Classical Film Theorists

Some theorists of cinema, who wanted to analyze the intrinsic nature of the filmic medium, a kind
of ontological approach.

Hugo Munsterberg
Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1916) was a leading psychologist and philosopher who worked in
Germany and the United States. He studied medicine and experimental psychology (with Wilhelm
Wundt), and become Professor of Psychology at the University of Freiburg in 1892. His friendship
with American psychologist and philosopher William James led to his appointment to the faculty at
Harvard University in 1897 While in America, he became a famous academic, publishing numerous
books on applied psychology, including The Principles ofArt Education (1905), Psychology and
Crime (1908), Psychotherapy (1909), Vocation and Learning (1912), Psychology and Industrial
Efficiency (1913), American Patriotism and other Social Studies (1913), Business Psychology
(1915) and Psychology (1916). In his final book, The Photoplay (1916), Munsterberg argued for
the psychological and aesthetic distinctiveness of film as a serious art form. Following the outbreak
of the First Wo rid War and his increasing criticisms of American life, Munsterberg's work fell out
of favour with the public. Despite almost a century of neglect, The Photoplay is generally
recognized today as the first genuine work of film theory.

Within ten months of seeing the first film in his life he came out with his theory on cinema.

Munsterberg attempted to identify the artistic specificities of the new medium, championing the
validity of cinema as a novel art form distinct from, and in ways even superior to, theatre and
photography.

Munsterberg was quick to recognize the interplay of technological developments and

More originally, he also articulated the distinctively psychological dimensions of cinematic

For Munsterberg, cinema (photoplay) is primarily a spectator's medium, because it takes place
inside the mind of the spectator. Cinema is the art of mind, while music is the art of the
ear and painting is that of the eye.

For him, memory, imagination, emotions and our crave for omnipresence are made tangible in
cinema.

"In film, the objective world is moulded by the interests of the mind."
-- Munsterberg

He commences with the important phenomenological point that while we know that we are
watching "flat" two-dimensional images while in the cinema, we nonetheless experience the strong
impression of depth and movement on the screen. Drawing on numerous psychological experiments
(including ones that he conducted himself), Munsterberg's claim endorses the idealist thesis that the
experiences of depth and movement are not objectively present in the image as such, but are
"added on" by the psychological (or cognitive) operations of our own minds.
What is the difference between our perceptions of movement on stage compared with those on
film? For Munsterberg, the former is obviously a real movement in space while the latter is an
impression of movement generated by the "inner mental activity" uniting separate phases of
movement in "the idea of connected action". Depth and movement on screen are a mixture of
"objective" perception and the subjective investment of this perception, which we do not even
notice once we are perceptually and psychologically immersed in the complex visual world of the
film.

It is the psychological act of attention that Munsterberg emphasizes as the key to understanding
the film-mind analogy. "Attention" is broadly taken to refer to the intentional directing of
consciousness that selects what is relevant or not in our field of conscious awareness. Such directing
can be further distinguished into voluntary and involuntary acts of attention.

Voluntary attention involves our mindful focusing of consciousness through particular ideas or
interests that we bring to our impressions or observations, ignoring whatever does not serve our
interests or desires (attending to a task at hand, making something, solving a problem).

Involuntary attention, by contrast, refers to the way events or objects in our environment can
provide the cue for the (unwilled) focusing of our perceptual awareness (an explosion, a flashing
neon sign, a cry that commands our notice). Involuntary attention also spans emotional and
affective responses to what is happening in ourselves or in our environment: "Everything which
appeals to our natural instincts, everything which stirs up hope or fear, enthusiasm or indignation, or
any strong emotional excitement, will get control of our attention".

Genuine aesthetic engagement with the film, however, demands that we open ourselves up to the
capturing of our involuntary attention: "we must accept those cues for our attention which the
playwright and the producers have prepared for us".

The close-up, for example, provides a visual analogue for the intensification of perception that
attends attentive focus. Munsterberg is the first of many theorists to highlight the unique
possibilities of the cinematic image particularly the close-up in drawing our attention to particular
objects, gestures or expressions.

Rudolf Arnheim
Rudolf Arnheim (1904 – 2007), a perceptual psychologist inclined towards gestalt theory of
perception, a theorist of silent film, strongly argued to see silent film as a different art form than
talkie. Mostly known for his book 'Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye'
(1954, reedited in 1974). His other books, including Film as Art (1932), Visual Thinking (1969),
Entropy and Art (1971), The Dynamics of Architectural Form (1977), and The Power of the Center:
A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1988).

