intellectual vanities… about close to everything

People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.

Researchers at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.

“It’s interesting as the task didn’t involve any kind of problem solving,” says Fredrik Ullén at Karolinska Institutet, who led the study with Guy Madison at Umeå University. “Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity.”

According to Fredrik Ullén, the results suggest that the rhythmic accuracy in brain activity observable when the person just maintains a steady beat is also important to the problem-solving capacity that is measured with intelligence tests.

“We know that accuracy at millisecond level in neuronal activity is critical to information processing and learning processes,” he says.

They also demonstrated a correlation between high intelligence, a good ability to keep time, and a high volume of white matter in the parts of the brain’s frontal lobes involved in problem solving, planning and managing time.

“All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides,” says Fredrik Ullén.

J Neurosci. 2008 Apr 16;28(16):4238-43.

Intelligence and variability in a simple timing task share neural substrates in the prefrontal white matter.

Ullén F, Forsman L, Blom O, Karabanov A, Madison G.

Neuropediatric Research Unit Q2:07, Department of Woman and Child Health, Karolinska Institutet, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden. fredrik.ullen@ki.se

General intelligence is correlated with the mean and variability of reaction time in elementary cognitive tasks, as well as with performance on temporal judgment and discrimination tasks. This suggests a link between the temporal accuracy of neural activity and intelligence. However, it has remained unclear whether this link reflects top-down mechanisms such as attentional control and cognitive strategies or basic neural properties that influence both abilities. Here, we investigated whether millisecond variability in a simple, automatic timing task, isochronous tapping, correlates with intellectual performance and, using voxel-based morphometry, whether these two tasks share neuroanatomical substrates. Stability of tapping and intelligence were correlated and related to regional volume in overlapping right prefrontal white matter regions. These results suggest a bottom-up explanation of the link between temporal stability and intellectual performance, in which more extensive prefrontal connectivity underlies individual differences in both variables.

The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries. More than 2000 years ago Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.

And the so-called musica universalis or “music of the spheres” emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies — the sun, moon and planets — could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors — Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University — have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called “geometrical music theory” that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into “families.” They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way “x” and “y” coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

Different types of categorization produce different geometrical spaces, and reflect the different ways in which musicians over the centuries have understood music. This achievement, they expect, will allow researchers to analyze and understand music in much deeper and more satisfying ways.

The work represents a significant departure from other attempts to quantify music, according to Rachel Wells Hall of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. In an accompanying essay, she writes that their effort, “stands out both for the breadth of its musical implications and the depth of its mathematical content.”

The method, according to its authors, allows them to analyze and compare many kinds of Western (and perhaps some non-Western) music. (The method focuses on Western-style music because concepts like “chord” are not universal in all styles.) It also incorporates many past schemes by music theorists to render music into mathematical form.

“The music of the spheres isn’t really a metaphor — some musical spaces really are spheres,” said Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music at Princeton. “The whole point of making these geometric spaces is that, at the end of the day, it helps you understand music better. Having a powerful set of tools for conceptualizing music allows you to do all sorts of things you hadn’t done before.”

Like what?

“You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys,” he said. “You could create new kinds of visualization tools — imagine going to a classical music concert where the music was being translated visually. We could change the way we educate musicians. There are lots of practical consequences that could follow from these ideas.”

“But to me,” Tymoczko added, “the most satisfying aspect of this research is that we can now see that there is a logical structure linking many, many different musical concepts. To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries.”

Understanding music, the authors write, is a process of discarding information. For instance, suppose a musician plays middle “C” on a piano, followed by the note “E” above that and the note “G” above that. Musicians have many different terms to describe this sequence of events, such as “an ascending C major arpeggio,” “a C major chord,” or “a major chord.” The authors provide a unified mathematical framework for relating these different descriptions of the same musical event.

The trio describes five different ways of categorizing collections of notes that are similar, but not identical. They refer to these musical resemblances as the “OPTIC symmetries,” with each letter of the word “OPTIC” representing a different way of ignoring musical information — for instance, what octave the notes are in, their order, or how many times each note is repeated. The authors show that five symmetries can be combined with each other to produce a cornucopia of different musical concepts, some of which are familiar and some of which are novel.

