The Soul of Film Theory

S. Cooper

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230365131
• eBook ISBN: 9781137328588
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: History

In this innovative book, Sarah Cooper revisits the history of film theory in order to bring to the fore the neglected concept of the soul and to trace its changing fortunes. The Soul of Film Theory charts the legacy of this multi-faceted, contested term, from the classical to the contemporary era.

1

Classical Souls

Some of the most abiding theories of film that issued from North America and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century make striking and repeated appeals to the soul. This chapter deals mainly with key film theorists from three different countries in order to demonstrate where explicit reference to the term was most prevalent: namely, in specific strands of theory published in the United States, France, and the Weimar Republic from the 1910s to the end of the 1920s. From Hugo Münsterberg’s ‘soul psychology’ through the ‘photogénie’ of French Impressionist theory to the physiognomics of Weimar film theory, the soul enters early Western film theory in various ways. While these theoretical discourses are culturally specific, they bear each other’s influence (at the time, many signal texts circulated in translation across Europe, the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and the United States), and their implications also stretch beyond the borders of their countries of origin. Nineteenth-century Symbolism, Romantic concerns with inwardness, a revival of occultism, and spiritualist beliefs variously haunt these theories in the context of the twentieth century, and discussion of the soul within theoretical discourse at this time points frequently to tensions between tradition and modernity, as well as to archaic and more recent philosophies. By far the thorniest issue that all three theoretical strands under discussion here contend with is the rise of far right-wing politics in the broader social sphere. The political stakes of speaking about the soul become increasingly risk-ridden for film theory from the 1910s to the late 1920s and reach their height in the Weimar Republic, where nationalist tensions and reactionary forces weigh down the flight of this otherwise ethereal but capacious concept. However, discussion of the soul within film theory has a far more nuanced history, politics, and ethics than essentialist visions allow for, and although its place within early film theory is at times highly contentious, it is not irredeemably problematic. In this chapter, we witness how the soul of the classical period is articulated in a manner that does not always bolster reactionary political thinking. Hugo Münsterberg is one of the first theorists whose work relates to the soul and he furnishes film theory with a psychological definition. This distinctive sense emerges from within a contrasting climate of fascination with Spiritualism and psychical research that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the age of scientific progress and industrialization reveals the persistence of beliefs from a more mystical age.

From occultism to Hugo Münsterberg’s ‘soul psychology’

When the Fox sisters, Kate, aged 11, and Margaretta, aged 15, told of mysterious rapping sounds that emanated from the walls and floor-boards of the new family home in Hydesville, in the United States in the late 1840s, they initially had no idea where their tales would lead. Their older sister, Leah Fish, who lived in Rochester, recognized the potential of Kate and Maggie’s talents, and was soon showcasing them before an audience that testified to the genuineness of their claims: the disembodied rapping was taken as just one form of contact from the spirit world. It was from these inauspicious beginnings that Spiritualism was born. Spiritualism aimed to demonstrate the immortality of the soul by establishing channels of communication with spirits of the dead. As feminist historian of religion Ann Braude explains, whether this was a source of comfort for the bereaved, a means of sustaining a livelihood, a form of entertainment, or a way of breaking with religious orthodoxy, it offered two major attractions to thousands of Americans: rebellion against death and against authority.¹ Much to the chagrin of committed Calvinists for whom access to heaven was reserved to an elect, the Spiritualists rendered an afterlife democratically open to everyone. Furthermore, and as Braude argues in her study of Spiritualism and the women’s rights movement, the political views of the Spiritualists were associated with the most radical reform movements of the nineteenth century from women’s rights, through the abolition of slavery, to reforms of marriage, children’s rights, and religious freedom.² Unknowingly, the Fox sisters and their early credulous followers had sown the seeds of revolution. Although later exposed as fraudulent from the start, the Fox sisters had tapped into a long history of mysticism and magic. Public debunking of this and other experiences of spiritual activity did not perturb those committed to proving the existence of otherworldly phenomena, and this desire for proof drove a significant amount of scientific research in this era. It is the nature and international scope of this research that needs to be noted first, before Hugo Münsterberg’s more sceptical view of the spirit world, and his differing psychological articulation of the soul can be made apparent, along with its relevance for his theory of film.

