Gary Peterson wrote:
>AAgh! Sorry about that incomplete post. I was interested in whether anyone
>who uses movies in class would find the Blair Witch Project useful.....
I must confess that I haven't seen it yet, though I've read enough to know
something about its premise and how it was done.
I happened to read a little blurb in the paper this morning suggesting that
there had been in increase in the need for theatre managers to clean up
after people who...uhh...toss their cookies during screenings of Blair
Witch. It was suggested that a combination of the almost constant movement
and shakiness of the camera in the filming (leading to something like
motion sickness), and fright induced by the content of the film perhaps was
responsible for this veritable barf-o-rama.
If, indeed, there has been a real increase in Blair Witch in-theatre
vomiting, controlling of course for numbers of people who actually are
seeing the film and a whole host of other factors, this could lend itself
to a discussion of motion sickness and agreement between visual input and
sensory information from the vestibular system. Same thing, no doubt, as
the discomfort some people experience in IMAX films (or, for those of us
old enough to remember, Cinerama) in which the visual field is filled with,
e.g., the view from a plane as it swoops through the Grand Canyon. (Any
evidence that IMAX theatres see an increase in vomiting in their patrons
when they show films with a lot of movement vs. films that have more static
views?)
It also might suggest some interesting possibilities for a student research
project (though there may be some difficulties in getting IRB approval for
a project in which the DV is "latency to vomiting"....).
Bob
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Robert T. Herdegen III
Department of Psychology
Hampden-Sydney College
Hampden-Sydney, VA 23943
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