In this way, the musicians are able to reduce musical works to their mathematical essence.

Once notes are translated into numbers and then translated again into the language of geometry the result is a rich menagerie of geometrical spaces, each inhabited by a different species of geometrical object. After all the mathematics is done, three-note chords end up on a triangular donut while chord types perch on the surface of a cone.

The broad effort follows upon earlier work by Tymoczko in which he developed geometric models for selected musical objects.

The method could help answer whether there are new scales and chords that exist but have yet to be discovered.

“Have Western composers already discovered the essential and most important musical objects?” Tymoczko asked. “If so, then Western music is more than just an arbitrary set of conventions. It may be that the basic objects of Western music are fantastically special, in which case it would be quite difficult to find alternatives to broadly traditional methods of musical organization.”

The tools for analysis also offer the exciting possibility of investigating the differences between musical styles.

“Our methods are not so great at distinguishing Aerosmith from the Rolling Stones,” Tymoczko said. “But they might allow you to visualize some of the differences between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And they certainly help you understand more deeply how classical music relates to rock or is different from atonal music.”
Science 18 April 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5874, pp. 346 - 348
DOI: 10.1126/science.1153021

1 College of Music, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
2 Music Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
3 Music Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.

Ensemble, c’est tout (2007)

Director: Claude Berri

Writers: Claude Berri , Anna Gavalda (novel)

Release Date: 16 August 2007 (Germany)
Genre: Drama / Romance
Plot Keywords: Doctor / Elderly Woman / Stuttering / Neighbor / Inheritance
——————————————————————————–
(Cast overview, first billed only)

Audrey Tautou … Camille Fauque
Guillaume Canet … Franck
Laurent Stocker … Philibert Marquet de la Tubelière
Françoise Bertin … Paulette
Alain Sachs … Medecin du travail
Firmine Richard … Mamadou
Béatrice Michel … Carine
Kahena Saighi … Samia
Hélène Surgère … Yvonne
Alain Stern … Chef restaurant
Halima Guizani … Infirmière
Juliette Arnaud … Aurélia
Danièle Lebrun … La mère de Camille
Li-Ting Huang … Serveuse
Madeleine Cofano … La coiffeuse

——————————————————————————–

Also Known As: Hunting and Gathering (Europe: English title)
Runtime: Germany:97 min (European Film Market)
Country: France
Language: French

A fabric like of dreams: three slightly excentrical, nonetheless highly gifted late-twens (or early thirties?) bumping into eachother and trying to ease their somewhat melancholical megalopolis life in a anytime-nowhere that looks amazingly like Paris. “Together one is less lonely” - as the German Title suggests. Claude Berri, adapting a novel by Anna Gavalda, throws a struggling young artist who works as an office cleaner at night, a young aristocrat misfit, a cook, and an elderly grandmother into an apparently normal chaos.

I cannot say anything about the dialogs in French, but in German they are often trivial or even pathetic. What worked well, is the big shot of neuroticism placed into the movie, seemingly distilled from the novel. Camille (Audrey Tautou) with Amelie-Eyes in close-up, is looking for happiness in the big city djungle. On top of her cleaning job she is punished with her ever quizzical mother, who does not know better but to criticize her daughter’s eating habits. (Their conversations are longer, but that is roughly the gist of them). Returning from one of those meetings with her mother, Camille meets Philibert (Laurent Stocker). He stutters, and his manners are somewhat bizarr, which the viewer is probably meant to take as a clue for an extraordinary and fantastic event. As such, the two do agree to dine together - yeah, just like that. Later, as the fragile girl is catching a cold, it is only natural that the bizarr guy stumbles into her house by chaste and chivalrous coincidence, and brings her to his more lavish abodes, shared already by his somewhat grumpy roommate Franck (Guillaume Canet). Franck is a chef in a noble restaurant, and has an old granny to look after, because she broke her leg. He feels, who would be amazed, bitter about that empty life of his, or so he tells is tearful grandmother. As in opposition to the other’s he compensates for this melancholy with sex and drugs. (His musical preferences are the only good bits of music in the whole musette-ish soundtrack in bad Yann-Tiersen-style, b.t.w.). Now the scene is set for some clashes and mutual idiosyncrasies, that are, naturally, all overcome by doing good. Hence the idiosyncrasies turn into deep mutual bonds and so the now much happier trefoil orchestrates sick grannie’s move into the appartment, and next back into her own house, where she dies. Catharsis: the aristocrat’s lavish abodes are sold - and stretta: the stuttering aristocrat stops selling postcards and, having become a successful standup comedian, he moves with his new girlfriend. The grumpy cook and the thorny artist do move away from Paris, and take over a bistro. They all live there happily ever after and produce babies in between hearty customer service. The aforementioned grandmother was dead anyway. Love, success as recompensation for life’s lack of justice so far… So much about this.

