art and ideology.Harte blends together several historiographies in this narrative, merging multifaceted, multidisciplinary analysis of sports, physical beauty, art, and Russia itself during revolutionary, turbulent, and violent decades in the nation's early twentieth-century history. In many ways, Harte carves his own niche in researching unique dynamics of Russian culture, as his prior monograph, The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930 (2009), also explored a distinct piece of cultural development in the nation. This subsequent effort merely continues defining new ground for interested readers and scholars to study while advancing understanding of the global significance of these ideas in relation to other nations during the same time period(s).The book is organized chronologically, roughly by decade, and thematically, starting with popular wrestling in the prerevolutionary, Russian 1900s, as artists captured the “muscular” athlete as a symbol of brewing cultural change. Harte then explores Russian poetry in the 1910s and its focus on sports and the human body as underpinnings to the 1917 revolution that swept away much imperial culture. Yet athletics provided a bridge to the early Soviet period in the form of artistic representations of popular sports like soccer, track and field, and wrestling. These communal activities were a constant while so much of the Russian world changed around the individual. As the 1920s progressed, the government tightened restrictions on art, and thus silent films focusing on sports enabled some semblance of artistic expression and originality in the emerging Soviet culture. By the next decade, there was an ideological endorsement of athletics, as fizkul'tura found mainstream consumption via sports photography, giving some artists relatively significant freedom to express ideas. Finally, Harte explores the latter years of the Stalin era, where state-sponsored “Socialist Realism” featured heroic Soviet athletes in a departure from the earlier artistic expressions of individual athleticism. He concludes with the similarities in the Russian and Soviet artistic and cultural response to the “unique allure and promise of modern sports” by arguing that what started out innocently in prerevolutionary Russia ended up being used for “ideological objectives” by the authoritarian Soviets. There is also a coda that examines the life of Vladimir Nabokov—the author of Lolita—in relation to the arguments and themes of the book, and this piece itself could be the core of a fine journal article someday.There are many strong points in the book that connect to sports history for the audience, and the multidisciplinary approach is useful in understanding the broad reach of athletics as a cultural and political force in history as well. Harte also provides many illustrations for his readers, and the thorough “notes” section and wide-ranging bibliography are a gold mine for scholars in many disciplines. Challenges may arise for readers not well versed in Russian and Soviet art, as in the chapter 2 exploration of poetry, for example. That is Harte's primary discipline and not a well-known subject area for most readers. Overall, however, this is a great read for sport history scholars interested in the specifics of Harte's research or those making connections to their own research, whether it involves Russia, the Soviet Union, or artistic and cultural representations of sport in any nation. As no Russian/Soviet athletes participated in the Olympics from 1916 to 1956, artistic interpretations of sport in those decades, familiar to us now, come to mind, as Harte fills in the gaps of collective historical memory with this examination of athletics and art in a nation shrouded in secrecy for much of the past century. While artistic renditions of Babe Ruth, Jesse Owens, and Rocky Marciano celebrated American culture, we now can learn more about their Russian/Soviet counterparts thanks to Harte's multidisciplinary efforts.

No effect of focused attention and open monitoring meditation on EEG auditory mismatch negativity in expert and novice practitioners

The auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) is a well characterized event-related potential component which has gained recent attention in theoretical models describing the impact of various styles of mindfulness meditation on attentional processes and perceptual inference. Previous findings highlighted a distinct modulation of the MMN amplitude by different meditation practices and degrees of expertise. In the present study, we attempted to replicate results from the recent literature with a data sample that allowed for increased statistical power compared to previous experiments. Relying on traditional frequentist analysis, we found no effect of focused attention and open monitoring meditation on the auditory MMN amplitude compared to a control condition (silent movie) in expert or novice practitioners (all p > 0.17), providing a non-replication of our previous work (Fucci et al. 2018). Using a Bayesian approach, we found strong evidence against an interaction effect on the MMN amplitude between expertise groups and meditation practices (BF01 = 11.0), strong evidence against effects of either meditation practices compared to the control condition (BF01 between 11.9 and 16.1) and moderate evidence against an effect of expertise during meditation (BF01 between 5.3 and 7.9). On the other hand, we replicated previous evidence of increased alpha oscillatory power during meditation practices compared to a control state (p < 0.001). We discuss our null findings in relation to factors that could undermine the replicability of previous research on this subject, namely low statistical power, use of flexible analysis methods and a possible publication bias leading to a misrepresentation of the available evidence.

