Christopher Palma, Penn State

If you have visited an island like one of the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti or Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, you may have noticed how small these land masses appear against the vast Pacific Ocean. If you’re on Hawaii, the nearest island to you is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away, and the coast of the continental United States is more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away. To say these islands are secluded is an understatement.

For me, watching the movie “Moana” in 2016 was eye-opening. I knew that Polynesian people traveled between a number of Pacific islands, but seeing Moana set sail on a canoe made me realize exactly how small those boats are compared with what must have seemed like an endless ocean. Yet our fictional hero went on this journey anyway, like the countless real-life Polynesian voyagers upon which she is based.

As an astronomer, I have been teaching college students and visitors to our planetarium how to find stars in our sky for more than 20 years. As part of teaching appreciation for the beauty of the sky and the stars, I want to help people understand that if you know the stars well, you can never get lost.

U.S. Navy veterans learned the stars in their navigation courses, and European cultures used the stars to navigate, but the techniques of Polynesian wayfinding shown in Moana brought these ideas to a very wide audience.

The movie Moana gave me a new hook – pun not intended – for my planetarium shows and lessons on how to locate objects in the night sky. With “Moana 2” out now, I am excited to see even more astronomy on the big screen and to figure out how I can build new lessons using the ideas in the movie.

The North Star

Have you ever found the North Star, Polaris, in your sky? I try to spot it every time I am out observing, and I teach visitors at my shows to use the “pointer stars” in the bowl of the Big Dipper to find it. These two stars in the Big Dipper point you directly to Polaris.

If you are facing Polaris, then you know you are facing north. Polaris is special because it is almost directly above Earth’s North Pole, and so everyone north of the equator can see it year-round in exactly the same spot in their sky.

It’s a key star for navigation because if you measure its height above your horizon, that tells you how far you are north of Earth’s equator. For the large number of people who live near 40 degrees north of the equator, you will see Polaris about 40 degrees above your horizon.

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If you live in northern Canada, Polaris will appear higher in your sky, and if you live closer to the equator, Polaris will appear closer to the horizon. The other stars and constellations come and go with the seasons, though, so what you see opposite Polaris in the sky will change every month. https://www.youtube.com/embed/COHwfKusGbs?wmode=transparent&start=0 Look for the Big Dipper to find the North Star, Polaris.

You can use all of the stars to navigate, but to do that you need to know where to find them on every night of the year and at every hour of the night. So, navigating with stars other than Polaris is more complicated to learn.

Maui’s fishhook

At the end of June, around 11 p.m., a bright red star might catch your eye if you look directly opposite from Polaris. This is the star Antares, and it is the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion.

If you are a “Moana” fan like me and the others in my family, though, you may know this group of stars by a different name – Maui’s fishhook.

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, Scorpius may not fully appear above your horizon, but if you are on a Polynesian island, you should see all of the constellation rising in the southeast, hitting its highest point in the sky when it is due south, and setting in the southwest.

Astronomers and navigators can measure latitude using the height of the stars, which Maui and Moana did in the movie using their hands as measuring tools.

The easiest way to do this is to figure out how high Polaris is above your horizon. If you can’t see it at all, you must be south of the equator, but if you see Polaris 5 degrees (the width of three fingers at arm’s length) or 10 degrees above your horizon (the width of your full fist held at arm’s length), then you are 5 degrees or 10 degrees north of the equator.

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The other stars, like those in Maui’s fishhook, will appear to rise, set and hit their highest point at different locations in the sky depending on where you are on the Earth.

Polynesian navigators memorized where these stars would appear in the sky from the different islands they sailed between, and so by looking for those stars in the sky at night, they could determine which direction to sail and for how long to travel across the ocean.

Today, most people just pull out their phones and use the built-in GPS as a guide. Ever since “Moana” was in theaters, I see a completely different reaction to my planetarium talks about using the stars for navigation. By accurately showing how Polynesian navigators used the stars to sail across the ocean, Moana helps even those of us who have never sailed at night to understand the methods of celestial navigation.

The first “Moana” movie came out when my son was 3 years old, and he took an instant liking to the songs, the story and the scenery. There are many jokes about parents who dread having to watch a child’s favorite over and over again, but in my case, I fell in love with the movie too.

