Jan 26 2025

1926 – Faust

1926 – Faust

Produced by Ufa, directed by F. W. Murnau. It stars Gösta Ekman as Faust, Emil Jannings as Mephisto and Camilla Horn as Gretchen. I watched it on YouTube here (did not like the horrible colorization there is on other places).

When I was an adolescent, it was typical that in the 13th year of school, you read the “Faust” by Goethe. I got out of it by reading 2 Thomas Mann books and I still regret it to this day. It may have been harder to interpret, but I am sure it would’ve given me more than that depressive German attitude that “Der Untertan” gave me, a good description, but so, so lost. In any case, reading the “Faust” is still on my backlist, but more like a project that “I’ll do someday” (yeah, right…). Everybody knows its main theme: Faust gets visited by Mephisto, an incarnation of the Devil which offers him youth, fame and fortune in exchange for his soul. Will he take that (Faustian) bargain?

So, with everybody discovering Murnau, because of the remake of Nosferatu, it was quite an easy decision to go with the Faust! It was his last German film at Ufa and is believed together with Nosferatu to be the height of German Expressionism in Film. Of course, having studied and having now worked in Potsdam for many years, the history of Ufa is present at all times. You see the imagery when visiting the Film Studios Babelsberg (the rides are horrible, but the studio and the history are great) or the Film Museum, so I went in to watch the movie knowing that.

The plot is as expected, though I did not know much about the Gretchen part of the story, which is Faust’s potential love story and the wringer she is put through in the last part of the movie. Things I liked in the movie were the artistic expression, like a ballet, almost like they were pausing the movie now and then to pose off, so that you could save the frame. The face contortions and mannerisms of Mephisto are purposively over the top, but I liked that very much. The film drags a bit in the middle, because they need to show the huge fall from grace that Gretchen has, so need to show her good, but boring life, but it distracts from the actual Faust story. Interestingly, the title cards in German were a bit hard to read, so sometimes I reverted to the English subtitles, whose translation was quite good.

In any case, the movie is as prescient today as it was in any time. In a week when during the Trump administration inauguration among the invited guests where the billionaires of tech companies, I was reminded of the quote by Lord Acton:

“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There is no bargain you make with the devil where you will do good in the end, even if that was your intention in the beginning. And that’s really what this techno super-elite has turned into, Faustian doppelgangers making deals with Trump, seeking eternal fountains of youth, telling themselves that they’re doing good in the world by inventing the next social media app. To assuage their guilt and looking for absolution, they donate a few millions, but are always baffled at why the people see them as evil. People, also in the movie, can sniff the wickedness in Faust a mile away. And so I can only recommend people watch the movie, the style may not be for everybody and the end message is cheesy. But just because it’s cheesy, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Jan 12 2025

1925 – Battleship Potemkin

2025 I was looking for a New Year’s resolution. There’s always the typical ones – “I want to read more”, “I want to be healthier”, “I want to keep caught up on astro-ph”, the listserver we get our newest 60-70ish papers delivered to every day! Nah, I wanted a fun challenge. So movies, those are fun, but if chosen wisely, they can linger with you for a long time, teach you something and change your perspective on stuff. But rather than simply going after famous “100 / 250 lists” (AFI 100, IMDB Top 250, Letterboxd Top 250), many of which I have already seen, I decided to make my own list, that is 1 movie per year from 1925 – 2024! Of course, I couldn’t have seen the movie before, duh! Choosing a movie is as easy as me googling “movies from 19xx” and me going by name recognition on something I always wanted to see and look if I can stream or rent it somewhere (I still get my classics via DVD, we don’t have Criterion in Germany, grrr). But I do still have a life, I can’t watch 100 movies in a year. Last year, I watched like 85 and that included movies watched on planes and dumb Netflix movies, like “Carry On” (which was fine, but not what I’m looking for). So let’s make this a 4 year project. 25 movies per year, One every 2 weeks and I get a grace period somewhere in the year. By the way, if you like this movie blog, I do log my movies over at letterboxd, too. So…

