Thinking in the Dark

Murray Pomerance, R. Barton Palmer

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813575605
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Today’s film scholars draw from a dizzying range of theoretical perspectives—they’re just as likely to cite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as they are to quote classic film theorist André Bazin. To students first encountering them, these theoretical lenses for viewing film can seem exhilarating, but also overwhelming.
 
Thinking in the Dark introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made a great impact on film scholarship today, including Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, and Judith Butler. Rather than just discussing each theorist’s ideas in the abstract, the book shows how those concepts might be applied when interpreting specific films by including an analysis of both a classic film and a contemporary one. It thus demonstrates how theory can help us better appreciate films from all eras and genres: from Hugo to Vertigo, from City Lights to Sunset Blvd., and from Young Mr. Lincoln to A.I. and Wall-E.
 
The volume’s contributors are all experts on their chosen theorist’s work and, furthermore, are skilled at explaining that thinker’s key ideas and terms to readers who are not yet familiar with them. Thinking in the Dark is not only a valuable resource for teachers and students of film, it’s also a fun read, one that teaches us all how to view familiar films through new eyes. 
 
Theorists examined in this volume are: Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Michel Chion, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Douchet, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Vachel Lindsay, Christian Metz, Hugo Münsterberg, V. F. Perkins, Jacques Rancière, and Jean Rouch.

1

Hugo Münsterberg

Psychologizing Spectatorship between Laboratory and Theater

JEREMY BLATTER

“It is arbitrary to say where the development of moving pictures began,” The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916) begins, “and it is impossible to foresee where it will lead.” Whether we locate the origins of motion pictures in the philosophical toys of the nineteenth century like the phenakistoscope or the zoetrope, in Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic studies of physiological movement, in Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, or in the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe, the historical development of cinema as a medium and a cultural form may best be described as the piecemeal coalescing of perceptual theories, technological innovations, aesthetic experiments, and entrepreneurial efforts. The same observation holds true for the origins of film theory. It would be no more accurate to assign film theory a single founding figure than it would be to identify cinema with a singular inventor. Nevertheless, Hugo Münsterberg’s (1863–1916) The Photoplay has come to be regarded by cinema and media studies scholars as the first rigorous study of film worthy of membership in the canon of classical film theory. Dudley Andrew called The Photoplay “not only the first but also the most direct major film theory” (Theories 14). Giuliana Bruno writes that Münsterberg “devised the first full ‘experiment’ in film theory” (90; see also Lindsay, Art; Sargent).

Not always was Münsterberg acknowledged as a pioneer in film theory. Indeed, it was only after The Photoplay was republished in 1970 that critics and scholars began referencing this work as the first example of academic film theory. The French film theorist and cineaste Jean Mitry is said to have remarked, “How could we have not known him all these years? In 1916 this man understood cinema about as well as anyone ever will” (qtd. in Andrew, Theories 26). Even Rudolf Arnheim, who in the 1920s studied psychology and moonlighted as a Berlin film critic, knew nothing of The Photoplay, despite his familiarity with Münsterberg’s other writings (“Zum Geleit”). Unlike his early works written in German and translated into English, The Photoplay was written in English and not translated into German until 1996.

It would be misleading to say that The Photoplay had no initial impact on film discourse. Many reviewers praised Münsterberg at the time for his eloquent defense of film as a legitimate art and for the facility with which he analyzed the psychological mechanisms of filmmaking technique. After 1917, however, the book proved as ephemeral as the word “photoplay” itself, a term invented around 1910 to lend cultural prestige to the medium and attract new middle-class audiences hesitant to embrace what they often viewed as a lowbrow vaudevillian type of entertainment (see Hansen, Babel). The most obvious and direct influence on The Photoplay’s long-term reception was the fact that it was eclipsed by Münsterberg’s own dramatic death while lecturing at Radcliffe College in December 1916 and the subsequent entry of the United States into the First World War the following April. The impact of the war was not just important in terms of shifting cultural concerns. By 1914, Münsterberg had become a notorious figure in the eyes of an American public increasingly drawn into a riptide of anti-German sentiment (see P. Keller). Since the 1890s, he had taken it upon himself to promote mutual understanding between his beloved German Heimat and his adopted American home, but after war broke out in Europe what was initially tolerated as the benign cultural commentary of a Harvard professor interested in German–American relations was soon enough perceived as Teutonic propaganda. Symptomatic of this deeply politicized climate were false accusations that Münsterberg was a spy for the kaiser, followed by the scandalous offer of $10 million by a delusional Harvard alumnus in exchange for the professor’s forced resignation (Hale 173).