Distinct from the Spiritualist movement but nonetheless part of this nineteenth-century fervour for communications from beyond the grave, the psychical research that emerged originally in Britain but that was also practised in earnest in the United States bore witness to the desire to prove scientifically the existence of life after death, and the survival of the soul. As historian John J. Cerullo notes: ‘First in Spiritualism and then in psychical research, what we see is an attempt to come to terms with scientific thought while retaining the understanding of the self that religious tradition has transmitted.’³ The psychic researchers were forced by the logic of their position to redefine the soul in a manner more palatable for scientists; Cerullo speaks of ‘the secular soul’ to designate their vision of a protean self that incorporated supernatural qualities of the soul into the worldly persona.⁴ The Society for Psychical Research (the SPR), established in Cambridge, England in 1882, with professor of moral philosophy Henry Sidgwick as the first President, revealed a fitting blend of sceptical open-mindedness to spiritual phenomena from the outset. The American branch, founded in Boston in 1884 by philosopher William James, and over which he presided from 1894–95, followed the British in its interest in all kinds of manifestations, from telepathy to rapping and table turning, along with the capacities of mediums.⁵ The broad field of research was vast and the researchers meticulous in documenting their explorations and findings, along with their theories. One of the more ambitious attempts to synthesize an entire corpus of psychical research at that time was classical scholar Frederic Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, unfinished and published in 1903, two years after his death, in which Myers put forth the notion of subliminal selfhood.⁶ As Cerullo notes in relation to the British context of the waning of the SPR in the twentieth century, Freud’s psychoanalytic model would soon offer a more functional way of theorizing the self and its subliminal elements.⁷ While Freud distanced himself from any association with the psychic researchers, Myers’s psychic work on the occult argued for a model of the self that transcended the limits of a life in one time and place.⁸ Orphic mysteries and Neo-Platonic thought are distant precursors to the spiritual parapsychology of Myers and others, which contrasts markedly with Freudian rationalism. The influence of Freud’s theory in conceptualizing the psyche would eventually overtake that of such psychic researchers, and would also, with time, filter into, and inform the study of, the media of photography and film. However, from photography to film in this early period the immediate influence of the soul-seeking Spiritualists and psychic researchers is far more palpable.

That photography contends with death has long been the subject of classic theorizing, which binds the photograph to both annihilation and preservation.⁹ Speaking not of death, but of life, one of the most creative photographers of the late nineteenth century, Julia Margaret Cameron, believed that photography was taken ‘from life’ (she wrote this on several of her portraits) and she referred to photographing the souls of those who sat for her. By this, she meant that she would enter the inner life of her subjects and grasp, mechanically, their vital energy. While the Cyclopean vision of the mind’s eye, to coin philosopher Colin McGinn’s turn of phrase,¹⁰ is illumined here by use of the camera, and the light of the mind is glimpsed, it is, rather, the light of the soul that comes more sharply into focus. Contemporaneous with Cameron’s portraiture there emerged another form of photographic soul capture devoted in part to palliating the acute pain of losing loved ones. Although discredited subsequently, and received suspiciously by many at the time, Münsterberg included, as we shall see, spirit photography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and its associated relation to Spiritualism and psychic research haunted the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imagination.

According to medium photographer James Coates’s early study, the connection between Spiritualism and the lens-based medium of photography first manifested itself in 1861 in Boston in the United States.¹¹ William Mumler’s first spirit photograph cemented the bond between technology and the other world, and countless other psychic photographers were soon to follow suit in their own attempts. Whereas painters, dramatists, and writers had imagined the soul for centuries in their own media, here was a more direct, albeit still mediated, means of attempting to record its existence. Rather than a mere matter of inadvertently capturing a spirit presence on a photograph, Coates points out that a ‘sensitive-photographer’ was needed in order to accomplish the task, and that without such a medium, spirit photography would not be possible.¹² Indeed, Tom Gunning emphasizes how, in the twentieth century, such photography takes us beyond the indexical capture of otherworldly manifestations and into the realm of reproducibility and communication, as supernatural forces are thought to have recourse to existing photographs of the dead to establish contact with the living.¹³ Viewed as crystallizations of thought, the manifestation of spirits depended on the state of mind of the sitter and the medium, along with good atmospheric conditions.¹⁴ In conjunction with the combined minds of medium and sitter, the spirit could manifest itself. The connection between the mental and the spiritual is hinted at through the name that spirit photographer William Hope gives to his images – psychographs – and the spirits would sit like thought bubbles above the sitter’s head.¹⁵ Yet what is clear is that the inner workings of the mind served as a conduit for something more than thought or imagination and that what materialized in the image alongside the sitter was believed to come from without rather than within: the appearance of the so-called ‘extra’ was a product of the combined capacities of the living and the dead but was never to be fully located on either side of the divide.

