LITERARY CRITICS AND THEIR TECHNIQUES

☆ Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916) - A German philosopher, psychologist, sociologist.

➔ The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)

History of cinema
● Outer developments: technological history
● Inner developments: society’s uses of the medium: information, education, entertainment
● Photoplay: narrative medium
Visual tricks -> information and education -> human mind

Munsterberg was a forerunner of GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

Gestalt psychology - every experience involves relations between part and a whole, figure and ground
➔ The mind organises its perceptual field (pole percepcyjne)
➔ The mind is active: it confers1 motion on stimuli (phi-phenomenon; an illusion of movement that arises when
stationary objects—light bulbs, for example—are placed side by side and illuminated rapidly one after another)
➔ The mind does not reflect the world but constructs it (according to the laws of the mind)
e.g. you either see faces or a rabbit | vase/ a duck → you cannot see both at the same time
➔ his main claim was that Cinema is the art of the mind → cinema organises its material similarly to the way human
mind works

PSYCHOLOGY OF CINEMA - how does cinema work?

Münsterberg has a hierarchic concept of the mind:​

The way mind works → cinema organise the world:​

1st level
a. mind confers motion on stimuli → this corresponds to the way →
b. cinema creates the illusion of movement​
2nd level
a. mind: attention (sensation and motion)
b. cinema: angle, composition, focal length, image size, lighting​
3rd level
a. mind: memory and imagination (sense, personal aspect)
b. cinema: editing (dramatic direction and organisation)​
4th level
a. mind: emotions (complete mental events which organise the activities of the mind)
b. cinema: narrative​

AESTHETICS OF CINEMA - what is its value?

Münsterberg was a neo-Kantian​→ Immanuel Kant’s three critiques​
1. of pure reason (theoretical reason)
2. of practical reason (ethics)
3. of judgement (value)​

☆ Kant distinguishes between:​

a. Phenomena - what can be perceived within the framework created by time, space and causality (the physical
world)​
b. 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​

1
confer - nadawać, przyznawać
Kant’s main quality related to the beautiful is disinterestedness – while 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

‘purposiveness without purpose’ - we feel there has to be some principle of order in beauty, even if we cannot find it

DISINTERESTEDNESS - aesthetic value

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​

Munsterberg:
"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-contained2, censorship of films is unnecessary.​

☆ Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) - a revolutionary director and one of the most important theorists! - “Battle of Potemkin”
● Two ‘schools’ in Russian post-revolutionary theater
1. Moscow Art Theatre 2. Constructivism
Constantin Stanislavsky - psychological, faithful Vsevolod meyerhold - anti-realistic: breaking down of
replication of reality, dialogue as dominant (hierarchy) reality into useful/manipulable material

Eisenstein start as a constructivist in theatre, and later brings its techniques to film:
● Elements of theatre - dialogue, set, lighting, staging of actors, costuming… - should be neutralized → made into
manipulable material like colour in painting and sound music
● Individual shot is comprehensible(understandable in itself) (it’s a unit of meaning) - it should be neutralised

➔ Inspiration from Japanese Kabuki theatre:

◆ exaggerated stylisation which deforms and alters events and facts leaving only physical form
◆ stylised gestures on equal footing with stylised codes of sounds, costume, decor, etc
◆ abstract and powerful form where the meaning resides in the form of the ensemble3 - unlike in western
film or theatre, where all the codes (light, sound, etc.) are subservient4 to narration
◆ the meaning of kabuki cannot be understood by recounting the plot
While watching Kabuki:
- you involuntarily recall the novel by an American writer about a man whose auditory and optical nerves were
transposed so that he perceived light vibrations as sounds and air tremors as colours → synaesthesia
➢ Montage of attractions
○ Lightning, composition, acting, camera work, story made commensurable to avoid crude realism
dominated by storytelling

2
self-contained - samowystarczalny
3
ensemble - zespół, zestaw
4
subservient - służalczy, podległy, podporządkowany
 ○ each element should be like a circus attraction - each giving a precise psychological impression (contrary
to mainstream cinema where dominant action is just supported by other elements)
○ Film: continuous string of shocks coming from various elements of the film spectacle

● Early Eisenstein claims:

