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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Neurofilmology
The Future of the Past. Arnheim and Film Today
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Introduction
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2022-05-31
2022-12-30
2022-12-30
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Cinéma & Cie
Ian Verstegen
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Neurofilmology
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The Future of the Past. Arnheim and Film Today
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                                                                                       The Future of the Past.
                                                                                       Arnheim and Film Today
                                                                                       Adriano D’Aloia, Università degli Studi di Bergamo
                                                                                       Ian Verstegen, University of Pennsylvania1




                                                                                       ARNHEIM, AGAIN                                                                                 Keywords
                                                                                                                                                                                Rudolf Arnheim
                                                                                          Exactly fifteen years ago, on June 9, 2007, psychologist of art and media                  Film as Art
                                                                                                                                                                             Gestalt Psychology
                                                                                       theorist Rudolf Arnheim died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one month before his 103rd
                                                                                                                                                                              Gestalt Filmology
                                                                                       birthday (he was born in Berlin on July 15, 1904). He devoted his entire life to         Neurofilmology
                                                                                       the study of the arts — starting with film in the 1920s — and is the author of                       DOI
                                                                                       Art and Visual Perception and Visual Thinking and many other masterpieces                    10.54103/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       that continue to be essential points of reference for generations of students,        2036-461X/17977
                                                                                       scholars and professionals in the fields of analysis, criticism and the practice
                                                                                       of the visual arts2. Arnheim is also considered one of the classic film theorists
                                                                                       for his application of the assumptions of Gestalt psychology to film analysis
                                                                                       presented for the first time 90 years ago in his essay Film als Kunst.3 His radical
                                                                                       positions have been criticized in various eras and intellectual spheres, but they
                                                                                       are in some respects still valid and are often unwittingly adopted by critics and
                                                                                       scholars. As the essays of this special issue demonstrate, a recontextualization
                                                                                       and revitalization of Arnheim’s film theory and, more generally, a Gestalt
                                                                                       approach to the film experience, can be still productive today.4
                                                                                          This task has been made easier in the past few years due to a series of
                                                                                       publications that have clarified aspects of Arnheim’s theoretical project or
                                                                                       else further specified some of his philosophical commitments.5 For years in
                                                                                       film studies there was a standoff between psychoanalytic derived and more
                                                                                       cognitive approaches. More recently, we have learned to nuance how to blend
                                                                                       an approach that is not afraid of experimentation or quantification with one
                                                                                       that can address the perennial problems of more speculative film studies like
                                                                                       spectatorship, the gaze, enunciation and embodiment.6 The latter, the turn
                                                                                       toward embodied approaches to the filmic experience, has largely made this new
                                                                                       idea possible. Yet many writers would still be hesitant that there is contained
                                                                                       in Arnheim’s work or Gestalt theory more largely the pieces of a kind of theory
                                                                                       of Gestalt embodiment. In some ways, such a theory would clarify some of the
                                                                                       more untenable elements of embodiment theories which in general have been


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                     9
     adopted as specular reversals of cognitive theory.7 The body is meant to erase
     representation, when properly elaborated a Gestalt embodiment might show
     how the body and its role in filmic experience is still self-conscious because
     even awareness of the body is a form of consciousness.
       The present special issue of Cinéma & Cie goes deeper into some of Arnheim’s
     theories, broadening the platform of his work into Gestalt psychology more
     generally, and addressing question of fit between older theories and newer
     tendencies.