Book Review: Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film by Juan Sebastián Ospina León

Book Review: <i>Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film</i> by Juan Sebastián Ospina León

Italians in Colombian silent cinema 1910–26: The Di Domenico brothers’ film memoirs and filmography

This article is both a review of the legacy of the Italian brothers Francesco and Vincenzo Di Domenico and a historical analysis of their filmography (1914–26). On the one hand, it analyses Francesco Di Domenico’s memoirs, which offer invaluable insights into how these itinerant projectionists from Italy became the bearers of a European film culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. The article also reviews the evolution of Francesco and Vincenzo Di Domenico as filmmakers working in South America and Colombia by identifying and validating important milestones in the history of the country’s silent cinema. The aim is not only to reconstruct the journey and filmography of the Di Domenicos, but also – and more importantly – to recognize the significant legacy of these Italian brothers during the era of silent cinema in the Americas.

The Study of Image by Aby Warburg

Warburg is one of the most inspiring figures in the German tradition of art historiography. Although one of the well-known aspects of Warburg’s intellectual work is its relation to iconology, this article seeks to go beyond the conventional understanding of Warburg to mapping a picture of his “special” view of the image as a whole. To this end, by re-reading the classic Warburg texts and new interpretations of those texts, an attempt has been made to examine the place of his approach to the “image” in the tradition of German art historiography and the key concepts of his intellectual system in this field. The findings of the article show that in this system of thought, we can see the traces of the ideas of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jakob Burckhardt and Robert Vischer. In this context, Nietzsche’s “Apollonian-Dionysian” dichotomy, Fisher’s concept of “empathy” and Hegelian Burckhardt’s totalitarianism were influential in formulating Warburg’s particular conception of the Renaissance art. In this regard, Warburg devotes himself to the study of a concept called the “afterlife” of antiquity and other concepts such as pathos formula, dialectic, and empathy in Renaissance art and thought. It seems that most of these concepts revolve around the idea of “survival.” According to Warburg, since art has a history, images also had remnants, remnants that reveal themselves in connection with the concept of memory and in connection with a concept called pathos-formula. In this sense, Warburg focuses on gestures and their transmission through art. The result of such an effort is a silent language design free from argument. Expressive gesture analysis offers an unusual way of looking at past shapes and allows the audience to find images of the past in the present. This is the meaning of the afterlife and the survival of the images.

Theme Songs without Words

When Max Steiner arrived at RKO Studios in late December 1929, he came as a seasoned Broadway conductor and arranger to work on musicals. Applying the art and craft of song arranging from musical comedies on the Broadway stage to so-called “theme songs” that were sung in dramatic films in the early talkies, he developed what came to be known as “the big theme” in Hollywood Golden Age film scoring parlance in which a song-like theme was featured instrumentally as background music rather than sung on screen. In conjunction with this practice, Steiner and his Hollywood cohorts continued and adapted the existing dramatic techniques of silent film accompaniment to “talking pictures,” which, because of music playing under dialog, was given the name “underscoring.”

A Review of Deep Learning Algorithms and Their Applications in Healthcare

Deep learning uses artificial neural networks to recognize patterns and learn from them to make decisions. Deep learning is a type of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks to mimic the human brain. It uses machine learning methods such as supervised, semi-supervised, or unsupervised learning strategies to learn automatically in deep architectures and has gained much popularity due to its superior ability to learn from huge amounts of data. It was found that deep learning approaches can be used for big data analysis successfully. Applications include virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri, facial recognition, personalization, natural language processing, autonomous cars, automatic handwriting generation, news aggregation, the colorization of black and white images, the addition of sound to silent films, pixel restoration, and deep dreaming. As a review, this paper aims to categorically cover several widely used deep learning algorithms along with their architectures and their practical applications: backpropagation, autoencoders, variational autoencoders, restricted Boltzmann machines, deep belief networks, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, generative adversarial networks, capsnets, transformer, embeddings from language models, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, and attention in natural language processing. In addition, challenges of deep learning are also presented in this paper, such as AutoML-Zero, neural architecture search, evolutionary deep learning, and others. The pros and cons of these algorithms and their applications in healthcare are explored, alongside the future direction of this domain. This paper presents a review and a checkpoint to systemize the popular algorithms and to encourage further innovation regarding their applications. For new researchers in the field of deep learning, this review can help them to obtain many details about the advantages, disadvantages, applications, and working mechanisms of a number of deep learning algorithms. In addition, we introduce detailed information on how to apply several deep learning algorithms in healthcare, such as in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. By presenting many challenges of deep learning in one section, we hope to increase awareness of these challenges, and how they can be dealt with. This could also motivate researchers to find solutions for these challenges.

Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film

Hollywood's growing influence in Latin America in the early twentieth century coincided and intermingled with an expanding US economic and military presence in the region. Yet at the same time, a nascent silent film industry challenged US hegemony and made visible the diverse political, cultural, and social characteristics of the region. Juan Sebastián Ospina León's Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film is an ambitious, South-to-North hemispheric look at the intersections of silent cinema, melodrama, and modernity in the 1910s and 1920s. In addition to representing a significant contribution to the still-understudied topic of early cinema in Latin America, Struggles for Recognition enriches our understanding of modernity, gender, and political culture in places as distinct as Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico during this era.Researching silent film presents significant challenges in terms of sources and compels scholars to grapple with the techniques and politics of film preservation and restoration. Many of these early films have been fully or partially lost, while others have been reconstructed in ways that may not have been fully faithful to the originals. Contemporary film magazines provide insight into how films were promoted and received and on the way that local film production, distribution, and promotion were structured. We learn, for example, that the early Argentine film business favored films of US origin, while their Colombian counterparts' orientation and connections meant that European (especially Italian) films were the dominant fare in early cinema there. Finally, surviving print materials related to a film's production may speak to what the film looked like or how it was made.Following an introduction discussing the main themes and elaborating the links between melodrama and Latin America's “multiple modernities,” the first chapter sets the stage for silent cinema during the Great War era, with an emphasis on Argentina and Colombia. The pair of chapters that follow, which focus on these two countries respectively, are the strongest of the book. We are first introduced to “cinedrama porteño,” with roots in the melodrama of Argentine tango and sainete and typically set in popular locales like the conventillo, the cabaret, and the department store. In keeping with melodramatic templates, a good deal of attention is given to the strivings, debasement, and exploitation of workingwomen (including prostitutes). In contrast and reflecting the “Conservative Hegemony” that marked Colombian politics during this era as well as a very different relationship with the United States, the chapter on Colombian silents provides a fascinating discussion of breakout films in which Catholicism and local elites were visible in abundance and of a film industry that was more anti–United States than Argentina's.The next pair of chapters look at examples of silent cinema in Orizaba, Mexico, and two films made in or focused on the United States. The Mexican films, centered on subjects such as a train robbery and drug abuse, reflected the disruptions of the Mexican Revolution and a shared border with the United States, presenting a very different kind of melodramatic subject matter. The Mexico chapter also devotes some attention to the important topic of film restoration and reconstruction and the challenges of the silent film archive. This is an important and relevant discussion, but the link with wider themes of melodrama and modernity is not so clearly delineated. In the final chapter we are introduced to Charge of the Gauchos (Una nueva y gloriosa nación), a 1928 film written and produced in the United States by a Spanish Argentine filmmaker, a less-than-successful effort to rework a gaucho-centered tale of Argentina's history for US tastes. The chapter also discusses Garras de oro (1926), a Colombian film so highly critical of the US role in wresting the Panamanian isthmus from Colombia that the US government sought to squelch its circulation in the region.For all its notable strengths in research and analysis, it is noteworthy that a book with a thematic focus on visibilities and invisibilities in Latin American silent cinema has very little to say about representations of race and ethnicity in the films discussed. There is a brief analysis of Orientalism as it is deployed in the Mexican film El puño de hierro (1927) and some mention of the ways that Latin American silent cinema partly developed in reaction against racist depictions of Mexicans in Hollywood cinema. But one wonders, for example, to what degree whiteness was one of the visible dimensions of civilized respectability that many of these films sought to portray. All in all, however, this is a solid and enlightening piece of scholarship that makes an important contribution to film studies and the history of twentieth-century Latin America more broadly.