This political context is important for another reason. The strain and anxiety that the war had brought him took its toll on his health and left him feeling alienated from his colleagues. According to his daughter, Münsterberg turned to the movies for a distraction, a break “from the wearing anxieties caused by the international stress” (M. Münsterberg 281). Why he chose film over some other form of entertainment is unknown, but it is likely that the German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers helped sway him in this direction (Schweinitz 13). In November 1914, Ewers had been Münsterberg’s guest at the German-American Society in Boston and less than a year earlier had written the screenplay for the film The Student of Prague (1913). Like Münsterberg in The Photoplay, Ewers was an ardent defender of film as an autonomous art. In a private letter to Harvard president Abbott Lowell, Münsterberg suggested a “secondary motive” behind his turn to the psychology of film. “My name was so much connected with the war noise,” he explained, “that I wanted to break that association by a new connection with a popular interest” (Münsterberg to Lowell).

While this background helps us understand the complex context in which The Photoplay was written and, to a certain extent, the cause of its delayed recognition, to understand the actual content of the book we must dig deeper into the author’s intellectual biography and the tradition of experimental psychology in which he worked.

Before Münsterberg Went to the Movies

Hugo Münsterberg began his academic career at the University of Freiburg, where in 1887 he was appointed Privatdozent (private lecturer) in psychology. Having studied philosophy and experimental psychology under the eminent Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig, Münsterberg hoped to follow in his former teacher’s footsteps by establishing his own psychological laboratory in Freiburg. As a Privatdozent, Münsterberg received no salary, only student fees, and initially no formal institutional support for his endeavor. Therefore, to realize his dream he relied on his family inheritance to finance the purchase of equipment that soon filled two rooms in the apartment he shared with his wife on Günterstalstrasse. Despite these limitations, Münsterberg’s laboratory was in full swing by 1888, making it by most counts the fourth psychological laboratory in all of Germany.

Experimental research carried out by Münsterberg and his students was documented on the pages of the Beiträge zur experimentelle Psychologie, the laboratory’s organ of publication. So impressed was William James by the experimental prowess on display in the first issues of the Beiträge that shortly after opening a new Psychological Laboratory at Harvard in 1891 he turned to Münsterberg to replace him as its director. Although by 1892 James had achieved stature akin to that of Wundt in Germany, he made no secret of his disdain for the tedium of experimental labor. In securing Münsterberg as director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory for a three-year tryout, then as tenured faculty after 1897, James found in his precocious German colleague, only twenty-nine when he was appointed, long-desired relief from the responsibilities of an acting laboratory director.

As James’s successor from 1892 to 1916, Münsterberg attracted considerable press and media attention. Psychology at the time was an exciting yet poorly understood new science and the Harvard Laboratory was soon reputed to be among the best on either side of the Atlantic. But for all the hoopla surrounding the young science the actual practice of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century was self-consciously mundane and abstract. There was a widespread anxiety among psychologists that overblown or premature claims about the utility of their knowledge and techniques might undermine their credibility. This fear was compounded by the popular conflation of psychology with phrenology, mesmerism, and psychical research carried out by lay practitioners who often profited by making sensational claims about the ability to read human character and aptitudes from cranial topography, heal disease through hypnosis, and demonstrate telepathy and paranormal phenomena unverifiable by accepted scientific standards. Those psychologists who prematurely heeded the calls of commercial interests to put their skills to practical use were vulnerable to accusations of falling prey to base commercialism.

Such were the reasons why many academic psychologists through the 1890s upheld the image of their laboratories as cloistered spaces for disinterested research where ascetic scientists plumbed the depths of the mind purely for the sake of knowledge. In his first decade as director of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, Münsterberg steadfastly affirmed the ethos of pure science by confining experimental work to what today we would call basic research. Given this constraint, useful applications for psychological knowledge and techniques were discovered only serendipitously as experiments designed to solve practical problems were strictly proscribed. Most experiments thus focused on isolating certain senses or mental faculties such as attention, memory, imagination, or emotion in complete abstraction from the everyday contexts in which they are employed.

To illustrate this method let us look, for example, at the human faculty of attention, a faculty which, as discussed later in the context of The Photoplay, was central to Münsterberg’s understanding of the cinematic close-up. One common experimental technique for studying attention involved the use of what psychologists called a “puzzle picture.” The puzzle picture is an image that by design includes certain objects or figures not immediately visible within a depicted scene. An object might be discovered hidden in the background, outlined in negative space, or otherwise camouflaged. By giving such puzzles to test subjects under controlled conditions in a laboratory the psychologist aimed to collect objective data, such as the time taken to identify certain objects, as well as subjective data, such as test subjects’ observations about their experience of the task. Taken together, these pieces of information might give one hope of discovering something about qualities that quickly grab the attention versus those which elude it, and the means by which objects formerly overlooked may in a moment of recognition suddenly occupy the center of one’s field of concentration.