Since then, I have wanted to thank the storytellers who made this movie for being so careful to show the astronomy of navigation correctly. I also appreciated that they showed how Polynesian voyagers used the stars and other clues, such as ocean currents, to sail across the huge Pacific Ocean and land safely on a very small island thousands of miles from their home.

Christopher Palma, Teaching Professor, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Maria San Filippo, Emerson College

Writing during what seems – in retrospect – to have been the wildly carefree summer of 2019, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday lamented that “sex is disappearing from the big screen.”

Fast forward two years, and, improbably enough, it’s conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat who’s pleading for “sex and romance [to] make a comeback at the movies.”

Both commentators blame this sexual stagnation on what they see as an abstinence-only policy in Hollywood, fueled by the Weinstein effect on one hand and family-friendly franchise fever on the other, where libidinal energy has been sublimated into buff-yet-sexless superheroes. To Hornaday and Douthat, sexual prudence seems to be tipping into prudery.

Hornaday and Douthat are correct that the traditional sex scene – a tasteful “pas de deux” between glossy stars, typically straight and vanilla, presented as a spectacle for our visual pleasure – has become increasingly rare.

But after devoting hours to watching sex scenes as research for my book “Provocauteurs and Provocations: Selling Sex in 21st Century Media,” I can reassure the randy and romantic among us that sex onscreen isn’t disappearing. Far from it.

Instead, over the last decade, it’s simply changed – and mostly for the better.

What’s hot: honesty and humor

Today’s sex scenes are first and foremost fun – as ideally sex itself should be – and emphasize the truthful over the tasteful.

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In some cases, you’ll see likable, relatable characters revealing perverse predilections, such as the all-consuming hots that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s protagonist in the TV series “Fleabag” has for a clergyman she dubs “Hot Priest.” Or when Kathryn Hahn’s character in Joey Soloway’s directorial debut “Afternoon Delight” drunkenly confesses to her gal pals that she’s “masturbated to that scene for two decades.” The scene she’s describing? The gang rape from “The Accused.” What’s more, her friends agree it’s hot.

Other moments make for embarrassing yet endearing waypoints en route to real intimacy. In Desiree Akhavan’s “The Bisexual,” a bout of postcoital queefing cracks up a couple and dispels the awkwardness of their morning after. And in a carnal scene from Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” neither sanitary products nor a blood clot manages to kill the moment. It’s the latest woman-created show – joining “Girls”, “GLOW” and “I Love Dick” – to shatter the taboo against mentioning, much less showing, menstruation during sex.

Other filmmakers bulldoze the boundaries of which bodies the culture industry deems fit to depict. For this we have “Girls” creator Lena Dunham largely to thank; the actress famously insisted on baring all in the face of brutal fat shaming and portraying her show’s privileged protagonists’ sexual escapades in all their cringe-inducing candor.

Alongside defying the opposition and outrage meted out to artworks or artists deemed obscene or unattractive, some filmmakers have sought to redefine the sex scene altogether.

In my view, some of the most arousing sex scenes put to celluloid are ones where clothing stays put and verbal foreplay takes center stage. In “Laurel Canyon” and “Take This Waltz” – again, works created by women – would-be philanderers engage in dirty talk as a means to sublimate their desire, but in such smoldering terms as to arouse the viewer. https://www.youtube.com/embed/C_8fbYOtG90?wmode=transparent&start=0 Sexually charged dialogue permeates ‘Take This Waltz.’

Romcom’s morning after

While not clinching my case that the sex scene is flourishing, these films repudiate Douthat’s assertion that there’s “a cultural void where romance used to be.”

It’s all part of redefining what romance looks like on screen.

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And I don’t mean merely making the couplings and casting more inclusive: “Crazy Rich Asians” relies on the same Cinderella-style premise as “Pretty Woman.” I’m talking about the sunsets-and-soulmates wish fulfillment fantasies that, for decades, served as the template for most romantic comedies: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.

As my new edited collection “After ‘Happily Ever After’: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age” points out, recent films like “Appropriate Behavior,” “Before Midnight,” “Medicine for Melancholy” and the Netflix series “Love” rejuvenate the romantic comedy genre by actually addressing the realities and complexities of intimacy.

In these works, issues of coming out, growing old, being Black and staying sober are what drive the plots – and true love doesn’t conquer all.

Queering the scene

Regrettably, outside of art cinema, queer male characters rarely get naked or have sex onscreen. But given that straight sex on screen got a huge head start on queer sex, it’s no surprise that same-sex couples aren’t getting it on with gusto at the multiplex.