Review: Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen, by Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio

This book is comprised of a mediaphilic conversation between the two authors as they revisit a wide array of Latinx representations in U.S. popular culture, and a visual essay that runs in parallel accompaniment. The latter draws on frame grabs from comics and television shows, poster art, and Nericcio’s own graphic mashups of past and present Latinx icons, from Erik Estrada to Eva Longoria, all in brilliant color. Divided into five thematically organized sections, and an introductory and concluding chapter, the protean discussion glosses an ample range of media, from animation and comics to sitcoms to dramedies and horror series, with a steady emphasis on television, spanning over five decades of transmission and what Roland Barthes would call “decanting.” In their self-reflective dialogue, the authors wax nostalgic—the prevailing perception is that, with few exceptions, the quality if not the quantity of Latinx televisual presence has declined with time. They occasionally dip into disillusionment and often express ambivalence toward the cultural objects of their collaborative cathexis. In addition to the authors, the protagonists of this exploration are mainly Latinx actors and characters, as the emphasis is on the casting politics surrounding them, and performance style and body image of human and anthropomorphized elements on the screen, laced with attention to dialogue and meaningful plot twists. The work of two Latinx auteurs, Alex Rivera and Robert Rodríguez, is showcased. The authors apply a range of analytical frames with references to poststructural and postcolonial theory. They scrutinize media performances and audiovisual compositions through the lens of semiotic close-reading, intertextual analysis, and cognitive reception theory.In the first section, the authors consider whether an amplification in screen representation, which still lags behind the statistical presence of Latinxs in the United States, has been of tangible benefit to the community. In a field driven by business rather than cultural logic, where is the substance and have Latinxs fared better as consumers than as producers and actors? Section II, “Pinche Paradoxes,” is devoted to a critique of cross-casting—both interethnic, as with the Filipino-American actor Lou Diamond Phillips, and intraethnic, as in the case of Cuban-American actor Steven Bauer. Special attention is given to the related phenomena of brown-facing and “brown-voicing,” or trying to sound “Mexican,” and what the authors perceive as occasional Latinx complicity with these practices. Section III, “Sombreros to Pistoleros” traces the trajectory of Mexican bandits and superheroes from pre-televisual silent cinema through D.C. comics characters—with an homage to Chicana Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman—to Battlestar Galactica and the music videos of Alex Rivera. Section IV is devoted to a consideration of children’s programming, such as cartoons featuring Speedy Gonzales, The Super Friends, and the Mexican show El Chapulín Colorado, as well as programming for teens and young adults, such as The Simpsons and food-focused films, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013) and Tortilla Soup (2001). In the process, the authors comment on the voicing of animated characters by Latinx actors. Section V tackles the “Latinx threat” narrative, with references to Brian de Palma’s Scarface (1983) and narcotraficante narratives, including the borderlands work of Robert Rodríguez in the Machete film series and a nod to digital webisode series such as Brujos (2017) and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-2016). This is perhaps the most eclectic chapter as it exposes the failings of National Geographic’s Underworld, Inc. (2015) and Breaking Bad (2008–2013) to deliver complex, informative renderings of border crossing, contrasted with the experimental ethnography of Jason de León and Lalo Alcaraz’s work in the short-lived, animated Bordertown (2016). At the end of the section, Aldama and Nericcio define #browntv as “part of an evolution of a place, the birth of a revolutionary space, where an ontological incubator appears, nurturing a decidedly brown tomorrow” (p. 131). According to the concluding chapter, that tomorrow harbors queer Latinx romantic and erotic graphic art, as well as queer Latinx characters on television shows such as The Office (2005–2013) and 13 Reasons Why (2017), and they even mention the altersexuality in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (2001), as a corrective to the heteronormative discourse of some of the Latinx depictions previously discussed, whether disparaging or edifying. Written in a pithy, colloquial style, the book engages the reader as an ally in the quest for uplifting representations. In effect, the authors invite readers to participate in an ongoing discussion of #browntv on Facebook and Instagram. With its nuanced interpretations, attention to affect, and capaciousness with regard to the media analyzed, this is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on Latinx representation in electronic and digital media. A well-compiled index facilitates the navigation of the book as a reference text.