     THE PARTS AND THE WHOLE
        A multifaceted and passionate thinker, throughout the twentieth century
     Arnheim turned his interest to a variety of media and arts — from cinema
     to photography, from radio to television, from painting to sculpture, from
     architecture to video art —, applying with rigor and extending with creativity
     the assumptions of the Gestalt psychology method he learned in Berlin in the
     1920s directly from its founders Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler. In clear
     opposition to the psychological and philosophical currents dominant at the time,
     in particular behaviorism and idealism, Gestalttheorie theorized perception
     as an immediate act through which the mind, in a predominantly innate way,
     organizes sensible data according to certain laws of ‘unification’ of single parts
     into a whole other than their simple sum. Distinct elements of the visual field
     tend to be perceived as belonging to a single overall configuration by virtue
     of their similarity, closeness, common destiny, continuity of direction, closure,
     figure-ground relationship, meaningfulness. In short, the images — or rather
     some of their qualities — ‘communicate’ directly with the observer, eliciting a
     mediation and organization of the visible that the human eye and mind tend to
     intuitively grasp, supported by their physiology.
        Gestalt psychology cannot be reduced to a descriptive theory of optical
     phenomena, it is indeed a theory of mind based on the elective relationship
     between perception and cognition. Optical illusions and ambiguous figures
     (such as Kanizsa’s triangle, Rubin’s vase, or Jastrow’s duck-rabbit) are
     evidence of the discrepancy between the physical object and its phenomenal
     perception. For Gestalt psychology and in particular for Arnheim, who applied
     its laws to artistic phenomena, perceiving is always also thinking, reasoning is
     also intuition, observation is also invention. The image is traversed by a system
     of forces which, in the eyes of the observer, make it more or less dynamic,
     unstable, tending to a momentarily disrupted equilibrium. Thanks to its gestalt
     qualities, the image expresses some relevant aspects of human experience,
     including emotions. Grasping the meaning of an image therefore means actively
     participating in the adventure of its perceptual organization.
        An important element of properly understanding Arnheim — and one which
     is present in the following volumes — is the recognition that although moving
     forms are phenomenally immediate, it is the spatial, temporal and multi-medial



10                                            D’Aloia, Verstegen, The Future of the Past
context that dynamically shifts their meaning. Therefore, there is an inherent
provisional and fallible background to any observations made in an Arnheimian
manner. His theory is the opposite of a dogmatic formalism and is therefore
highly useful in our contemporary context because it links the ultimate meaning
of the filmic work to analytic methods that are not reductive.



FORMATIVE FORMALISM
   At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, Arnheim made an original application of
Gestalt laws to cinema, a phenomenon of considerable aesthetic importance
which, however, had not been studied with a scientific approach until then.
There was no better laboratory than cinema theaters to test the principles
according to which the eye captures the forces, the vectors, the dynamism,
the intensity and all the expressive element of a work of art on the basis of
the systemic relationships between the visual elements involved. Also based
on a large number of examples collected during his activity as a film critic at
Die Weltbühne (a leading periodical of the Weimar Republic), in 1932 Arnheim
composed an impressive volume entitled Film als Kunst 8. The book was soon
banned by the Nazi regime due to its author’s Jewish origins and a too direct
allusion to the similarity between the mustache of Charlie Chaplin’s Charlot and
those of Hitler in one of his review. Film als Kunst, however, was immediately
translated into English and began to circulate in some Italian intellectual circles,
in particular among the teachers and students of the Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia in Rome. Having fled from Germany, Arnheim arrived in Rome in
the summer of 1933 and for the following five years was one of the main editors
of the magazines Intercine and Cinema. On the columns of these magazines he
published a large number of articles on the psychological and aesthetic aspects
of film, many of which were signed with various pseudonyms which have only
recently been directly attributed.9 His Italian ‘idyll’ was destined to end soon: in
1938, the promulgation of the racial laws in Italy forced him to a new escape
(first to London and then to New York), which corresponded to a sort of ‘denial’
of cinema, of which he will return to deal only sporadically or incidentally.10
   Film als Kunst is a tormented and controversial book not only for the political
context in which it hardly begins to circulate, but also for its content. It was
at the end of the 1920s that the transition from silent to sound was taking
place and Arnheim opposed this and other technical innovations — color, the
panoramic format — by taking a defensive position on the specificity of cinema.
As eminently a visual medium, in order to claim its artistic status, cinema had
to avoid contamination with non-original means of expression and to remain
autonomous in developing and using its own language artistically. These
contaminations were in fact evident concessions to spectacle and commercial
success, but above all a fatal reproductive approach to reality, from which the
film had to keep away. This ‘purist’ position remained substantially unchanged
over time despite the advances in the art of cinema. In the new edition of the book,