Interview with Arnheim:

Arnheim has reservations about certain technological developments within the history of cinema
because he believes that the artistic potential of film lies in its technological limitations. Arnheim
is concerned with film as art and characterizes his approach as Materialtheorie, according to which
the aesthetic principles of a medium should be based upon its material properties.

The major criticism leveled against film derived from a certain characterization of its
representational capacity: as a photographic medium film is merely a reproduction of reality. One
implication of such a criticism is that the mechanical processes involved in photography and film do
not permit the operators’ creative control or intervention. Painters, for instance, can intervene at any
moment during the process of painting, from the decision of the subject matter, composition,
drawing, and color of pigment, to the thickness of brush stroke. In contrast, filmmakers and camera
operators have a limited range of control – such as lighting and the placement of objects during the
filmmaking process – while the rest is rendered through a more or less automatic mechanical
process. As Noël Carroll notes, such a charge comes from the growing artistic tendency in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toward antimimesis (Carroll 1988: 21). From
Baudelaire to Croce, the principal function of art, it is claimed, should not be found in the imitation
of nature, and thus film, which excels in “re-presenting” reality, is considered too aesthetically
inadequate to belong to the realm of fine art.

Arnheim does not construe the relationship between a photographic image and its referent as a
matter of “truth,” or correspondence. Rather, it involves the aesthetic sensibility of a photographer,
which can provide an insight into the object. An artistic filmmaker should capture the essence of
an object or an event, and there is no set of rules to follow. Arnheim argues, “There is no formula
to help one choose the most characteristic aspect: it is a question of feeling”.

Arnheim lists a set of attributes of film that differentiate filmic perception from natural
perception. From (i) the reduction of depth, to (ii) lighting, to (iii) the delimitation of the screen, to
(iv) the absence of the space-time continuum, and to (v) the absence of color and of nonvisual
sensory coordination, filmic transformation of reality falls short of rendering an exact replica of
natural perception. In filmic images, for instance, sizes and shapes of objects do not remain constant
in the way we normally see two distant objects.

Film produces in the spectator a distinctive spectatorial effect. Arnheim claims that the film image
is neither completely two-dimensional nor completely three-dimensional, rendering a “partial”
illusion of real space. By “partial,” Arnheim refers to two different aspects: (i) the unreality of
filmic space is often unnoticeable; and (ii) information gathered from filmic image is
incomplete.

A film image is bounded by its margins and can easily allow a montage, both within a scene and
between scenes. Arnheim claims, “a result of the ‘pictureness’ of film is, then, that a sequence of
scenes that are diverse in time and space is not felt as arbitrary. One looks at them as calmly as one
would at a collection of picture postcards” (Arnheim 1957a [1933]: 27–8). He continues, “if at one
moment we see a long shot of a woman at the back of a room, and the next we see a close-up of her
face, we simply feel that we have ‘turned over a page’ and are looking at a fresh picture”. Arnheim
must have a specific editing system in mind, here, such as the continuity editing of Hollywood, in
which the editing pattern is less noticeable.

Film is far from a perfect copy of reality, rendering in the viewer a perceptual experience as an
alternative to both natural perception and the perception given by other artistic media. For
Arnheim, however, the imperfections of the “mechanical” reproduction process of the film medium
should not be dismissed as technical flaws; instead, they should serve as the basis for the artistic use
of the medium. In the chapter “The Making of a Film,” Arnheim demonstrates how each “defect” or
“drawback” of the film medium can yield artistic effects. His famous quote aptly captures this idea:
“Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off, where the conditions of representation serve
in some way to mold the object”.

According to Arnheim, the artistic possibility of the medium should be found in its very
technical constraints. As Jon Elster notes, creativity comprises both “choice of constraints” and
“choice within constraints”.
Arnheim emphasizes the expressive nature of visual perception in general. Our perceptual
mechanism does not merely register sense data but recognizes them as expressive: "When I sit in
front of a fireplace, I do not normally register certain shades of red, various degrees of brightness,
geometrically defined shapes moving at such and such a speed. I see the graceful play of aggressive
tongues, flexible striving, lively color. The face of a person is more readily perceived and
remembered as being alert, tense, and concentrated than it is as being triangularly shaped,
having slanted eyebrows, straight lips, and so on."

For Arnheim expression is “an inherent characteristic of perceptual patterns,” not a projection of
and/or association with the expressive qualities of human and animate beings. A comparison or
analogy with the physical manifestations of human expression comes as secondary. Arnheim
continues, “If expression is the primary content of vision in daily life, the same should be all the
more true of the way the artist looks at the world”.

Cinematic representation is not a vehicle of transferring the real, not merely an instrument of
observation, but a means to translate and communicate via the real.