As historian John Harvey argues, the link thus established to others beyond the grave offered the possibility of spirit communication, and it is no accident that Spiritualism and spirit photography were on the rise again in the second decade of the twentieth century as a public response to the losses of the First World War: rather than a memorial to the dead here was tangible evidence of their continuing existence.¹⁶ We will see how this belief manifests itself in film too, and in other contexts affected by the war – for example, in Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919) in the second section of this chapter. For the time being, the literal impression that the spirits and souls of the dead might make on light-sensitive paper or might inspire in later celluloid creations is of far less importance to the psychologist and film theorist whose work will be the focal point of the rest of this first section. Thanks to Hugo Münsterberg’s scepticism, a radically different understanding of the soul emerges from within the very context of Spiritualism and psychical research that has just been set out. While hostile to the otherworldly interests that surrounded him at the time, Münsterberg was unable entirely to escape their hold, and his anti-spiritualist drive did not void his own work of reference to a different sense of soul.

Soul psychology

The interest in Spiritualism and in the SPR that had swept across the United States and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was incomprehensible to Münsterberg. His stance on all such spiritual matters would eventually be the cause of a rift with his colleague and friend, William James, who played an instrumental role in bringing Münsterberg to Harvard in the 1890s. The two men first met in 1889 at the First International Congress of Psychologists in Paris.¹⁷ James was an enthusiastic follower of Münsterberg’s early career, the brilliance of which had brought the young German thinker international fame precociously in his late twenties. Münsterberg was invited to Harvard for a three-year period between 1892 and 1895, and then in Autumn 1897 the German expatriate took up a permanent post there as Professor of Experimental Psychology. Eventually, after James’s death, Münsterberg would succeed to his Chair, but by then the felicitous encounter between the two men and Münsterberg’s initially happy relation to America that began in the 1890s were distant memories. In an inverse move to that of expatriates such as cultural and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, who took a more critical attitude to his homeland once in exile, Münsterberg gradually fell out of favour with his colleagues and the more general public because of his idealized attitude to Germany and his increasingly critical appraisal of America, along with an involvement in political polemics. Münsterberg’s position became all the more problematic through the deterioration of American relations to Germany in the First World War. For James, though, the deeper and more personal catalyst for the dispute between the two men lay in Münsterberg’s attitudes towards Spiritualism.

James’s curiosity in, and serious commitment to, Spiritualism and psychical research leads him to declare with some irritation: ‘If your imagination is incapable of conceiving the spirit-hypothesis at all, you will just proclaim it “impossible” (as my colleague Münsterberg does, Psychology and Life, p. 230), and thus confess yourself incompetent to discuss the alternative seriously.’¹⁸ By the time of this remark in 1909, Münsterberg’s dismissive views were well known,¹⁹ but when invited in November 1909 to investigate the mediumship of one of the most prominent women on the spiritualist scene, he accepted. As his daughter, Margaret Münsterberg, explains in her posthumous biography of her father, it may have been expected that he would refuse to have anything to do with the occult programme, but it seemed wiser to him to face it for once rather than flee it.²⁰ Münsterberg gives his reasons in a letter to a psychiatrist friend, explaining that attacks on him had sharpened as a result of his declaring that these phenomena made real, scientific study improbable, and that James had accused him of a kind of ‘shallow dogmatism’ no different from mystical superstition.²¹ It was this kind of view that Münsterberg wished to combat by agreeing to test the medium, all the while retaining his suspicions rather than approaching the séance with an open mind (he uses ‘humbug’ four times in the brief letter to describe any suggestion of spiritual power).

The medium in question was Eusapia Palladino, of Italian origin, who had first appeared on the psychic scene in the 1870s and who was said to have relied heavily on creating a distraction for her audience in order to achieve her desired effects.^22...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Soul of Film Theory
• 1. Classical Souls
• 2. Signifying Souls
• 3. Body and Soul
• Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Films Cited
• Index