In a new study, researchers set out to quantify the effect that "ephemeral phenomena, " like sunsets and sunrises, can have on people.
For the study, the researchers used computer graphics to show carefully controlled images of both urban and natural environments to more than 2, 500 participants. (Illustrative image) (Image credit: Pixabay)
Have you ever wondered why you marvel at sunrises and sunsets and why you get the sudden urge to pull out your smartphone to capture that magical moment when they happen? A group of researchers have set out to quantify the effect that fleeting events, like sunsets and sunrises, can have on people.
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Despite many research efforts aimed at examining the impact of nature on our mental health, most studies have assessed these effects under calm blue skies, according to the University of Exeter. Only a few research studies have actually considered how humans respond to variations in weather and the daily rhythms of the Sun. These are referred to as “ephemeral phenomena.”
The researchers set out to close this gap by using the latest computer graphics to show carefully controlled images of both urban and natural environments to more than 2, 500 participants. The participants found these scenes to be substantially more beautiful when they featured elements like sunrise and sunset than when they were viewed under sunny conditions at other times of the day.
Interestingly, the research also revealed that these ephemeral phenomena elicited awe. The feeling of awe is a difficult emotion to trigger, and research indicates that it has the potential to improve mood, enhance positive social behaviour, and increase positive emotions.
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Apart from sunrises and sunsets, the paper published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology also considered rarer events like rainbows, rainstorms and starry and moonlit skies. All of these phenomena altered the extent to which the participants experienced beauty and awe in different landscapes.
More importantly, these changes were also behind variations in how the environments were valued. The researchers assessed this by asking participants how much they would be willing to pay to experience each scene in the real world. They found that participants were prepared to pay a premium of nearly 10 per cent to visit a natural setting at sunrise compared to under blue skies.
According to the research team, this kind of added value is normally attributed to more permanent features like scenic lakes or historic buildings. This suggests that encouraging people to experience sunsets and sunrises could help boost well-being and could be used as part of green prescribing, where nature plays a therapeutic role in mental health treatment.B ack in the dark days when the UK Film Council was merrily throwing money at the shameful Sex Lives of the Potato Men, British film-making legend Terence Davies was finding it impossible to fund a screen adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel, Sunset Song, a hardscrabble tale of a young woman finding her identity – personal, national, spiritual – in rural northeast Scotland beneath the gathering clouds of the Great War. Despite the critical success of The House of Mirth, his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, Davies feared he might never trouble our cinema screens again. It wasn’t until his superb, low-budget love letter to Liverpool, Of Time and the City, became the unexpected toast of Cannes in 2008 that the skies started to brighten for our pre-eminent auteur. Now, with a well-received 2011 adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea under his belt and the Emily Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, already in the can, Davies’s long-delayed passion project finally reaches our screens. It has been worth the wait.
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, which he first encountered through the BBC’s 1971 TV serialisation, and succinctly summarised as being about “the power and cruelty of both family and nature”. So many elements from Grassic Gibbon’s novel – the first instalment in the beloved
Trilogy – resonate with the autobiographical themes explored in Davies’s own (trans)formative trilogy of early shorts, and subsequently in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. There is the abusive father, brilliantly played by Peter Mullan, who breathes both fury and pathos into the role of John Guthrie, a turn-of-the-century farming patriarch torn between the anger of devotion (he sings hymns while harvesting) and the demons of violence and lust (he beats his son and beds his wife “like a breeding sow”, the screams of sex and childbirth intermingled). There is the yearning female voice, Agyness Deyn providing internal monologue narration for Chris, who is torn between the beauty of the ancient Scottish land on which she toils, and the “sharp, clean and true” English words of an education that may yet take her away from all this. And there is unforgiving religion, from father’s belt to the damnation poured from the pulpit upon those (including Chris’s true love, Ewan) who have no enthusiasm for war, branded as “pro-German cowards” in league with an antichrist kaiser.