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      11
     published in the United States in 195711, the entire second part was replaced by
     a series of writings dating back to the Italian period, including the well-known
     essay A New Laocoön (1938) which confirmed his opposition to talkies.12 At the
     turn of the 1950s and 1960s, however, in the wake of the success of Art and
     Visual Perception, the interest around Arnheim theory of cinema rekindled.
        The fundamental assumptions of Arnheimian film theory is that cinema is not
     a means of simple mechanical transcription of reality, but a reality in its own
     right which dialogues with the former by difference. The transposition of reality
     on the screen brings out the insuperable partiality of the human eye (and of the
     camera) in front of the natural world. Arnheim identifies and describes a series
     of ‘absences’: the absence of depth, of color, of off-screen space, of space-time
     continuity, of non-visual stimuli.13
        Yet precisely from its limitations with respect to reality, cinema has the
     possibility of being art, as the use of these ‘differentiating factors’ as ‘formative
     means’ allowed the ‘cinematographic artist’ to make a creative compensation of
     the gaps. Arnheim therefore describes the artistic use of each factor. First, the
     possibility of choosing a particular point of view, thus creating a surprise effect
     from a hiding/revelation dynamic. For example in the opening scene of Charles
     Chaplin’s The Immigrant, the rear angle suggests that the character, leaning
     on the railing of the ship, is feeling bad, while it is later revealed that he was
     only fishing. On the other hand, Arnheim considers inappropriate and gratuitous
     — formalist instead of formative — the abundant use of extreme close shots
     in Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), a solution that hides
     action and therefore prevents the viewer’s full understanding of the narrative.
     Second, the possibility of composing the shot by exploiting the ‘duplicity’ of the
     image, which gives both the impression of a real event thanks to the illusion of
     depth, but it is still a two-dimensional image. Thus, for example, in King Vidor’s
     The Crowd (1928) the shot of young John Sims climbing the stairs, already
     suspecting that he has lost his father, is not only a body that approaches the
     camera, but also a figure that enlarges by progressively widening towards the
     angles of the frame, physically and symbolically going towards his adult age.
     Third, the possibility of expressing inner states or symbolic meanings through
     the grayscale, lighting and contrast, without resorting to color, as in Walter
     Ruttmann’s Berlin Symphony of a Great City (1927). For Arnheim, the availability
     of the entire color range is by no means an advantage for the film artist. Indeed,
     it is the grayscale, in its complex essentiality, that offers the possibility of
     expressing symbolic contents. It is no coincidence that Arnheim was on the jury
     of the 1964 Venice Film Festival which awarded the Leone d’oro to Michelangelo
     Antonioni’s Red Desert, a film in which an non-naturalistic use of color is the
     reflection of the characters interiority. Fourth, the use of the limits of the frame
     to exclude and then reveal portions of the scene (off-screen space), to ‘cut out’
     and bring a significant detail closer (close-up) or to play with the dimensions
     and proportions of objects placed at different depth levels (deep focus). The
     almost-squared aspect ratio in use in the 1910s and 1920s helped the viewer
     to have a comprehensive view of the action depicted on the screen, which is