○ each shot is a particular attraction/psychological stimulus
○ later on elements within each shot provide sympathetic or conflicting attractions
○ attractions are shaped rhythmically and thematically into rich textures
○ LONG TAKES ARE A WASTE → a shot should last only as long as it is necessary for the audience to
register its significance

● Neutralisation of elements can take two forms:

a. Transference5: instead of accompaniment, the transference of the basic affective intention form one
material to another, from one category of stimulant to another
1. elements reinforce each other (accompaniment)
2. conflict between elements to create a new effect
3. an unexpected element creates a needed effect
4.
b. Synaesthesia (multisensory experience): several elements combine at the same time: “you hear colors with
your ears”
➔ Eisenstein’s example - A protagonist leaves a besieged castle
◆ the representation of the castle at the back of the stage
◆ a backdrop which appears and shows the castle gate in a smaller size
◆ another backdrop of abstracted landscape colors
◆ the greatest distance from the castle expressed synaesthetically: in terms of sound, by the music of
the shamisen
● KULESHOV EFFECT is associated with EISENSTEIN to some extent
○ Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin were closely associated with Kuleshov’s workshop and were familiar
with his experiments concerning montage → which they considered crucial to the art of cinema.
○ Pudovkin conceived the audience as passive receivers of meaning that a film-maker gives to a film by
using montage/editing.

☆ Vsevold Pudovkin
The task of a film-maker:
★ by the proper choice and organisation of shots, one could reconstruct the sense of the world which is already
there in reality
★ a film should present a heightened image of reality by exposing hidden relationships within it, which the audience
doesn’t see due to chaotic experience of everyday life (confusion of history and psychology)
○ Eisenstein: cinema should not expose linkages[połączenia] (received passively by the viewer) - it should
create new meanings by collision of images

Attractions (shots) - cells; montage - animating principle

◆ Eisenstein compares his ideas about cinematic montage to compound ideograms or the way haiku poetry
functions
◆ Japanese/Chinese ideogram:
- 口 (mouth) + 鸟 (bird) = 鸣 (to sing)​
- child + mouth = to scream, etc.
- A new concept is created out of juxtaposition
● Haiku
A lonely crow
on leafless bough
one autumn eve.

5
transference - przeniesienie
 - A series of sense perceptions (provided by an author),
- unified sense (created by the mind of a reader),
- precise psychological impact (final effect)

Conflict as the main principle of organisation

1. Conflict between attractions: graphic direction, scales, volumes, masses, depths, darkness/lightness, focal lengths,
etc.
2.

3. Conflict can be organised: rhythmically, tonally, overtonally

4. Shots - stimulation; interaction of shots creates meaning

Statement on sound
‘In the first place there will be commercial exploitation of the most salable merchandise, TALKING FILMS. Those in
which sound recording will proceed on a naturalistic level, exactly corresponding with the movement on the screen, and
providing a certain "illusion" of talking people, of audible objects, etc.

To use sound in this way will destroy the culture of montage, for every ADHESION of sound to a visual montage piece
increases its inertia[bezwładność] as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its meaning – and this will
undoubtedly be to the detriment of montage, operating in the first place not on the montage pieces but on their
JUXTAPOSITION. ​

ONLY A CONTRAPUNTAL6 USE of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of
montage development and perfection. ​

THE FIRST EXPERIMENTAL WORK WITH SOUND MUST BE DIRECTED ALONG THE LINE OF ITS DISTINCT
NON SYNCHRONISATION WITH THE VISUAL IMAGES. And only such an attack will give the necessary palpability
which will later lead to the creation of an ORCHESTRAL COUNTERPOINT of visual and aural images. ‘​
● ​Not only sound: in “Ivan the Terrible part II” - non-realistic use of colour
● Eisenstein argues for the square screen (‘dynamic square’): within a square frame all the directions are equally
valid, unlike in a rectangular frame which pretends to be a window on reality

The theme
“What is essentially involved in such an understanding of montage? In such a case, each montage piece exists no longer as
something unrelated, but as a given particular representation of the general that in equal measure penetrates all the
shot-pieces. The juxtaposition of these partial details in a given montage construction calls to life and forces into the light
that general quality in which each detail has participated and which binds together all the details into a whole, namely,
into that generalized image, wherein the creator, followed by the spectator, experiences the theme.”