As with most of his colleagues, Münsterberg’s attitude toward this work was that of self-conscious restraint. Although it is easy to see how such an experimental technique as was used to study attention might be applied to the purposes of advertising, for most psychologists in the late nineteenth century venturing down such a path meant risking scientific credibility. The prejudices that checked psychologists’ private and professional activities are apparent in Münsterberg’s earliest film essay, “Why We Go to the ‘Movies,’” which appeared in the December 1915 issue of Cosmopolitan. There he wrote, “I should have felt it as undignified for a Harvard Professor to attend a moving picture-show, just as I should not have gone to a vaudeville performance or to a museum of wax figures or to a phonograph concert.” It was thus only while “traveling a thousand miles from Boston,” he continued,

[that] I and a friend risked seeing Neptune’s Daughter, and my conversion was rapid. I recognized at once that here marvelous possibilities were open, and I began to explore with eagerness the world which was new to me. Reel after reel moved along before my eyes—all styles, all makes. I went with the crowd to Anita Stewart and Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin; I saw Pathé and Vitagraph, Lubin and Essanay, Paramount and Majestic, Universal and Knickerbocker. I read the books on how to write scenarios; I visited the manufacturing companies, and, finally, I began to experiment myself. Surely I am now under the spell of the “movies,” and, while my case may be worse than the average, all the world is somewhat under the spell. (“Why We Go” 23–24)

Becoming a film enthusiast was one thing, studying the movies as a psychologist something completely different. Psychologists through the turn of the century adopted a serious, even effete pose, and were reluctant to apply their science to practical life. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century this began to change. Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern University brought advertising psychology a respectability unimaginable in nineteenth-century scientific circles; William Stern co-founded an Institute of Applied Psychology in Berlin; Clark University and Teachers’ College made educational psychology a fixture of pedagogical training; and the Psychology Department at Columbia University introduced a research fellowship financed by the Advertising Men’s League of New York.

Keeping abreast of these developments, Münsterberg announced in 1908 the founding of a special department within his laboratory devoted entirely to the new field of applied psychology. Based on research carried out in this department, Münsterberg would publish influential books on the application of psychology to virtually every context of daily life, from the classroom, courtroom, and clinic to the market, factory, and movie theater. Only within this new regime conducive to applied psychology was Münsterberg able to justify his work on film.

The Photoplay: A Psychological Study

As an extension of works on applied psychology, The Photoplay followed a familiar model. The basic idea was to adapt experimental methods and tests designed with fundamental research questions in mind to the kinds of practical questions directly relevant to everyday life. For example, investigations into memory were revised with an eye to producing results of pedagogical value, studies of mental fatigue modified to test worker productivity. In The Photoplay, this takes the form of four core chapters organized around psychological functions: Depth and Movement (i.e., basic perception), Attention, Memory and Imagination, and Emotions. With each of these classic categories of psychological inquiry, Münsterberg aims to demonstrate what role it plays in film spectatorship and what techniques are used to exploit it.

“Depth and Movement” appropriately begins by asking what, psychologically speaking, it actually means to view a moving picture. “To begin at the beginning,” he explains, “the photoplay consists of a series of flat pictures in contrast to the plastic objects of the real world which surround us” (45). That we perceive depth and movement in these flat images, however, does not imply that what we see is an illusion. “Differences of apparent size, the perspective relations, the shadows, and the actions performed in the space” (50) all combine to communicate dimensionality from the vantage point of the spectator. “Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world,” he elaborates, “not as hard facts but as a mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them” (71; emphasis original).

In the three following chapters, Münsterberg moves from the fundamentals of film perception toward the analysis of discrete filmmaking techniques such as the close-up, cut-back, and the flash-forward, and the construction of narrative through editing. The chapter “Attention,” for example, unpacks the significance of the close-up as a means of guiding the spectator’s gaze toward details of dramatic or symbolic importance. In one example Münsterberg describes a scene in which a slip of paper falls unnoticed from the pocket of a criminal as he takes his handkerchief out of his pocket. While in theater this detail might be missed by the entire audience, captured in close-up on the big screen that scrap of paper becomes endowed with special significance.

The manipulation of attention, however, is not only achieved through the close-up. The absence of the spoken word also heightens our attention to the subtle play of gesture and facial expression. In his chapter on “Emotion,” Münsterberg explores in greater detail how the “enlargement by the close-up on the screen brings this emotional action of the face to sharpest relief” (113). Unlike stage actors who, limited by their fixed distance from the audience, must rely on speech and histrionics to communicate emotion, screen acting encourages greater naturalism and expressive nuance by means of close-ups and the use of multiple takes.

While music and sound effects may shape the spectator’s experience, Münsterberg asserts that film is first and foremost a visual medium and it is in the moving pictures that its true power lies. For this reason he expresses skepticism about the potential role of the spoken word in film. Although in 1916 the technology of synchronized sound was only in its earliest experimental phase and The Jazz Singer (1927) still a decade away, Münsterberg’s prescient sensitivity to the problem anticipates many criticisms of the talkie by filmmakers and critics alike, from Charlie Chaplin to Béla Balázs.

In relation to the faculties of “Memory and Imagination,” the cut-back and flash-forward are considered. Imagine a scene, for example, in which a soldier, huddled in the trenches, grips his rifle as a barrage of hostile fire passes overhead. Cut to a blissful sum...