12                                             D’Aloia, Verstegen, The Future of the Past
instead prevented by the horizontal expansion of the format (as in Abel Gance’s
panoramic Napoléon [1927]). Fifth, the possibility of unnaturally reconstituting
the fragments of space and time through editing. Finally, the ability to arouse
sound perceptions using only images (in Josef von Sternberg’s The Docks
of New York [1928], the shot of a gun corresponds to the sudden flight away
of a flock of birds). Arnheim accuses sound and in particular the dialogue of
paralyzing the action, as it relieves the actor from the need to use the body and
facial expressions as primary means of communication. Moreover, the absence
of the nonvisual world of the senses, allows the film to arouse a sense of vertigo
by exploiting the discrepancy between the viewer physical immobility and the
camera movements.
  The artistic use of these means made it possible to combine form and content:
simple aesthetic solutions could immediately express inner states and symbolic
meanings. The set of these means constituted the specific aesthetic language of
cinema — a system that today we take for granted, but which in the 1930s still
had to be described systematically.
  Arnheim had already described the developed machine-like money profit
orientation of the Berlin cinema industry, and in America saw this expanded
in the Hollywood system.14 Once the talking film could no longer be dislodged
from the tastes of the public and the production schedules of the studios, he
immediately recognized the new importance of ideological analysis, which was
developed in his friendship with Siegfried Kracauer. At the same time, as a
keen observer of technological issues, he was considering the consequences to
cinema of the improvement of film stocks. Sharper and better emulsions almost
required a shift toward realism, while he predicted that the traditional aims of
cinema could be satisfied through animation.



A KINOGESTALTTHEORIE
  Film als Kunst was therefore a retrospective book, aimed at discussing the
effect of technological innovations on the great age of cinema as art. However,
the immutability of Arnheim’s position over the years, made his theory even
more radical (as well as more criticized, especially in its method15). Despite
the intrinsic limitations of Film as Art, in fact, the laws of Gestalt psychology
continue to act in our perceptual experience of visual artifacts (as well as in
their production), including films. Even without considering this approach as
exclusive and exhaustive, but rather in integration with other models capable
of explaining more rigorously the complexity of the viewing experience, a filmic
Gestalttheorie can still be a productive means of access to the interpretation
of film. The evolution of the history of visual media, characterized by the
digitalization, the multiplication of screens and formats, the overabundance
of images, and the multimedia contamination of languages, have changed the
occasions and conditions of film viewing. However, these phenomena have not
distorted the basic components of visual communication, nor do they suspend


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    13
     the duty of a critic, a scholar or a student to describe the communicative and
     artistic effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of audiovisual products (cinema, TV
     series, commercials, music videos...).
        The study of cinematographic formative means can still help us today. Film
     analysis could return to dwell more precisely on the compositional aspects of
     shots (e.g. off-screen space, camera angles and point of view, shots scale, editing
     and deep focus) and its dynamics (in terms of vectors, balance, configuration,
     etc.).16 Today eye-tracking tools allow us to register and study empirically the
     viewers’ gaze behavior and the dynamics of attention.17 This approach has the
     potential to enrich the analysis of the film experience with information on the
     quality and adequacy of stylistic choices.
        The way in which viewers process editing — or what Arnheim called the
     ‘space-time discontinuity’ — is inherently a gestaltic activity: in fact, the viewer
     mentally reconstructs the continuity behind the logic of events despite the fact
     that there are lacks in space and time, applying the law of ‘good continuity’, that
     is, filling the gaps and constituting a whole that does not derive from simple
     juxtaposition of the shots or narrative chunks. In this sense, editing follows the
     functions of the mind in tending towards a ‘complete’ or ‘pregnant’ — that is,
     simple, coherent, logically structured — figure. On closer inspection, in drawing
     attention to the differences between reality and the film, Arnheim legitimized
     infringements of the rules of continuity (and, more generally, of Hollywood’s
     ‘ideology’).18 What matters is not balance per se, but the ability of the visual
     configurations to tend towards it, that is, to make themselves unstable, dynamic,
     in need of compensation.19 As Gestalt approach thus identifies and describes
     the expressive potential of dynamic tension, and even of discontinuity, if this
     stimulates the viewer’s propensity to comprehend the overall meaning of
     the narrative. Applied to the so-called ‘puzzle films’ or in general to complex
     storytelling, this approach allows us to conceive the film as a great mental game
     whose content is not the narration (or, the content), but the processes activated
     through the formal elements. An insight — another concept developed by
     Gestalt psychology — emerges as a reconfiguration of the relationship between
     the fragments in a new, sudden and intuitive way that allows a resolutive vision
     of a problem. If the film hides a real state of affairs until the last sequence, then
     there is no insight. If, on the other hand, it uses the space-time ‘folds’ of editing
     as formal means of expressing a momentarily incomprehensible state of affairs,
     then it involves the viewer actively in the comprehension of the content of the
     film. In short, it is likely that Arnheim would have loved Christopher Nolan’s
     Memento (2000) for its formalism in the use of editing (and also for the mixed
     use of cinematography), but not Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995) or
     films that adopt the same type of ‘unreliable’ narrator.
        Among the formative means, the ability of the film to evoke non-visual
     sensory experiences is one of the most interesting. This affects primarily the
     negative effects of the dialogue on acting, that Arnheim conceived as mostly a
     pantomimic activity. Interestingly, contemporary filmmakers have spontaneously
     rediscovered the power of the absence of speech, when the predominantly



