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The Stars at Noon review: A 'beguiling, immersive film'laire Denis is one of the most beloved filmmakers in internationa...
26/05/2022

The Stars at Noon review: A 'beguiling, immersive film'
laire Denis is one of the most beloved filmmakers in international art-house cinema, but in a career that has stretched across three decades, her films haven't crossed over to a mainstream English-speaking audience. The closest she got up until now was with High Life in 2018, a science-fiction horror drama starring Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche. Now she is at the Cannes Film Festival with The Stars at Noon, which would appear, at first glance, to be even closer to a commercial genre movie. Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Denis Johnson, this is a romantic thriller set in the tropics, with two hot young Hollywood stars, Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn, an undercurrent of danger, and so many torrid s*x scenes that it's quite a surprise when the actors have their clothes on.

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Johnson's novel was set in Nicaragua in 1984. The film version is set in the present day, with Covid tests and face masks in abundance, but Denis is deliberately vague about whether the characters are in Nicaragua or some other Central American country. Indeed, she's deliberately vague about most things. Qualley plays Trish, who was once an idealistic campaigning journalist, but now seems to be stuck in this cesspool (her words) with no job, no purpose, and no money except for what she gets by sleeping with various militia officers and government ministers. Her home is a motel on the crumbling outskirts of a city with a shortage of luxury goods, but no shortage of armed soldiers on every corner. "I'm going home tomorrow," she declares, "or the day after". You get the feeling that she's been saying that for a long time.

One night in the Inter-Continental Hotel bar, she spots Alwyn's character, Daniel, a brooding loner who claims to be working for an oil company, but keeps a gun stashed in his hotel bathroom. He wears a white suit which is obviously going to get a lot more stained and crumpled as the film goes on. Both Qualley and Alwyn are a little too fresh-faced and youthful to be the jaded, well-travelled lost souls they're supposed to be, but Qualley throws herself into the role with firecracker energy, and the gravel-voiced, chain-smoking Alwyn does a serviceable audition to be the next James Bond.

Oksana Linde and the forgotten pioneers of electronic musicThe recent release of an album 39 years in the making is part...
25/05/2022

Oksana Linde and the forgotten pioneers of electronic music
The recent release of an album 39 years in the making is part of a global movement shedding a light on women composers who have been overlooked, writes Allyson McCabe.
W
When she was 17 years old, Daphne Oram was told by the famous medium Leslie Flint that she was destined to become a great musician – a prophecy that led her to ditch plans to train for a career in nursing. Instead, Oram took a position as a music balancer with the BBC in 1943. She tested microphone input and output levels, and when musicians performed in wartime, she stood at the ready with a pre-recorded version of the music on the turntable, should the live broadcast be interrupted by the intrusion of enemy fire.

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By the mid-1940s, Oram started conducting sonic experiments after hours, composing a 1949 piece called Still Point for double orchestra, live electronics, and turntables. A bit too ahead of its time, it was rejected by the BBC, though Oram was promoted to studio manager. In 1957 she created the first commissioned piece of electronic music in BBC history shortly before co-founding the influential BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Recognising the potential for technology to create and express an entirely new musical language, she left the BBC in 1959 to establish her own studio where she invented "Oramics," a system to transform drawings into sounds via the transfer of etchings on to 35mm film stock.

The medical power of hypnosisHypnosis is emerging as a powerful medical treatment for pain, anxiety, PTSD and a range of...
24/05/2022

The medical power of hypnosis
Hypnosis is emerging as a powerful medical treatment for pain, anxiety, PTSD and a range of other conditions. Can it shake off its reputation as a stage magician's trick?
W
When David Spiegel was told his next patient was waiting for him, he didn't need to ask the room number. He could hear her wheezing from halfway down the hall.

Entering the patient's room, he saw a 16-year-old girl with red hair sitting bolt upright in bed, knuckles white, in the midst of an asthma attack. By her side, her mother was crying. It was the third time the girl had been hospitalised for asthma in as many months.

Spiegel was a medical student on a paediatric rotation at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts, US, in 1970. As part of his training, he was also taking a class in clinical hypnosis.

The young asthma patient's medical team had already tried to dilate her airways with injections of adrenaline. After two shots, the girl's attack was not subsiding. Spiegel didn't know what else to do. "Do you want to learn a breathing exercise?" he asked her.

She nodded, and so Spiegel hypnotised his first patient. Once the girl had entered the trance-like state characteristic of hypnosis, Spiegel was ready to make a suggestion – the "active ingredient" of hypnotic treatment, typically a carefully worded statement that will produce an involuntary response. But as the girl sat in bed, calm and focused, Spiegel wondered what suggestion he should make. They hadn't got to asthma in his hypnosis class yet.

"So I came up with something," Spiegel tells me, as he recalls the case. "I said, 'Each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier.'"

The improvisation worked. Within five minutes, the patient's wheezing had stopped and she was lying back in her bed, breathing comfortably. Her mother was no longer crying.

It was a formative encounter for doctor and patient. The girl grew up to train as a respiratory therapist, while Spiegel embarked on a career in clinical hypnosis. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to found the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University and, by his reckoning, hypnotise more than 7,000 patients.

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