1925 – “Battleship Potemkin“
Produced by Mosfilm. Directed and co-written by Sergei Eisenstein. Main character Aleksandr Antonov portraying Vakulinchuk.You can watch it on YouTube

What does it take to start a revolution? Just like not every stone falling from a mountain will cause a landslide, likewise not every action against a represive regime will start a revolution. Just think of how difficult it was until finally the English gave up their colonial reign in India, how many failed attempts, horrifying in their brutalness. Similarly, before the Bolchevik revolution in 1917, there was the Revolution of 1905, which did NOT end the Tsarist regime, though it introduced the Duma. If you read about “The Bloody Sunday” (aka Red Sunday) it is quite clear that this is a catalyst of civil unrest.

This movie takes place during that time. It is based on true events, though the film has been changed for propaganda sakes and you need to take this into account at all times, when watching this movie. In any case, because of the Russo-Japanese war happening at that time, the Black Sea was controlled only by dingy warships, none of which were given much importance, let alone proper maintanenance. It is when the ship is given rotten meat (cinematically disgustingly exaggerated with maggots crawling all over it), that the mutiny starts. Vakulinchuk, a simple sailor, emboldened by hearing about the unrests happening in Russia decides with many other sailors to refuse to eat the rotten meat. In any case, things escalate quite quickly and I don’t want to give things away, but the sailors do take over the ship and go to Odessa to bury the ones they lost. In Odessa, the actions of the soldiers inspire the common folk in the city to join in on the fight against the higher powers.

It is then in the movie when the most dramatic and most well known scene of the movie happens: The Odessa steps. Cossacks from the top simply firing on fleeing civilians, children, women, even a dreadful sequence of a baby carriage barreling down the steps… It is a silent movie and yet I got anxious and even had to flinch away a few times. The battleship retaliates this inhuman attack by firing onto the opera house where the Tsarist leaders are meeting. Battleship Potemkin now has a big target on its back, all the rest of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea will go after them. Will they survive or go down in a flame of glory?

It is quite ironic that the actions take place in modern day Ukraine, that atrocious acts are done on Ukrainian citizens, in the name of a higher government.

In any case, the movie had a big influence on the next years. It is always weird to watch these old films and World War 2 hasn’t happened. Apparently Goebbels was impressed with it and the power of movies as propaganda. It is really quite simple, yet effective in its propaganda, you immediately know who to sympathize with, but they are easy to sympathize with. But just like this Salon article makes clear – the propaganda isn’t what is captivating about this movie. Otherwise it would’ve disappeared in the archives of the Soviet Union only to be studied by historians and not a movie enthusiast in 2025. It is the revolution in filmmaking that made this movie remarkable, the art of the montage, the capturing of emotion on the steps recreated in many movies even with the carriage as an homage. And that’s what will stay with me, a remarkable movie!

Jan 30 2020

Goodbye Spitzer!

February 4th 2008. I entered the building at the corner of Wilson and California for what was to become my new workplace. I had been here many times before as a student: to visit, once for a 2 week collaboration, once for a job interview that didn’t work out. But now I was excited – I was going to work at the Spitzer Science Center, with the telescope of the same name, among other things. This was my new academic home.

And what an exciting time it was. The halls were all abuzz, new postdocs, young staff, excited grad students almost entirely taking over that building. Tuesday bagels, Friday martinis, lunches and cigarettes on the roof. And of course, the walks to IPAC down the road or the brand new Cahill building – journal club at red door cafe. When the 2008 Euro Championship was played, it wasn’t Italy against Portugal or France against Greece – it was Claudia against Paola, Nicolas against Kalliopi, everybody hailed from all over the world. And all throughout my work, there was the clock that yielded Spitzer’s operation time.

Then in 2009, sad excitement – the cold mission was over, it had lasted about a month longer than expected, but even that was to come to an end. No more amazing IRS spectra, beautiful 24/70 micron MIPS images (come on, 160 micron was crap and you know it, heh). But on we went, Mark Lacy, my supervisor having just gotten a large IRAC program accepted.

And so I am sad that today Spizter is turned off. Thanks for the beautiful data, thanks for a great first postdoc at the Spitzer Science Center, thanks for letting me meet the great people responsible for that telescope. Godspeed, little telescope that could!