14                                             D’Aloia, Verstegen, The Future of the Past
visual medium takes over. For example, Brian De Palma — who had studied
with Arnheim for a time at Sarah Lawrence College — remarked that he was
‘essentially a silent film director’, as he demonstrated with the abundant use
of long-takes with little or no dialogue in his films.20 Furthermore, for Arnheim,
the absence of non-visual stimuli affects not only the actor’s body, but also
the viewer’s. The latter, in fact, not only watches the movement represented
on the screen, but also experiences camera movements. Here, the relativity
of film expression emerges non only in terms of visual perception, but of the
relation, potentially conflictual, between the eye and the body, between visual
perception and proprioception and equilibrioception. Contemporary cinema
often uses this conflict in order to intensify the viewer’s perception. In this case,
‘embodied cognition’ is the result of a process that includes and strategically
uses a ‘disembodying phase’ of viewer’s perception.21
  In short, Arnheim could be considered as a classical theorist of modern and
contemporary cinema. On the one hand, he explained for the first time in a
systematic way the aesthetic implications of the film language at the time of its
evolution. On the other hand, with his ‘differential’ theory, he has aesthetically
legitimized infringements of the rules of continuity and balance, identifying
precisely in the interference to physiological perceptual laws, a vast range of
artistic potential that the cinema then naturally developed and that today we
can return to observe with its far-sighted gaze.
  The orientation of much film scholarship to either avant-garde cinema
or an inverted canon of popular culture and the condemnation of the elitist
orientation of critique of the Frankfurt school caused Arnheim’s approach to
appear hopelessly outdated. Yet his argument was intended to be a playbook
for those seeking various artistic effects. In that sense, its recommendations
were rather uncontroversial. Once one no longer believes in a positivist manner
that a prediction of a theory is a law-like certainty, one can begin to see Gestalt
principles as tendencies, in interaction with others for unpredictable results. One
can almost express the necessity of an Arnheimian filmology as a tautology. It is
simply the science of aesthetic effects, presumed by each and every filmmaker
for whatever their purpose.



FILM AS ART EXTENDED
  As the contributions to this special issue demonstrates, a Gestalt approach
to film is still productive today. Indeed, the coupling of Arnheim to Gestalt
psychology focuses the film theorist less on Arnheim the auteur than on him
as a Gestalt psychologist. Consequently, each of the essays contained in this
special issue in some sense extends Arnheim’s thought to new domains,
brings in other aspects of Gestalt psychology that he may have neglected, and
reconnects aspects of Gestalt filmological thinking to contemporary trends in
thinking.
  The article by Maarten Coëgnarts, ‘Meaning Potential of Motion Vectors in