Discovery of the theme

1. Nature is not easily available
2. Truth is achieved by means of transformation of nature and history
3. The artist: to apprehend the true form of an event or natural phenomenon
4. Utilisation of such forms in creation
5. Reality must destroy realism

Conclusion

6
kontrapunktowy - element obrazu, widowiska itp. uwydatniający inny element przez skontrastowanie go z nim
 ■ The film is not a product, but a creative process in which the audience participates → the road to truth is truth
■ Unification through conflict → conflict is the principle of life
■ Transformation of consciousness by what cannot be expressed in language

☆ Rudolph Arhnheim (1904-2007) 103 lata lmao

Film als Kunst - Film as Art (1933)
● He is interested only in aesthetic use of cinema - he focuses on the medium itself, its formal properties. Film has
no simple material as other arts (music has sound, painting has colour, sculpture has stone)
● Some say that reality is film’s medium, but any art’s medium should be manipulable
● Reality cannot be manipulated, consequently → film cannot be art
● According to Arnheim, film can be art: what can be manipulated are the limitations in rendering reality by cinema

THE LIMITATIONS: REALITY → FILM

1. 3D (solids) to 2D (flat surface)
2. Reduction of sense of depth → the problem of the image size
3. Lighting and absence of colour
4. Framing of the image
5. Absence of space-time continuum [editing]
6. Absence of inputs from other senses

Technically visible vs. psychologically visible

● Human eye is built more or less like the film/photo camera, but we do not see the reality as our eyes do - the data
gets processed by our brain, which compensates for all kinds of visual distortions → our eyes see the table from
this particular perspective(fig. 1), but our brain processes this information and we actually see the table as almost
rectangular because our mind knows it is rectangular.

● He claims that the film manipulates the technically visible [unreal] or ‘technical limitations of
representationalism’
● It is the manipulation/distortion of the process of representation, not objects in the world, as is the case in other
arts
● Specifically cinematic manipulations (there are others which film shares e.g., with plastic arts):
○ fast/slow motion, fades, dissolves, superimpositions, backward motion, use of stills, distortion through
focus and filter

Art focus on form

● Art emphasises medium (the way things are represented) rather than object (what is represented)
● Every art has its own specific sensory nexus
● Art involves symbolic language: translation of the world into the proper codes of the medium
● Developing historically, an art accumulates experience - it finds out that certain forms and themes are more
appropriate to its medium than others (e.g., it is difficult to express ideas in music, etc.). This results in purifying
the medium - every art finally finds its perfect forms.
○ For instance, after hundreds of years of experimentation European music found its purified form in the
sonata and the symphony (‘absolute’ music purified of external influences like the literary message, etc.)
● Some conventions are more natural to the medium because it has certain physical properties

☆ According to Arnheim
● The film found its purified form in silent cinema of the 1920s - the constituent parts of the art of cinema found
perfect balance → this was destroyed by the introduction of sound.
● “The Jazz Singer”, 1927 - the first feature-length motion picture with synchronised dialogue sequences
● the perfectly coherent (balanced) art was destroyed by the predominance of the dialogue → because it served
crude realism
● with the introduction of sound, everything else in the film serves the plot and dialogue (semblance7 of reality vs.
formal integration with expressive purposes) - the balance is destroyed
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semblance - podobieństwo
General purpose of art according to Arnheim and GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
● There are close relationships between the world and the mind
● The mind creates patterns
● Artists create more highly organised patterns which reflect patterns of the world
● Art aims at en equilibrium8 of forces (‘organic’): between the artist's mind and the world
R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (1954)
‘Motifs like rising and falling, dominance and submission, weakness and strength, harmony and discord, struggle and
conformance, underlie all existence. We find them within our own mind and in our relations to other people, in the
human community and in the events of nature. Perception and expression fulfils its spiritual mission only if we experience
it more than the resonance of our own feelings. It permits us to realise that the forces stirring in ourselves are only
individual examples of the same forces acting throughout the universe. We are thusenabled to sense our place in the
whole and the inner unity of that whole.