That this sounds like Franck himself compared to a lovely, charming and nonchalant movie, is certainly one of Berri’s biggest achievements. But more than once the boundaries of charme and nonchalance are overridden by rightaway sirupous kitsch. The characters are condensed into something beyond reality, and hence beyond real sympathy too. Candid dialogues do not make up for shallow stories.

Who likes anytime-nowhere stories with happy end, is sure better off with Chocolat (2000). It has it all, and is just a charming little nothing. Neither Amelie nor Ensemble… seem to have added much to this.

Director:

Greg Marcks

Writer:

Greg Marcks

Release Date:

1 September 2005 (Germany) more

Genre:

Comedy / Crime / Drama / Thriller more

Tagline:

Fate can change in seconds more

Plot Outline:

The events leading up to an 11:14 PM car crash, from five very different perspectives. more

Furious, brilliant, full of black humour and goofy surprises, the directing debut of Greg Marcks is hard to beat. Like MEMENTO or IRREVERSIBEL it tells a story about la forza del destino in five different strings of events, that finally are ingeniously woven together.
Along with this are coming great actors: Hilary Swank, Rachael Leigh Cook, Tom Hanks’ son Colin Hanks, Henry Thomas, Patrick Swayze and Barbara Hershey.

Admitted that in 20 minutes the figures are accomplishing an awfull lot of things, like clearing crime scenes, make car trips, run back and forth, and even lose their penis. Yet, I do LOVE this clever little black comedy, about, in the end, nothing but a tragic accident during sexual intercourse.

Saw it tonight - a new version of the brother Grimm’s fantasy world or just crap? Terry Gilliam’s answer to this question costs dearly: 80 Mio. $ for the story of two fake “ghostbusters”, together with their “futuristic” special gear, have to face a real curse one day. Wilhelm (Matt Damon) und Jacob (Heath Ledger) stumble rather colourless through a baroque pseudo-middle age full of amiable details. There is a faint smell of Monty Python upon it, as has been often noticed.

Gilliam uses more a warehouse of motives from his earlier works, as Jabberwocky (1977) or Time Bandits (1981), than really originally rendering a fairy tale world. Spooky perspectives, bizarre torture instruments - that look like a disney land version of Piranesi’s Carceri - and rarely any real comical elements make a luke warm bore, instead of a creative movie.

Devilish stepmother cliché from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937 with Rapunzel (Monica Bellucci), centers a plot grippy like mashed potatoes. Intertextuality, the kafkaesque, whatever might help cloth this miserable skeleton of a story, is consequently amiss.

Stale as the story, is the acting too. Matt Damon has nothing to render, and does not even try. Heath Ledger has a bit more cute figure (Jake) to interpret, but is clearly not facing any challenge with it. Peter Stormare, known from Fargo (1996), is the bearer, not of light, but at least of humour as an excentric torture specialist of ancient italian provenance. Mediocre blockbuster with technical perfectionism.

Brothers Grimm (The Brothers Grimm); Czechia/ USA 2005; 118 minutes, Director: Terry Gilliam; Writer: Ehren Kruger; Producers: Daniel Bobker, Charles Roven; Starring: Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Peter Stormare, Lena Headey, Jonathan Pryce
Start: 6.10.2005

Erscheinungstermin: 17.8.2007

Another Diva prey to the seemingly irresistible temptation to sing Castrato-Arias out of her register. Fascinating recital with (perhaps a bit too) much impetus, dramatic coloraturas and annyoing respiration technique. Beyond this M. Kozena sparkles with all possibilites of carefully executed ornaments and subtle colours.