Most importantly, there is song, ringing out through the natural rustle of wind and bird and harvest, threatening to transform this drama into a musical, that purest of cinematic fantasias (no surprise that Davies cites
The Best View In Every State
As inspirational). When the Guthrie family move house to accommodate their ever expanding brood, they do so to the strains of Wayfaring Stranger hauntingly sung by Jennifer John. On her wedding night, Chris performs a keening rendition of Flowers of the Forest, the music of which is woven into the very fabric of Grassic Gibbon’s text. Later, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) sings a few line of Robert Burns’s The Lass That Made the Bed to Me, another song taken directly from the rhapsodic sacred source. Throughout, Davies’s aim remains true. He is perhaps the only film-maker in the world who could stage a tipsy rendition of Ladies of Spain without the slightest hint of a Spielberg reference (it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d never seen
What sings clearest, however, is Michael McDonough’s ravishing cinematography, a blend of 65mm celluloid stock and resiliently responsive digital that takes us from the darkened, coffee-coloured confines of candlelit interiors through glowing fields of gold and green and up into cloudy skies of blue, grey and white. There’s a touch of Terrence Malick as McDonough’s camera glides through verdant pastoral idylls (weather and funding variously led the production to Scotland, New Zealand and Luxembourg). Elsewhere we see hints of Vermeer as families huddle in semi-lit rooms, painterly compositions defined by an artist’s attention to detail. There are slow tracks and long pull-backs too – a Davies trademark – but McDonough brings his own sense of circling exploration, moving us forward even as the narrative folds back upon itself and once-loving men become brutalised beasts, crawling from the shadows, across floors and through mud, foreign and domestic.
Through it all, the land, like this exceptional director, endures. Davies is still sprightly as he turns 70, and I suspect his best work may be yet to come. Now that is something worth singing about.
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, which he first encountered through the BBC’s 1971 TV serialisation, and succinctly summarised as being about “the power and cruelty of both family and nature”. So many elements from Grassic Gibbon’s novel – the first instalment in the beloved
Trilogy – resonate with the autobiographical themes explored in Davies’s own (trans)formative trilogy of early shorts, and subsequently in Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. There is the abusive father, brilliantly played by Peter Mullan, who breathes both fury and pathos into the role of John Guthrie, a turn-of-the-century farming patriarch torn between the anger of devotion (he sings hymns while harvesting) and the demons of violence and lust (he beats his son and beds his wife “like a breeding sow”, the screams of sex and childbirth intermingled). There is the yearning female voice, Agyness Deyn providing internal monologue narration for Chris, who is torn between the beauty of the ancient Scottish land on which she toils, and the “sharp, clean and true” English words of an education that may yet take her away from all this. And there is unforgiving religion, from father’s belt to the damnation poured from the pulpit upon those (including Chris’s true love, Ewan) who have no enthusiasm for war, branded as “pro-German cowards” in league with an antichrist kaiser.
Most importantly, there is song, ringing out through the natural rustle of wind and bird and harvest, threatening to transform this drama into a musical, that purest of cinematic fantasias (no surprise that Davies cites
The Best View In Every State
As inspirational). When the Guthrie family move house to accommodate their ever expanding brood, they do so to the strains of Wayfaring Stranger hauntingly sung by Jennifer John. On her wedding night, Chris performs a keening rendition of Flowers of the Forest, the music of which is woven into the very fabric of Grassic Gibbon’s text. Later, Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) sings a few line of Robert Burns’s The Lass That Made the Bed to Me, another song taken directly from the rhapsodic sacred source. Throughout, Davies’s aim remains true. He is perhaps the only film-maker in the world who could stage a tipsy rendition of Ladies of Spain without the slightest hint of a Spielberg reference (it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d never seen
What sings clearest, however, is Michael McDonough’s ravishing cinematography, a blend of 65mm celluloid stock and resiliently responsive digital that takes us from the darkened, coffee-coloured confines of candlelit interiors through glowing fields of gold and green and up into cloudy skies of blue, grey and white. There’s a touch of Terrence Malick as McDonough’s camera glides through verdant pastoral idylls (weather and funding variously led the production to Scotland, New Zealand and Luxembourg). Elsewhere we see hints of Vermeer as families huddle in semi-lit rooms, painterly compositions defined by an artist’s attention to detail. There are slow tracks and long pull-backs too – a Davies trademark – but McDonough brings his own sense of circling exploration, moving us forward even as the narrative folds back upon itself and once-loving men become brutalised beasts, crawling from the shadows, across floors and through mud, foreign and domestic.
Through it all, the land, like this exceptional director, endures. Davies is still sprightly as he turns 70, and I suspect his best work may be yet to come. Now that is something worth singing about.
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