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 38 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                       15
     Cinema’, connects the notion of vectors and directed tension — a prominent
     feature of Arnheim’s post-film writing to his earlier work, creating a useful
     consolidation of Arnheimian theory, moving vector discourse into film. Vectors
     for Arnheim create meaning by creating pictorial analogues of existence within
     artistic works. Following Herbert Zettl (a theorist whose relation to Arnheim
     would be useful to further explore), there are also motion vectors in cinema:
     primary motion, secondary motion, and tertiary motion. Armed with such
     concepts, Coëgnarts pushes Zettl’s discussion of motion vectors into meaningful
     expression with case studies of three films: Akira Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata,
     Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables.
       The next essay, Philippe Bédard’s ‘Points of Anchorage: Exo-centric Images and
     the perceptual Relativity of Camera Movement’, considers camera movement
     as a kind of illusion. The exo-centric image, wherein a fixed camera registers
     a character’s fixed face and body, while the world moves, are slightly jarring
     (see Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, or Todd Phillips’ The Hangover).
     Such subjective effects reverse body-space relations, denaturalizing the tacit
     acceptance of the camera as a fixed eye, recording events of the world. Bédard’s
     analysis usefully moves filmic movement back into the general psychology of
     ego-centric motion.
       Next Maria Poulaki, in ‘A Gestalt Theory for “Disorder”: From Arnheim’s
     Ordered Chaos to Brambilla’s Entropic Art’ returns to Arnheim’s comments
     in his 1971 book Entropy and Art. This book, an homage to Arnheim’s mentor
     Wolfgang Köhler, tried to place the physicist’s notion of entropy, which by then
     had been overtaken by humanistic popularization, and revisit its meaning for
     contemporary discourse. Poulaki brings Arnheim’s opposition of order and
     disorder into dialogue with newer approaches from dynamic systems theory
     (e.g. complexity theory) to the neurosciences. By using the example of the digital
     endlessly transforming creations of artist and film director Marco Brambilla,
     Poulaki reminds us of the dynamic emergence and breaking of order in the
     spirit of the Gestalt theory inspiring Arnheim.
       Brambilla’s animations are a natural invitation to consider the topic more
     broadly, which is accomplished in Ryan Pierson’s ‘Gestalt, Animation and the
     Culture of Design’. Animation is a natural topic for Gestalt psychologists because
     experience itself is not regarded as a copy of reality. Accurately geometrically
     presented stimuli, for example, may not produce the most robust illusion. So
     too with animation, which though not live-action can be more ‘real’ than the
     former. For Pierson it is therefore fitting that Gestalt psychologists ought to have
     anticipated, and vice versa, been inspired by animators. Each also, for Pierson,
     participate in a culture of design, which can be construed as a parallel project of
     arranging senses and populations, a psychotechnics for a sociotechnics.
       In line with the reconnection of filmic ideas with larger traditions of Gestalt
     theory, Massimo Locatelli’s ‘Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm: A Case for
     Filmology?’ connects Arnheim to the work on rhythm by Albert Michotte’s
     student, Paul Fraisse (in effect, Arnheim’s theoretical ‘cousin’). For Fraisse,
     rhythm follows Gestalt organization but also connects to sensory-motor



16                                             D’Aloia, Verstegen, The Future of the Past
activation. It becomes a particularly important way to structure narrative and
the comprehension of events, but in a way not even anticipated by Fraisse can
also induce both bodily and neural entrainment. It therefore creates an informed
link to recent neurofilmological approaches.
   Finally, Emilio Audissino addresses the specific case of humor as cognitive
restructuring in ‘The Aha, Ha! Moment: A Gestalt Perspective on Audiovisual
Humour’. Departing initially from observations on music, Audissino considers
music to be a ‘part’ or micro-configuration of a ‘whole’ or macro-configuration.
Incongruity not only among single modal elements but multi-modal elements
can lead to humour. The restructuring related to an ‘aha’ moment can be
reconfigured for humour as an ‘Aha, Ha!’ moment. Humour is indissolubly linked
to problem-solving behaviour.
   It is the hope of the editors that readers will appreciate the bridges that have
been built across the career of Rudolf Arnheim, and from there to broader
elements of Gestalt psychology from which a Gestalt filmology can profit.
Limited exegesis of Arnheim’s works will limit the appeal of his work and
understanding of its potential breadth. We encourage scholars to continue to
consolidate knowledge and fill in gaps to construct a vigorous Gestalt filmology.