Film is a medium that displays both the generality and concreteness of the object filmed. A shot
of a policeman should bring out the most characteristic aspect of policemen in general, as well as
the peculiar aspect of that policeman. A carefully chosen angle will enable the viewer to see the
unfamiliar within the familiar.

Comparing intellectual montage with poetry, Arnheim claims that it is more challenging for the
visual medium to convey abstract ideas than the verbal medium. The verbal medium readily
allows a conceptual link between formally discrete ideas, due to their weak mental imageries.
The concreteness of filmic images, however, would resist such an imposed unity.

Jean Mitry
Jean Mitry’s life (1907–88) spanned a period which saw the flowering of cinema as a fully
expressive art form. He was a publicist, a young camera assistant (e.g., Napoleon, with Abel Gance,
1927), a film society founder and director, and an experimental filmmaker. He reached his true
glory in roles as film critic, historian, and theorist. He participated in passionate academic and
public debates around the nature and capacities of the new medium, expropriating the work of
philosophers, psychologists, and art critics and historians to build a massive Esthetique et
psychologie du cinema (1963–5). Mitry’s aesthetic theory is still not very well known. Esthetique
et psychologie du cinema, only translated into English in a condensed form by Christopher King in
1997, is long and often difficult to read in the original version.

What are the material, efficient, formal, and final causes of the cinema? What is it made of?
How does it work? To what effect? To what end? Mitry intended to describe the cinema in all of its
aspects: moving from the bare-bones experiential phenomenon, to its farthest extensions as a
molder of the human spirit.

At the center of Mitry’s critical theory lies a fundamental experience to which he remained devoted.
Underneath it all, Jean Mitry was driven by a “wow!” experience. Why the world on the screen is
so compelling, and why, when leaving the theater, life can seem so pale and flat. Which films give
us the deepest “wow!” experience? How do they work their magic?

Mitry’s work is, at its core, a phenomenology of the narrative film experience; it is secondly an
elaborate argument in defense of that experience.

In 1929, Sergei Eisenstein came to Paris by Leon Moussinac and his film club, The Friends of
Spartacus. The young Mitry, a member of the club, roamed Paris with Eisenstein. Through Notre
Dame and the Louvre, Eisenstein expounded on art, the symbol, artistic strategy, and ecstasy. Mitry
noted it all; these conversations, some of which are recounted in his book S.M. Eisenstein (Mitry
1955), would have a seminal influence on Jean Mitry the critic and theorist.

Mitry argues that there is a central core of phenomenal traits which define all film experience, the
“basic structures.”

Mitry develops a vast poetics of the cinema: he describes the symbolic and expressive capacities of
cinema as both an art and a language – as a language which works through concrete reality – and he
argues a special status for the cinema among the arts on this basis.

Mitry starts with the photographic image itself. “The essential nature of the cinema is that it is a
phenomenon of images”. Because the photograph is as well perceived as a finite, framed, physical
incarnation of a specific point of view, “the most ordinary image, by the very fact that it is an
image, offers even in its immediacy, a mediated world . . . a formalized double”. This
fundamental duality is the axiom of his aesthetic theory and everything flows from it: in our
experience of the photographic image, “it happens that . . . the reality represented is both the same
and an other”.

The second structure of film experience is the double nature of the frame. The frame delimits a
finite, subjective, and potentially aesthetic field of play and creation, much as the frame of painting.
At the same time, as image succeeds image in the movies, the frame becomes fluid. Mitry goes
beyond the positions of earlier theorists to insist that the key to the apprehension of the film is a
tensive co-presence of the represented and the representation.

The illusion of movement is the third defining structure of the film experience. Mitry embarks
on a long description of the “phi phenomenon” and neurological and intellectual activity behind our
perception of moving objects when faced with a rapid, distinct succession of static images. It is the
perception of movement which gives volume, depth, and life to the film experience.

The fourth and final defining structure of film experience is the montage effect. Any film image,
any sequence, any aspect of an image may acquire signification as a result of the implications of the
relationships or the context in which it occurs.

Mitry goes on to describe at great length and with great insight stylistic elements and artistic
approaches which can determine the qualities and types of our film experiences: the psychological
and emotional effects of various styles of montage, the use of sound, of pacing and rhythm, etc.
These nondefinitional elements he calls “forms.”

Mitry rightly argues that many of his predecessors confused film forms with structures,
conflating a style or approach to filmmaking with the cinema itself, developing “stylistics” rather
than true “aesthetics” of the cinema.

But Mitry’s model in fact privileges a certain form of cinema as well – representational narrative
cinema, and more specifically a representational cinema which achieves a kind of deep symbolic
and revelatory expression.