Mercenaries at the movies: representations of soldiers of fortune in Mexico and the Congo in American and European cinema

ABSTRACT This paper examines cinematic representations of mercenaries from the era of silent movies to the 1980s. It argues that cinema has been selective in the choice of historical periods to depict mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, ignoring for the most part the centuries of European state building in which mercenaries played a significant role. Most mercenary films are anchored in the near present and the paper focuses on Mexico and the Congo as terrains of political breakdown and external intervention. Since the 1950s, a range of films depict mercenaries in these terrains seeking money, adventure, and the thrills of killing, and the paper examines mercenary movies through the character structures of hero, anti-hero and villain. These three structures have shaped the portrayal of mercenaries in westerns and war movies as well as action and sci fi movies, where they have become hardened in the last two decades into range of stock stereotypes

Making Americans: Spectacular Nationalism, Americanization, and Silent Film

Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. Joining the recent work of film and immigration historians, it argues that just as Americanization did not produce compliant citizens overnight, silent film as a new and powerful medium of persuasion could influence the new American viewers’ transformation only in part. Of particular interest is the use of film in industrial and educational contexts – which sometimes overlapped – purporting to both “educate” and Americanize the new immigrants to the US. It asks, what cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay – industrial, educational, and nontheatrical films such as An American in the Making (1913), The Making of an American (1920), and others – illustrate the potential of silent film both as mimesis (or representation of ideology) and as ideology.

Unlocking adults’ implicit statistical learning by cognitive depletion

Human learning is supported by multiple neural mechanisms that maturate at different rates and interact in mostly cooperative but also sometimes competitive ways. We tested the hypothesis that mature cognitive mechanisms constrain implicit statistical learning mechanisms that contribute to early language acquisition. Specifically, we tested the prediction that depleting cognitive control mechanisms in adults enhances their implicit, auditory word-segmentation abilities. Young adults were exposed to continuous streams of syllables that repeated into hidden novel words while watching a silent film. Afterward, learning was measured in a forced-choice test that contrasted hidden words with nonwords. The participants also had to indicate whether they explicitly recalled the word or not in order to dissociate explicit versus implicit knowledge. We additionally measured electroencephalography during exposure to measure neural entrainment to the repeating words. Engagement of the cognitive mechanisms was manipulated by using two methods. In experiment 1 (n = 36), inhibitory theta-burst stimulation (TBS) was applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or to a control region. In experiment 2 (n = 60), participants performed a dual working-memory task that induced high or low levels of cognitive fatigue. In both experiments, cognitive depletion enhanced word recognition, especially when participants reported low confidence in remembering the words (i.e., when their knowledge was implicit). TBS additionally modulated neural entrainment to the words and syllables. These findings suggest that cognitive depletion improves the acquisition of linguistic knowledge in adults by unlocking implicit statistical learning mechanisms and support the hypothesis that adult language learning is antagonized by higher cognitive mechanisms.

Cardiac Startle Response and Clinical Outcomes in Preschool Children With Fragile X Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Objective: Poor physiological regulation in response to threat is linked to multiple negative developmental outcomes including anxiety, which is highly prevalent and impairing in young children with neurodevelopmental disabilities like fragile X syndrome (FXS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study contrasted cardiac startle response in pre-school-aged children with FXS, with and without ASD, to children with non-syndromic ASD (nsASD) and neurotypical controls (NT). The relationship of cardiac startle to non-verbal mental age (NVMA), ASD severity, and parent-reported anxiety was also examined.Method: Four age-matched groups of pre-school children participated including those with FXS without ASD (FXS-Only, n = 21), FXS with ASD (FXS+ASD, n = 17), nsASD (n = 42), and NT children (n = 27). Participants viewed a silent movie during which a single 200 ms 98-decibel white noise burst occurred. Cardiac activity was analyzed for pre-stimulus respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and the inter-beat intervals (IBI) at the auditory stimulus and 10 s post-stimulus. The Spence Pre-school Anxiety Scale, Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2nd Edition, and Mullen Scales of Early Learning were examined in relation to startle response.Results: The nsASD group demonstrated heightened cardiac activity at the auditory stimulus and 10 s post-stimulus compared to the NT controls. Neither of the FXS groups showed differences from any other group. Higher pre-stimulus RSA was associated with reduced cardiac response across groups, while the relationship between cognitive ability and ASD severity to cardiac response varied between groups. Parent-reported anxiety was not associated with cardiac response for any group.Conclusion: These findings demonstrate group distinctions in cardiac responses to auditory startle. Although FXS and ASD share behavioral characteristics, the nsASD group showed a heightened cardiac startle response compared to the NT group that was not present in the FXS groups with or without ASD. Non-verbal mental age was associated with greater stimulus or post-stimulus reactivity for all groups except the FXS+ASD group, which showed no association between startle response and any clinical outcomes. Increased understanding of the relationship between physiological regulation and clinical outcomes will assist in identifying the timing and targets for effective interventions for individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities.

