Teorie della rappresentazione - II modulo

Psychological Study

The core of this work is the idea that film is a vehicle for representing subjectivity and interiority, a vehicle that makes subjectivity and interiority totally visible. This lesson will deal with the ideas expressed in this work.

In Bergson there was this metaphor, but the real problem was how we can consider the mind, how is the main character of the memory. In Münsterberg the problem is the mind in relation to the cinematic apparatus, in relation to the movie. For these reasons, this text is the basis of two important traditions in film, on one hand the spectator theory, based on the question "how does the spectator mind contribute to the production of a cinematic experience?", and on the other hand the narrative film theory, based on the question "how does the movie represent or express a mental state?".

But why theorizing about cinema? Is it possible to theorize about it? The problem in 1916 was simple: is the film, what was Hugo

The issue is related to the impression of depth. The space, also within the cinema, is a three-dimensional space, while the image within a screen is flat, but we don't see this flatness. We quote from Münsterberg: "For [the viewer] the space is three-dimensional, and it is only because it is three-dimensional that it is possible for him to see the flatness of the screen as depth." Münsterberg never explains how this act effectively works.

The same thing could be told for movement. We can't perceive the still, fragmented photographic images that compose the body of the movie, we perceive a continuous moving image. How is this possible? For Münsterberg, this issue is not related only to the psychophysiology of vision, but to a superior mental activity.

The psychophysiological explanation of the moving image, that is not sufficient for Münsterberg, is that related to a specific phenomenon, the phenomenon of afterimages. They are images that live between absence and presence, like film images, but for him it is not sufficient to explain the presence of movement in the movie.

Afterimages will be at the...

centre of another book, that is very important, by Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. In this book afterimages are strictly linked to a new visual experience introduced by precinematic technology. In this experience the vision became a bodily act, a bodily phenomenon, while before the birth and the rising of precinematic technology the vision was seen a spiritual act, like the vision simplified by the perspective in the Renaissance. The function that relates precinematic technologies and afterimages, the fact that precinematic technology function only in relation to the psychophysiology of the human apparatus and the psychophysiology of the vision directly shows how the vision is a bodily phenomenon.

But this passive, physiological phenomenon for Münsterberg is not enough to explain the dynamics of the movies, the impression of movement inside the Photoplay. In fact Munsterberg considers the role of an active experience, an high mental act that unifies the still, fragmented and

Separated frames in the perception of a continuous movement, an higher mental act that is very important to consider and that emerges in the relationship between the cinematic apparatus and the human mind. This idea is really important for the history of film theory, and is at the basis of the concept of impression of reality, that is a concept formulated by the French filmologists in the 40s but that becomes very important for the apparatus theory related to psychoanalytical approaches. The impression of reality is a psychological process, but also in the psychoanalytical and political perspective of apparatus theory an ideological process, that is based on the possibility to hide the fragmentation of the cinematic body through the impression of a continuous movement. If we search this difference and this independence of the movie from the system of the other arts, it should be individuated in this dialectic between presence and absence, between material images and mental imagery. The theatre has depth.

and motion, without the any subjective help. The screen has them and yet lacks them. The independence of the movie from the outer reality is, at the same time, its dependence to the human mind and its laws.

The first part of the photoplay is devoted to the issue of the way the human mind contributes and cooperates to produce and shape cinematic experience by introducing the impression of depth and the impression of movement. In the second part the focus radically changes: the most important issue is the way the subjective acts and the mind, the mental acts, are represented within the film and affect the viewer. In fact, if we consider the movie, we can see that movies are not representations of the real world, but also representations of the processes through which we perceive and comprehend the outer world.

In movies there is a process of objectification and materialization of subjective, mental processes. For instance, a mental faculty that we can meet in the movie is the faculty of attention,

that is very important in Münsterberg's theory to represent the entire aesthetical goal on the movie. Why? Münsterberg distinguishes between voluntary attention and involuntary attention. The main device to express and drive the attention within the movies is the close up. We, in Italy, for the close up, use the term primo piano, by focusing only in the dimension of the face, but the close up is a shot that focuses the attention only to a part of the world viewed. As the objectification of the inner act of attention, the close up contributes to create a subjective world that is free from the physical form of space, time and causality. It's the world of the attention of the author that drives the attention of the spectator.

Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d'un crime, 1901 7 The mind of the film is not only related to space, but also to time. The movies have their faculty related to time, their memory. This memory is expressed by the device of the flashback. With the flashback

The mind can overcome the present and go to the past, to a dimension that is past. In this sense, I find very interesting the first representation of a flashback in the history of cinema, that is in this French movie of 1901 by Ferdinand Zecca called Histoire d'un crime. Here we can see a murderer that visualizes, the night before his death, his assassination, his entire life. The flashback is visualized in a very peculiar way, is visualized as a screen, a cinematic screen that appears at the shoulders of the murdered. In this sense, we can see this analogy between a cinematic apparatus and the memory is referred not only to the theory but also to themselves. He sees his happy youth and his decline in alcohol and debits. This movie seems to answer to Münsterberg. If the cinema has a mind, the mind itself seems to act like a cinematic screen. The problem with Münsterberg is that although he fights to recognize the importance, the aesthetical importance of the movie, the importance

of the movie for the aesthetical theory, he never caught the names of the films he analyses. This is the description that Münsterberg gives to the flashback, but we don't know to what film this description is referred.

The possibility to overcome the present and go directly to the past is identified with the mental faculty of memory and with the technical cinematic device of the flashback. What happens for the future? The possibility to go to the future with a higher mental act is identified with the faculty of imagination. The faculty of imagination has its expression in the forward, where a character imagines his own future. The description of Munsterberg is not surprising: It is not easy to find in early cinema expressions of flashforward, as well as is very easy to do it in modern cinema, but there is an example in A Christmas Carol (1910) made by James Searley Dowley, an Edison Manufacturing production, and naturally translated by Dickens. In particular a flashforward is the scene

In which the old Scrooge, visited by the ghost of the future Christmas can imagine and in this sense directly visualise his destiny of death and solitude [minute 8.10 to minute 9.10]. By analysing this devices, the flashback and the flashforward, we can notice a radical shift in considering the role of the mind in the movies: it is no more the mind of the spectator, it is the mind of the film itself. 8 It is a simulation of the mind that appears within the screen. It's clear, movies are not only visualisations of the world, but also exteriorisations of the way we see the world, objectification of subjective way of life, of subjective visions and mental acts, but not only. An instance is when we visualise the dream of a character represented within a screen, in particular with a peculiar device of editing, also in early cinema, called crossfade. We can see this instance in a film titled Let me dream again (1900) by George Albert Smith. We know, dreams are desires. There is