                                                                                      Rudolf Arnheim
                                                                                      in The Responsive Eye
                                                                                      (Brian De Palma, 1965)



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Notes
 1
    This introduction is the product of work carried out in common by two authors, and the result of a single
shared process of reflection. As far as the writing of the individual sections of the text is concerned, sections
1, 3, and 4 can be attributed to Adriano D’Aloia; 2, and 5 to Ian Verstegen.
  2
     Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley-Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1954/1974); Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
  3
     See Dudley Andrew, ‘Rudolf Arnheim’, in Id., The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (London: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 27–41.
  4
    A previous attempt of revaluation of Arnheim’s contribution to cinema and media theory can be found in
Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. by Scott Higgings (New York: Routledge, 2011).
  5
    For example, Ian Verstegen, Arnheim, Gestalt and Media: An Ontological Theory (Cham: Springer, 2019).
  6
     See Robert Sinnerbrink, ‘Phenomenology Encounters Cognitivism’, Projections, 13(2), 2019, 1–19, <doi:
10.3167/proj.2019.130201>; and Adriano D’Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni, ‘Philo-, Neuro-, Post-. Che cos’è e cosa
sarà la teoria del cinema’, in Teorie del cinema. Il dibattito contemporaneo, ed. by Idd. (Milano: Raffaello
Cortina, 2017), 9–28.
  7
    See for example Adriano D’Aloia, Neurofilmology of the Moving Image: Gravity and Vertigo in Contemporary
Cinema (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam press, 2021). For a discussion of Gestalt theory in the context
of film psychology, see Maria Poulaki, ‘The “Good Form” of Film. The Aesthetics of Continuity from Gestalt
Psychology to Cognitive Film Theory’, Gestalt Theory, 40, 1, 2018, 29–44, <doi: 10.2478/gth-2018-0004>.
  8
    Arnheim, Film als Kunst (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1932), translated into English as Film (London: Faber &
Faber, 1933).
  9
     See Arnheim, I baffi di Charlot. Scritti italiani sul cinema 1932-1938, ed. by Adriano D’Aloia (Torino:
Kaplan, 2009). See also Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1997), originally published as Kritiken und Ausfsätze zum Film (München-Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1977).
  10
     See D’Aloia, ‘Rodolfo Arnheim’, Comunicazioni Sociali on-line, 5, 2012, 29–44.
  11
     Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1957).
  12
     Arnheim, ‘A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film’, in Id., Film as Art, 199–230.
  13
      See Verstegen, Arnheim, Gestalt and Media, for an insertion of this argument into the Brentanist
ontological tradition and its affinity to Roman Ingarden’s ontology of the work of art.
  14
      See Arnheim’s comments on the ‘Psychology of the Mass-Produced Film’, in Film als Kunst and the
early English translation Film (170–181), but absent from the 1957 Film as Art.
  15
      See Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988).
  16
      See for example Meraj Dhir, ‘A Gestalt Approach to Film Analysis’, in Arnheim for Film and Media
Studies, 89–106.
  17
      See for example the relevance of Arnheim’s The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the
Visual Arts (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982) in Tim Smith’s ‘Watching You Watch
Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Cognitive Film Theory’, in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at
the Movies, ed. by Arthur P. Shimamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165–190.
  18
     For more on this argument, see Poulaki.
  19
     See Meraj Dhir, ‘A Gestalt Approach to Film Analysis’, in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, 90–106.
  20
      On the influence of Arnheim’s theory and teaching on De Palma’s cinema, see Didier Truffo, ‘Brian de
Palma avec Rudolf Arnheim’, La furia umana, 18, 2013, http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/40-archive/
lfu-18/74-didier-truffot-brian-de-palma-avec-rudolf-arnheim#sdfootnote6sym [accessed 25 May 2022].
  21
     See for example D’Aloia, ‘Overturning. Upside-down dissimulations’, in Id., Neurofilmology of the Moving
Image, 143–163, <doi: 10.5117/9789463725255_ch05.>




18                                                                     D’Aloia, Verstegen, The Future of the Past