☆ André Bazin (1918-1958)​

Cahiers du cinéma -​the most prestigious French film journal​
a. Established by Bazin with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in 1951
b. Young film critics supported by Bazin who later became famous French film directors: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc
Godard, Pierre Kast, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette

Bazin is an anti-formalist → for him realist representation of the world is crucial to the importance of the cinema
I. ‘Cinema attains9 its fullness in being the art of the real’
II. What is realist about cinema?
A. “not certainly the realism of the subject matter or realism of expression, but the realism of space without
which moving pictures do not constitute the cinema’
B. What is primarily realist about cinema is representation of objects in space

Reality is mechanically recorded by the camera

‘For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a
nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of
man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be
photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect something of his
personality, this does not play the same role as is played by that of the painter. All the arts are based on the presence of
man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a
flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.’ ​

(Pre-digital) photographic/cinematic image is a proof that a real object was actually present in front of the camera – the
nature of the photographic medium is naturally realistic/objective​
‘This production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image. The objective nature of
photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our
critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually represented, set
before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality
from the thing to its reproduction.’​

Cinema by Bazin:
● Automatic (non-human) registering of the image
● Complex technology: the desire for perfect representation of reality
● What we see in cinema is not exactly reality, but nevertheless something physically related to reality: the photons
which were a part of reality left their traces on the celluloid, thus the photographic/cinematic image is a
‘fingerprint’ (or ‘tracing’) of reality

8
equilibrium - równowaga
9
attain - osiągać
Cinematic image is primarily interesting because of its realism – that the camera registered what really was there
‘But then begins the long Calvary of the descent, with Herzog and Lacheraal [Lachenal] strapped like mummies to the
backs of their Sherpas. This time the camera is there like the veil of Veronica pressed to the face of human suffering.
Undoubtedly the written account by Herzog is more detailed and more complete. Memory is the most faithful of films —
the only one that can register at any height, and right up to the very moment of death. But who can fail to see the
difference between memory and that objective image that gives it eternal substance?’ (Bazin’s comment on a documentary
film about the Annapurna expedition of 1950)​

Bazin’s ‘objectivity axiom’

● Film is the tracing of reality on celluloid, which is genetically linked to reality
● The tracings are immediately comprehensible to the one who sees them - no need of deciphering as in the case of
fingerprints, X-ray, etc.
● Cinema is not reality but an asymptote of reality
He distinguishes between:

Signification - result of cinematic style→Reality Significance - result of cinematic form →Cinematic

transformed into abstract signs by personal preferences of realism is the effect of the rejection of style in which the
a filmmaker​ real nature of the medium is exposed/looked for
(significance)​

● According to him, unadorned(nieupiększony, bez ozdób)10 cinematic reality has its own aesthetic validity
(contrary to what Arnheim claimed)
‘There is nothing aesthetically retrogressive about simple cinematographic recording, on the contrary, there is
progress in expression, a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an extension of its stylistics’

● Rather than manipulating reality for his own purposes (signification), a good filmmaker should look for
significance found in objects and situations:
○ ‘The events are not necessarily signs of something, of a truth of which we are to be convinced, they all
carry their own weight, their complete uniqueness, that ambiguity that characterises any fact.’

Exploration of reality for its own sake (significance) vs. abstract manipulation of signs to embody a rhetorical truth
(signification)

Cinema provides access to empirical reality otherwise unknown to us by:

a. unadorned image
b. unedited scene
It can show us aspects of reality we have not noticed - as slow motion shows us reality we are not able to perceive with
‘natural’ eyes.

Theatre vs. Cinema

Theatre Cinema
- involves stylisation, convention or artificiality; - interest in unadorned ‘raw’ reality; it is a window
what takes place on stage can be compared to a on dreams
ritual - Centrifugal - we look at the cinematic reality
- Centripetal - we don’t imagine that the reality through the ‘window’ of the screen and imagine
acted out on stage extends beyond the limits of that this reality extends in all directions beyond a
the stage rectangular fragment that we see at any given
moment of the film
Centripetal / Centrifugal
‘The theatre,” says Baudelaire, “is a crystal chandelier.” If one were called upon to offer in comparison a symbol other than
this artificial crystal-like object, brilliant, intricate, and circular, which refracts the light which plays around its centre and

10
unadorned - nieupiększony, bez ozdób
holds us prisoners of its aureole, we might say of the cinema that it is the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an
uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the
screen.’

