Her heyday was the nineteen-seventies, when she made "The Night Porter," and to watch "Ripley's Game" is to be transported back to the visual manners of that era: the glassy lighting, the faces denied all flattery by the camera, and scenes so deliberately locked and stilted that you wonder whether Cavani, like Fassbinder before her, is deriding a movie's obligation to show us a good time.
Play the game's special edition, as I am right now on PS3, and with a simple tap of the Select button, the screen shifts back to the visuals I remember from the Amiga.
Recent studies with both macaques and humans indicate that attentiveness crackles through the brain along vast, multifocal, transcortical loops, leaping to life in regions at the back of the brain, in the primary visual cortex that engages with the world, proceeding forward into frontal lobes where higher cognitive analysis occurs, and then doubling back to the primary visual centers.
The response enhancement in higher areas is also fed back to the lower visual areas where labeling with the enhanced response proceeds faster than would have been possible without the higher areas.
It's not just about design, it's about the experience of playing – with their excitable sound effects and visual flourishes, titles like Peggle and Bejewled hark back to the audio-visual feedback loops of those first arcade games; the strangely pleasing bleeps and blips that we all still recall.
Each of the images has its own narrative, and by inserting small human figures into each one, Jing Zhang creates a typography that take us back to the kind of visual exploration typical of our early years, making the viewer loose his or herself in the elaborate composition of these structures, forgetting that original goal was just to make an alternative typeface.
The mask alters the revelation in a fascinating way, both buffering and intensifying its dreadfulness, creating the conflicting desire to hang on every word while also pulling back to decipher the visual power and artifice of the scene.
It's a highly technical undertaking, with a gauze screen covering the front of the stage and a screen at the back to give the visuals an added depth and allow the team to create multi-layered video effects.
It's the one sequence in the film that I come back to the most because of the visual dichotomy between someone who gave into his inner bullshit, and the other who chose to use it for his betterment (by comparison anyway).
Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History is out in the UK from Titan Books on 16 October 2015.
In redesigning the game's protagonist, Nathan Spencer, Grin cited the characters Iceman from the movie Top Gun and Marty McFly from the Back to the Future series as visual influences in the update.