Commentary: Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses

Commentary:Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses Kiki Loveday and Susan Potter Video: Traffic in Kisses This video is available at https://youtu.be/cJ0G40YZwPs. And then I had a sudden image: a dog lying somewhere very still, and a child, first looking at it, and then, compulsively, nudging it. Why? to see whether it was alive; because if it moves, if it can move, it lives. This most primitive, this most instinctive of all gestures: to make it move to make it live. So I had always been doing with my camera … —Maya Deren, Letter to James Card, April 19, 1955 Making Things Move We were curious about what would happen. In early cinema there is a genre known as the kiss film or kissing films, and the genre's emergence indicates already that certain shared expectations are forming about what might happen. Typically two figures, conventionally legible as a man and a woman, are framed in a medium shot (Figure 1). They may interact on screen, appear to talk to each other, perhaps court one another, before kissing, either once or several times in less than a minute of screen time. A popular attraction of early cinema, kiss films are historically important because they point to early film's intermediality, the traffic in entertainers and entertainments between stage and screen.1 More significantly, for our purposes, as a genre they are evidence of the intensification of the modern regime of sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century.2 Kiss films are regarded by Linda Williams as "the screen's first sex act," standing in for the "whole of sex that can be seen" while "permanently poised on the brink [End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Still, The New Kiss (Edison, US, 1900), remediated in Traffic in Kisses (Love-day and Potter, 2022). of carnal knowledge."3 Kiss films also instantiate early cinema's sexualization of public space, a process entangled with early cinema's forensic gaze of the body (Figure 2).4 We were curious about what would happen if we worked together on a creative assemblage of kiss films, if we attempted to model a lesbian audiovisual and historiographical practice while offering a queer perspective on the aesthetic, social, and disciplinary functions of kiss films in the history of early cinema. Produced across several weeks by exchanging, responding to, and assembling a series of image and sound sequences, Traffic in Kisses remediates some of the most iconic kiss films produced between 1896 and 1905. Drawing inspiration from queer collage films such as The Meeting of Two Queens (Cecilia Barriga, US, 1991), Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer, US, 1992), Badass Supermama (Etang Inyang, 1996), and Grosse Fuge (William Comstock, US, 1998), the resulting video tests out some ideas about the circulation and emergence of erotic and sexual discourses in early cinema, and the mobilization of—and resistance to—a filmic gaze articulated to concepts and categories such as the homoerotic, the Sapphic, lesbian, or, in some cases, trans*.5 In keeping with the [End Page 38] exquisite paradigm, we have not revised the video. It exists as an artifact of our research process and collaboration. Our scholarly work differently addresses the relation between cinema as popular medium and the representation of sexuality. Susan's work has investigated early cinema's participation in the consolidation of sexuality as a modern regime of power. She has argued that sexually legible figures in silent cinema are only the belated and most visible signs of an expansive array of knowledges, practices, aesthetic forms, and genres.6 In relation to the unruly period of early cinema, she has argued that certain kinds of homoerotic and Sapphic visual pleasures persist even as emergent genres such as the kiss films and other experiments in mise-en-scène and editing can be understood as fugitive signs of the emergence of new models of sexual identity. Kiki's work, in contrast, assumes a post-queer perspective to historicize the dual meanings of lesbian that circulated at the turn of the twentieth century: of sexual "deviancy," and of femxle authorial genius. She considers how scholarly discourses and canons produce...