Bazin was an enthusiast of Jean Renoir’s films because they displayed no visible style
‘This technique [rear projection] would be unthinkable for Renoir, for it necessarily dissociates the actors from their
surroundings and implies that their acting and their dialogue are more important than the reflection of the water on their
faces, the wind in their hair, or the movement of a distant branch. All of Renoir's boating scenes are shot entirely on
location, even if he has to sacrifice the shooting script to do so, and their quality is a direct result of this technique. A
thousand examples could illustrate this marvellous sensitivity to the physical, tactile reality of an object and its milieu;
Renoir's films are made from the surfaces of the objects photographed.’
● Rear projection - actors (in a boat, car, etc.) filmed in the studio with the image of the landscape through which
they are moving projected behind them by a camera

According to Bazin cinema should prefer selection (from reality) to transformation (of reality)
‘The [realist] style becomes the inner dynamic principle of the narrative, somewhat like the relation of energy to matter
or the specific physics of the work, as it were. This it is which distributes the fragmented realities across the aesthetic
spectrum of the narrative, which polarizes the filings of the facts without changing their chemical composition.’

Significance - style doesn’t need to alter reality. The camera can find correspondences and interrelationships in reality

Montage
- How to render an event by means of montage? Three principal possibilities:
1. Abstract principle of argument in which the montage of images illustrates prior logic (most often used in
silent cinema and commercials: e.g., drinking Pepsi associated with youth, having a good time, being free,
sexually attractive etc.)
2. psychological montage/continuity - an attempt to emulate the way our attention functions in ordinary lief
- significant details edited together to form a logical continuity (the view of a room - cut - a dead body
lying on the couch - cut - a close-up on the knife stuck in the chest of the corpse); typically used in
mainstream cinema/Hollywood
3. Bazin’s ideal (exemplified[zilustrowany] by Renoir and Italian neo-realism) is not the film which
fragments reality - which is a continuity of time and space - and then reorders it according to
psychological principles of human attention (as in 2.) but the cinema which attempts to render the
spatio-temporal continuity of reality as fully as possible by showing an event developing in integral space
(perceptual continuity); this can be done by using depth-of-field photography, long shot, sequence shot -
usually a long take that includes a full narrative sequence containing multiple scenes in its duration

Reality is ambiguous but meaningful

‘He [Renoir] alone in his searchings as a director prior to La Regle du jeu forced himself to look back beyond the
resources provided by montage and so uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said
without chopping the world up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without
disturbing the unity natural to them.’

Psychological realism - mainstream cinema

‘Whatever the film, its aim is to give us the illusion of being present at real events unfolding before us as in everyday
reality. But this illusion involves a fundamental deceit, for reality exists in a continuous space, and the screen in fact
presents us with a succession of tiny fragments called "shots," whose choice, order and length constitute precisely what we
call the film's découpage’ → breaking a film down into shots
● ‘If, through a deliberate effort of attention, we try to see the ruptures imposed by the camera on the continuous
unfolding of the event represented, and try to understand clearly why we normally take no notice of them, we
realize that we tolerate them because they nevertheless allow an impression to remain of continuous and
homogenous reality.’
● ‘Under the cover of the congenital realism of the cinematographic image, a complete system of abstraction has
been fraudulently introduced. One believes limits have been set by breaking up the events according to a sort of
 anatomy natural to the action: in fact one has subordinated the wholeness of reality to the ‘sense’ of action. One
has transformed nature into a series of ‘signs.’’

Reality: free interplay between man and perceptual objects

● ‘Classical [‘psychological’] editing totally suppresses this kind of reciprocal freedom between us and the object. It
substitutes for a free organisation, a forced breaking down where the logic of the shots controlled by the reporting
of the action anaesthetises our freedom completely.’

Bazin argues for

● Ontological realism: density and independence of the object on screen (the object is not supposed to be only a
psychological cipher)
● Dramatic realism: no separation between actor and decor
● Psychological realism: avoidance of determination of perception (In a long shot and during a long take we are able
to choose what to look at: what is happening either in the foreground, or middle-ground, or background; in
psychological montage we are forced to look precisely at a small fragment of reality the filmmaker choses for us.)
● For him, the most important task of the cinema is to find new or repressed aspects of the world