The Venice Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Andrea Marcón,is ways more convincing, although daring in the reading of Haendel’s scores. Soloist and orchestra work together at best probably in the first aria of the selection: Alcina’s Ah mio cor. The rest is at best what it probably was meant to be: peculiar, even very much so.

Fischer Tb., 2003, 556 Seiten, €9,90, ISBN-3596156602, http://www.fischerverlage.de

The novel My Name is Red, by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, to my mind focuses on two ways of seeing as its frame of reference. Beyond its qualities as a detective or love story, unfolding during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III in nine snowy winter days of 1591 - which I personally find rather moderate - it highlights issues of representation in a comparative context. Pamuk’s characters confront each other on ways of seeing in sixteenth-century Istanbul, by then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The visual narratives of Ottoman miniature painting are elaborated in comparison with the contemporary Renaissance art, unfolding the differences in the depiction of faces in particular.

 My Name is Red, instead of being very captivating for the identity of a murderer, it is ways more fascinating for the reason of murder, which is none other than the multidimensional confrontation between icon and image, tradition and innovation, idealism and realism in fine arts. In this sense, the story is also a contemporary tale, dealing with the concepts of representation and resemblance, iconoclasm and fundamentalism in the context of ‘East and West’.

Venice serves the pivot of the compass defining the scope of this presentation, joining Netherlandish painting and Ottoman miniature tradition at a common juncture. Both ways of seeing will be traced through the sixteenth century, from Hieronymus Bosch to Pieter Bruegel on the one hand and from Bihzad (the master of Persian miniature) to Nakkas Osman (the chief miniaturist of the Ottoman Palace during the second half of the second century) on the other.

Style in visual narration is treated in this novel as a reflection of seeing and imaging everything in its uniqueness and is contrasted with the tradition of Islamic book illumination where all objects appear to be cast into rigidly ruled iconografic molds, rendering the object possibly as in Allah’s own view (e.g. femaile beauty rendered invariably with chinese facial traits). Western concerns with individuality and the uniqueness of the point of view as revealed in one-point-perspective, suggests it is an indispensable aspect of style. In that sense, My Name is Red highlights portraiture in the visual arts as a reflection of character in visual narration; reflecting both the subject and the artist whose individuality is represented in the style of painting. For this, Pamuk’s novel, constructed as a symphony of many different voices, is well-suited in its form.

Yet another of those endless fMRI studies, this time using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an 18th-century composer, has gained insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it.

Still image from an animated clip of a subject’s fMRI illustrating how cognitive activity increases in anticipation of the transition points between movements. (Credit: Image courtesy of Stanford University Medical Center)

The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements - when seemingly nothing was happening.

Beyond understanding the process of listening to music, their work has far-reaching implications for how human brains sort out events in general.

The researchers caught glimpses of the brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which gives a dynamic image showing which parts of the brain are working during a given activity. The goal of the study was to look at how the brain sorts out events, but the research also revealed that musical techniques used by composers 200 years ago help the brain organize incoming information.

“In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested,” said the paper’s senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.

“I’m not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner,” Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain’s attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

“These transitions between musical movements offer an ideal setting to study the dynamically changing landscape of activity in the brain during this segmentation process,” said Devarajan Sridharan, a neurosciences graduate student trained in Indian percussion and first author of the article.

No previous study, to the researchers’ knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. To explore this area, the team chose pieces of music that contained several movements, which are self-contained sections that break a single work into segments. They chose eight symphonies by the English late-baroque period composer William Boyce (1711-79), because his music has a familiar style but is not widely recognized, and it contains several well-defined transitions between relatively short movements.

The study focused on movement transitions - when the music slows down, is punctuated by a brief silence and begins the next movement. These transitions span a few seconds and are obvious to even a non-musician - an aspect critical to their study, which was limited to participants with no formal music training.

The researchers attempted to mimic the everyday activity of listening to music, while their subjects were lying prone inside the large, noisy chamber of an MRI machine. Ten men and eight women entered the MRI scanner with noise-reducing headphones, with instructions to simply listen passively to the music.