Queer male intimacy more often finds mainstream success by inviting viewers to relish unrequited romance in films like “Weekend,” “Moonlight” and “God’s Own Country.” Even films focused on queer women are getting in on the swoon-worthiness of not getting off, a phenomenon mocked by Saturday Night Live’s recent parody “Lesbian Period Drama.”

In some cases, queer filmmakers have stretched the boundaries of the sex scene by exchanging explicit sex acts for erotic insinuation, as with the suggestive shots of one woman’s hand penetrating the other’s armpit in Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” or the infamous scene of Armie Hammer’s character slurping cum from a hollowed-out peach in “Call Me by Your Name.”

Safer is … sexier?

An outgrowth of the #MeToo era is the on-set intimacy coordinator – a professional trained to ensure that safe practices are in place when shooting sex scenes. In many ways, their presence is long overdue in an on-set environment where nudity quotas were, for a time, the norm.

Rather than delivering a cold shower for spectators, these more ethically and safely executed scenes are arguably sexier – perhaps in part because the performers feel safer and less inhibited, and perhaps because viewers might feel less morally compromised while watching them.

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As in real life, consent is what makes scenes of sexual degradation and endangerment hot. A film like Jane Campion’s “In the Cut,” in which Meg Ryan’s character is clearly heard consenting to having rough sex with Mark Ruffalo’s character, is exemplary in this regard. So, too, are the intimacy-coordinated sex scenes in last year’s “Normal People,” along with those in “Duck Butter,” which even gave the performers the opportunity to co-script the scenes themselves.

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Though I find that Hornaday’s and Douthat’s laments leave out a lot, I share their view that preaching abstinence takes a blinkered approach to art, as to life. The repercussions of rendering sex invisible – unseen and unacknowledged – aren’t just aesthetic. In times of political division and social unrest, sexual freedoms and sexual minorities are more strictly regulated and persecuted.

This threat of silencing makes it all the more important that filmmakers continue screening and – as radical sex theorist Gayle Rubin titled her landmark 1984 essay – “thinking sex.”

So far, filmmakers are meeting the challenge.

Maria San Filippo, Associate Professor of Visual and Media Arts, Emerson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Holly Willis, University of Southern California

Type text into AI image and video generators, and you’ll often see outputs of unusual, sometimes creepy, pictures.

In a way, this is a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are wielding this aesthetic to create a new storytelling art form.

The tools, such as Midjourney to generate images, Runway and Sora to produce videos, and Luma AI to create 3D objects, are relatively cheap or free to use. They allow filmmakers without access to major studio budgets or soundstages to make imaginative short films for the price of a monthly subscription.

I’ve studied these new works as the co-director of the AI for Media & Storytelling studio at the University of Southern California.

Surveying the increasingly captivating output of artists from around the world, I partnered with curators Jonathan Wells and Meg Grey Wells to produce the Flux Festival, a four-day showcase of experiments in AI filmmaking, in November 2024.

While this work remains dizzyingly eclectic in its stylistic diversity, I would argue that it offers traces of insight into our contemporary world. I’m reminded that in both literary and film studies, scholars believe that as cultures shift, so do the way we tell stories.

With this cultural connection in mind, I see five visual trends emerging in film.

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1. Morphing, blurring imagery

In her “NanoFictions” series, the French artist Karoline Georges creates portraits of transformation. In one short, “The Beast,” a burly man mutates from a two-legged human into a hunched, skeletal cat, before morphing into a snarling wolf.

The metaphor – man is a monster – is clear. But what’s more compelling is the thrilling fluidity of transformation. There’s a giddy pleasure in seeing the figure’s seamless evolution that speaks to a very contemporary sensibility of shapeshifting across our many digital selves. https://www.youtube.com/embed/on1K_xXcjW0?wmode=transparent&start=0 Karoline Georges’ short film ‘The Beast.’

This sense of transformation continues in the use of blurry imagery that, in the hands of some artists, becomes an aesthetic feature rather than a vexing problem.

Theo Lindquist’s “Electronic Dance Experiment #3,” for example, begins as a series of rapid-fire shots showing flashes of nude bodies in a soft smear of pastel colors that pulse and throb. Gradually it becomes clear that this strange fluidity of flesh is a dance. But the abstraction in the blur offers its own unique pleasure; the image can be felt as much as it can be seen.

