Hugo Münsterberg and the Psychology of Cinema

Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916)

Outer developments: Technological advancements in cinema.
Inner developments: How society uses cinema for:
- Information
- Education
- Entertainment
Photoplay: A narrative medium considered the essence of cinema by Münsterberg.
Evolution of Cinema: Visual tricks → Information & Education → Medium of the human mind.

Münsterberg was a forerunner of Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt Psychology: Every experience involves the relations between part and whole, figure and ground.
The mind organizes its perceptual field.
Active mind: The mind confers motion on stimuli.
The mind does not reflect the world but constructs it (according to the laws of the mind).

Cinema is the art of the mind; it organizes material similarly to how the human mind works.
Psychology of cinema: How does cinema work?
Münsterberg has a hierarchic concept of the mind.

1st (lowest) level: Mind confers motion on stimuli.
- Corresponds to how cinema creates the illusion of movement.
2nd level: Mind: attention (sensation and motion).
- Cinema: angle, composition, focal length, image size, lighting.
3rd level: Mind: memory and imagination (sense, personal aspect).
- Cinema: editing (dramatic direction and organization).
4th level: Mind: emotions (complete mental events which organize the activities of the mind).
- Cinema: narrative.

What is its value?
Münsterberg was a neo-Kantian.
Immanuel Kant’s three critiques
- Critique of pure reason (theoretical reason).
- Critique of practical reason (ethics).
- Critique of judgment (value).

Phenomena: What can be perceived within the framework created by time, space, and causality (the physical world).
Noumena: What goes beyond phenomena and cannot be measured by instruments – only reason can have access (intellectual intuition) to noumena such as logical categories, ethical first principles, beauty.

Disinterestedness: Normally we are interested in objects because they are useful to us (an object is a means to some end), we are interested in something beautiful for its own sake (it serves no useful purpose).
We feel there has to be some principle of order in beauty, even if we cannot find it.
Kant speaks in this case about ‘purposiveness without purpose’.

Münsterberg argues that cinema has aesthetic value because while watching a film we become ‘lost’ in the story, which is an example of disinterestedness: we are cut off from our engagements in the real world (we ‘forget’ about our world while we participate in a cinematic reality).
Film experience is valuable in itself: use, even comprehension are unnecessary (we may be overwhelmed by a cinematic reality even without understanding everything in it).

Film value does not rest in its transmission of theatrical artwork or natural world.
Film transforms reality (natural appearances) into an object of imagination: time, space, causality become reorganized according to the principles of the story to produce emotions.
A film is similar to a dream but it is an ordered dream world – the priority of mental laws over chaotic appearances – the cinematic world separated from and unrelated to the everyday world of struggle.

"The photoplay tells us a human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely attention, memory, imagination, and emotion. … [These events] reach complete isolation from the practical world through the perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance."
Because film experience is entirely self-contained, censorship of films is unnecessary.