In the analysis of the participants’ brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain. They found what they called a “striking” difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

In this foundational study, the researchers conclude that dynamic changes seen in the fMRI scans reflect the brain’s evolving responses to different phases of a symphony. An event change - the movement transition signaled by the termination of one movement, a brief pause, followed by the initiation of a new movement - activates the first network, called the ventral fronto-temporal network. Then a second network, the dorsal fronto-parietal network, turns the spotlight of attention to the change and, upon the next event beginning, updates working memory.

“The study suggests one possible adaptive evolutionary purpose of music,” said Jonathan Berger, PhD, professor of music and a musician who is another co-author of the study. Music engages the brain over a period of time, he said, and the process of listening to music could be a way that the brain sharpens its ability to anticipate events and sustain attention.

According to the researchers, their findings expand on previous functional brain imaging studies of anticipation, which is at the heart of the musical experience. Even non-musicians are actively engaged, at least subconsciously, in tracking the ongoing development of a musical piece, and forming predictions about what will come next. Typically in music, when something will come next is known, because of the music’s underlying pulse or rhythm, but what will occur next is less known, they said.

Having a mismatch between what listeners expect to hear vs. what they actually hear - for example, if an unrelated chord follows an ongoing harmony - triggers similar ventral regions of the brain. Once activated, that region partitions the deviant chord as a different segment with distinct boundaries.

The results of the study “may put us closer to solving the cocktail party problem - how it is that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room of many conversations,” said one of the co-authors, Daniel Levitin, PhD, associate professor of psychology and music from McGill University, who has written a popular book called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

These findings will be published in the Aug. 2 issue of Neuron.

Chris Chafe, PhD, the Duca Family Professor of Music at Stanford, also contributed to this work. This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation, the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Fund, the National Institutes of Health and a Stanford graduate fellowship. The fMRI analysis was performed at the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory.

Neuron, Vol 55, 521-532, 02 August 2007

Neural Dynamics of Event Segmentation in Music: Converging Evidence for Dissociable Ventral and Dorsal Networks

Devarajan Sridharan,¹,², Daniel J. Levitin,⁴ Chris H. Chafe,⁵ Jonathan Berger,⁵ and Vinod Menon¹,²,³,

¹ Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
² Program in Neuroscience, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
³ Neuroscience Institute at Stanford, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
⁴ Departments of Psychology and Music Theory, School of Computer Science, and Program in Behavioural Neuroscience, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
⁵ Department of Music and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

Corresponding author
Devarajan Sridharan
dsridhar@stanford.edu

Corresponding author
Vinod Menon
menon@stanford.edu

Summary

The real world presents our sensory systems with a continuous stream of undifferentiated information. Segmentation of this stream at event boundaries is necessary for object identification and feature extraction. Here, we investigate the neural dynamics of event segmentation in entire musical symphonies under natural listening conditions. We isolated time-dependent sequences of brain responses in a 10 s window surrounding transitions between movements of symphonic works. A strikingly right-lateralized network of brain regions showed peak response during the movement transitions when, paradoxically, there was no physical stimulus. Model-dependent and model-free analysis techniques provided converging evidence for activity in two distinct functional networks at the movement transition: a ventral fronto-temporal network associated with detecting salient events, followed in time by a dorsal fronto-parietal network associated with maintaining attention and updating working memory. Our study provides direct experimental evidence for dissociable and causally linked ventral and dorsal networks during event segmentation of ecologically valid auditory stimuli.

Martin Stadtfeld

Bei der Form der Fuge verhält es sich im Gegensatz zur verbreiteten Meinung um die bis zur Neuzeit freieste Form der Komposition. Wohl gerade deswegen fordert sie wie keine zweite die Meisterschaft de Komponisten heraus. Einer Unzahl teils absurder Raffinessen wie Themenumkehrungen, -spiegelungen, -verlangsamungen, -verkürzungen (und dies alles womöglich noch kombiniert miteinander) steht die weitestgehend leere Vorgabe gegenüber.

Die Fuge lässt ihren Verfasser (oder sollte man sagen Bezwinger?) mit sich selbst allein, sie scheint zu fragen: „Wie viele Stimmen kannst Du in vollkommener Unabhängigkeit umeinander kreisen lassen?“ Oder: „Wie viele Leben kannst Du erschaffen?“

…ein Bach durchschritt diese freieste, diese einsamste Form so leichten Schrittes, dass es einen frösteln macht.