2. The surreal

Thousands of TikTok videos demonstrate how cringey AI images can get, but artists can wield that weirdness and craft it into something transformative. The Singaporean artist known as Niceaunties creates videos that feature older women and cats, riffing on the concept of the “auntie” from Southeast and East Asian cultures.

In one recent video, the aunties let loose clouds of powerful hairspray to hold up impossible towers of hair in a sequence that grows increasingly ridiculous. Even as they’re playful and poignant, the videos created by Niceaunties can pack a political punch. They comment on assumptions about gender and age, for example, while also tackling contemporary issues such as pollution.

On the darker side, in a music video titled “Forest Never Sleeps,” the artist known as Doopiidoo offers up hybrid octopus-women, guitar-playing rats, rooster-pigs and a wood-chopping ostrich-man. The visual chaos is a sweet match for the accompanying death metal music, with surrealism returning as a powerful form.

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3. Dark tales

The often-eerie vibe of so much AI-generated imagery works well for chronicling contemporary ills, a fact that several filmmakers use to unexpected effect.

In “La Fenêtre,” Lucas Ortiz Estefanell of the AI agency SpecialGuestX pairs diverse image sequences of people and places with a contemplative voice-over to ponder ideas of reality, privacy and the lives of artificially generated people. At the same time, he wonders about the strong desire to create these synthetic worlds. “When I first watched this video,” recalls the narrator, “the meaning of the image ceased to make sense.”

In the music video titled “Closer,” based on a song by Iceboy Violet and nueen, filmmaker Mau Morgó captures the world-weary exhaustion of Gen Z through dozens of youthful characters slumbering, often under the green glow of video screens. The snapshot of a generation that has come of age in the era of social media and now artificial intelligence, pictured here with phones clutched close to their bodies as they murmur in their sleep, feels quietly wrenching.

4. Nostalgia

Sometimes filmmakers turn to AI to capture the past.

Rome-based filmmaker Andrea Ciulu uses AI to reimagine 1980s East Coast hip-hop culture in “On These Streets,” which depicts the city’s expanse and energy through breakdancing as kids run through alleys and then spin magically up into the air.

Ciulu says that he wanted to capture New York’s urban milieu, all of which he experienced at a distance, from Italy, as a kid. The video thus evokes a sense of nostalgia for a mythic time and place to create a memory that is also hallucinatory. https://www.youtube.com/embed/FKTyGJar-dE?wmode=transparent&start=0 Andrea Ciulu’s short film ‘On These Streets.’

Similarly, David Slade’s “Shadow Rabbit” borrows black-and-white imagery reminiscent of the 1950s to show small children discovering miniature animals crawling about on their hands. In just a few seconds, Slade depicts the enchanting imagination of children and links it to generated imagery, underscoring AI’s capacities for creating fanciful worlds.

5. New times, new spaces

In his video for the song “The Hardest Part” by Washed Out, filmmaker Paul Trillo creates an infinite zoom that follows a group of characters down the seemingly endless aisle of a school bus, through the high school cafeteria and out onto the highway at night. The video perfectly captures the zoominess of time and the collapse of space for someone young and in love haplessly careening through the world.

The freewheeling camera also characterizes the work of Montreal-based duo Vallée Duhamel, whose music video “The Pulse Within” spins and twirls, careening up and around characters who are cut loose from the laws of gravity.

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In both music videos, viewers experience time and space as a dazzling, topsy-turvy vortex where the rules of traditional time and space no longer apply.

Right now, in a world where algorithms increasingly shape everyday life, many works of art are beginning to reflect how intertwined we’ve become with computational systems.

What if machines are suggesting new ways to see ourselves, as much as we’re teaching them to see like humans?

Holly Willis, Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Looking for an entertainment experience that transcends the ordinary? Look no further than STM Daily News Blog’s vibrant Entertainment section. Immerse yourself in the captivating world of indie films, streaming and podcasts, movie reviews, music, expos, venues, and theme and amusement parks. Discover hidden cinematic gems, binge-worthy series and addictive podcasts, gain insights into the latest releases with our movie reviews, explore the latest trends in music, dive into the vibrant atmosphere of expos, and embark on thrilling adventures in breathtaking venues and theme parks. Join us at STM Entertainment and let your entertainment journey begin! https://stmdailynews.com/category/entertainment/

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