Feb 24 2014

How do I find out my H-index?

We should not be determined by numbers. Sometimes we work long and hard on a project that is important and the analysis is thorough, but the paper resulting from that project does not get its proper recognition. Sometimes, by sheer luck, we stumble on something that gets lots of views. Such is the plight of the scientist today.

Nevertheless, one metric that “attempts to measure the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist” is the h-index (Wikipedia). The definition: “A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np – h) papers have no more than h citations each.” So in decreasing order of citations, where your your nth paper meets your nth citation. Of course, the highest number your h-index can be is actually the number of papers you publish. Criticisms include skews to large collaboration projects and self-citation manipulation.

But… how do you actually calculate this h-index?!?!?! Interested? Watch the video below (make sure to have a fast internet connection to watch it in HD, otherwise you won’t be able to discern the fonts):

Feb 17 2014

January 2014 – Carolin Villforth on merger rates in X-ray selected AGN

In quasar science, the birth of an AGN is a hotly studied topic. That is because of two reasons. For one it takes a violent or turbulent event for the particles in a galaxy to move to its center and make the black hole there active. Think of it this way, it would need something quite radical for the earth to move away from its current orbit and suddenly fall into the sun, even though it has about 99.8% of the Solar System’s mass. Angular momentum conservation is just too hard to break.

The other reason AGN triggering is important is that we think that the active galaxy has a big impact on the rest of the galaxy. We see this by the close correlations between the black hole mass and the host galaxy properties However, by the time we observe the galaxies this close relationship is already established, so studying the birth of AGN might bring us clues to the mechanisms that establish this relationship.

In the 1980’s aided by the great work of the IRAS satellite, David Sanders proposed that quasars are triggered by major mergers between galaxies – that’s what he saw in the ULIRGs (Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies) with the IRAS satellite. At a certain infrared luminosity all ULIRGs were mergers and nearly all of them contained an active galaxy in their centers (summary work here)

The picture became much more muddled in the 2000s, though. The theorists could explain the formation of elliptical galaxies, their bulges, the close relationship between the black hole mass and the host’s properties, the triggering of the AGN and many more phenomena with ever improving simulations (see Phil Hopkins’ great summary in the picture above).

However, the observational picture showed various results. Optically selected hosts showed no excess of mergers when compared to quiescent (non-AGN) galaxies and only showed about merger signatures in about 30% of the quasars (Dunlop et al. 2003, Guyon et al. 2006). At redshifts below 1 they did see an increase in elliptical host galaxy with luminosity, though. X-ray selected quasars also show no excess in merger fraction when compared to quiescent galaxies either at low or high redshift (Cisternas et al. 2011, Kocevski et al. 2012). At high redshift and high luminosity their host galaxies are disks rather than ellipticals (Schawinski et al. 2012). Our work however has shown that red or infrared selected quasars, DO show a high incidence of mergers (or their signatures) up to moderate redshifts (Canalizo & Stockton 2001, Urrutia et al. 2008). Also, low surface brightness features that could be indicative of past mergers were found in many luminous quasars (Bennert et al. 2008), however, these could also be mergers with satellite galaxies, so not as wild and destructive as expected.

With that in mind, I would like to present Carolin Villforth’s recent paper: “Morphologies of z~0.7 AGN Host Galaxies in CANDELS: No trend of merger incidence with AGN luminosity” posted on astro-ph recently (1401.5477). She takes X-ray selected AGN and not only investigates the merger fraction, but also tries to see if it increases with luminosity when compared to a control sample. For that she uses the very deep data of the CANDELS survey using Hubble’s new camera in the infrared. By the way, if you are interested in CANDELS, its blog is really great and you can learn a lot from it.

Rather than simple visual classification, she used the quantifiable asymmetry index as a tracer for mergers as you can see in the picture. She found no higher incidence of mergers when compared to ellipticals and also didn’t find any increase of merger fraction with luminosity, which leaves us a bit head-scratching, but science isn’t always neat and easily explained. I sat down with Carolin and talked with her about her paper and speculated a bit on her research. Download or take a listen below!