…Die Fuge jedoch ist die größte Kunstform, denn sie spielt allein in der Phantasie, ist lediglich abhängig von Geist und Vision, unabhängig von Vorgabe und Effekt.

Bachs Fugen sind ein Spiegel des Universums in ihrer scheinbar greifbaren Unendlichkeit, zufälligen Wohlgeordnetheit und unantastbaren Emotionalität. Ein zum Schluss verlangsamtes Thema der es-Moll-Fuge mag uns vorkommen wie ein Sternbild, um das der Staub des Universums kreist., wir erfahren eine Verbindung zum Göttlichen, eine Art von Spiritualität, die keiner näheren Beschreibung bedarf – die Wahl des Instruments ist hierbei unmaßgeblich, denn Instrumente sind von Menschen gemacht.

After smaller parts in “Intimacy” and “Marie Antoinette”, Marianne Faithfull received twenty minutes of standing ovations after the premiere of “Irina Palm” during this year’s “Berlinale”. And duly so, as it is her breathtaking but retained acting that keeps this movie going.

60 years old Maggie needs money urgently. Her grandson is seriously ill in hospital, and the surgery that could save his life is way beyond what his parents can afford. She will have to come up with an idea soon if she is to give her son and daughter-in-law fresh hope. Desperate, Maggie finds herself responding to a temptingly lucrative job offer at a sex club. At “Sexy World”, the shy but sprightly widow meets the club’s charming manager, Miki (Miki Manojlovic), who bluntly introduces her to her tasks as a “hostess”. Her new colleague, Luisa, acquaints her friendly with the rules of the game and, before long, the conscientious Maggie becomes the much sought after and well-paid “Irina Palm”, rendering five minutes handjobs at a “glory hole”. Along with the cash, Maggie gains renewed self-confidence, realising that she’s not as old, unattractive and useless as she had believed herself to be. But then it transpires that Soho, where she renders her sexually hygienic services, is not a million miles away from the conservative suburb where Maggie lives, and her clandestine existence begins to raise the suspicions of both her son and her inquisitive neighbours alike, when Maggie comes up with the 6000 quid for her grandson’s treatment. But even when everything comes to light, Maggie refuses to let this get her down … But this emancipation is somewhat paradoxical: while her job is extremely other-directed, at the same time it teaches autonomy from dusty bourgeois conventions, where dignity (or the illusion of it) requires permanent struggle.

In the end, her son respects her decision, her grandson flies to Australia and Maggie lives with Miki happily in Soho.
End of story? Perhaps it is this surprisingly melodramatic happy end that should alarm the spectator about the movie’s subversiveness. What comes along as a comedy is in fact a bitter caricature of a miserable, relentless and bitter society, where all human relationships are rendered in terms of money and competition. This movie was made in UK, but it appears that it won’t take long before Germany or any other place of the globalised world could host it. It is real: a disease that is not covered by insurance can ruin one’s life in less than four months time.

Everything is subdued to a system of utilisation, human existence is instrumentalized. Who has nothing to offer but his hands, will sell his hands for wanking, even the left one, if the right one does not work anymore due to penis-arm problems. Sex becomes entirely depersonalised and an extravagant factory job for an aproned masturbation ferry — human existence trapped in social structures, conventions and behavioural patterns prostituting all and everything while its protagonists feel nothing but sneering contempt for what they consider perverted whores.

This awsome ethical exporation leads astonishingly to a happy end, as strange as a movie miracle can be. But perhaps is even that final kind of kitsch a critical turning point of the movie demonstrating that self-determination by increased alienation is a contradiction in itself? The politically not correct and romantic tragicomedy turnes into a bitter and satirical diatribe about political and social structures that are forcibly installed allover the globalised world. “Deregulation”, “liberalisation”, “flexibility” and “self-determination” in this system liberalise capital flow reducing individuals to simple variables within a deregulated growth of economy, and leaving no room for real self-determined agency. In this line of thought the movie presents the bitter teaching for the socially deprived and the HartzIV-pack grannies: learn some wanking and help yourself!