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Arnheim's Formalism & Cinematic Perception · Acedra
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Arnheim's Formalism & Cinematic Perception
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0:00
hi folks and welcome to the video lecture on rudolph arnheim and his formalism um and the notion of cinematic perception um so the things we're going to be talking about are what do we mean by cinematic perception for arnheim and what do we mean by formalism first let's like fixate on this word perception um rudolph arnheim was known as a gestalt psychologist gestalt psychology was a field of perceptual psychology that emerged around the early 20th centuries and rudolf arnheim was
0:34
a devotee of this particular school of thought but even more so in arnhem's writing of on film you can see the influence of gestalt psychology so what do we mean by gestalt psychology well there's a mantra of gestalt psychology which is that we perceive holes and not parts uh what does that look like um if you've ever seen um diagrams like this one especially images like this or images
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like this those kinds of diagrams were circulated widely by gestalt psychologists we think of them as optical illusions but they more so for the gestalt psychologists illustrate certain perceptual principles of how we perceive the world in holes and not parts so if you look at this image for a moment and for some of you maybe most of you there will be a moment when you stop seeing it as an abstract collection of dots and you'll start to see a form emerge that kind of experience
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of emergence is a version of gestalt perception or here the fact that we can see two distinct holes within one uh particular image right the vase and the two faces or with necker cube we can see it as i'm jutting out this way um or or jutting out that way um is an example of seeing holes gestalt means form or whole so take a look at the rest of these and some of them will actually come into play in rudolph arnheim's theory of cinema so you can also have a bit of fun
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with gestalt psychology i want to say that uh the reason that we can easily see two faces in one singular face these are both composite images of famous actors with within famous movies is result of gestalt psychology they may seem like unfamiliar faces to you but if you stare at them long enough it's likely the case that a face that you recognize will kind of pop out as a whole and you can't unsee it that kind of phenomenon is a gestalt phenomenon so where do we see this in
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arnhem's writing i want to take an important quote from arnheim's writing that's not in our reading but that really kind of captures the essence of how gestalt thinking and arnheim's film theory come together he writes even the most elementary processes of vision do not produce mechanical recordings of the outer world but organize the sensory raw material according to principles of simplicity regularity and balance this discovery of the gestalt school
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fitted the notion that the work of art too is not simply an imitation but a translation of observed characteristics into the forms of a given medium the operative word here is organize right he's making a claim um that art doesn't simply transform perception but perception is already itself something that is organized right arnhem is saying we already add forms um to what we see in the world we don't merely see a kind of stream of chaotic data we see forms shapes holes
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so that's kind of the perception aspect what's this formalism term that i'm introducing if you remember from our discussion last week i brought it up with respect to the way some of us were talking about our theories about film and i noticed that some of us in the class were already um film theoretical formalists what do i mean by being a formalist um well it's a kind of useful but sometimes reductive binary way of thinking about two strains of
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film theory on the left we have formalism on the right we have realism the realist thinkers are those who basically are interested in the in film's capacity to reproduce reality or you might call it physical or material reality the thinkers most readily associated with that are andre bazan and siegfried krakauer and a handful of others um on the other side we have film theorists who are
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obsessed with the idea that film doesn't reproduce reality but that it transforms reality so take this quote from arnheim as kind of the beginning idea that spawns these two camps of thought this is how arnheim begins our reading he says there are still many educated people who stoutly deny the possibility that film might be art they say in effect quote film cannot be art for it does nothing but reproduce reality mechanically in many ways this idea that film reproduces
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reality is the starting point for both both sides are at least in some aspects of their theory world we'll acknowledge this what makes you a formless or a realist is how you respond to that the arnheims will say if it reproduces reality let's think about the ways that it's say maybe doesn't reproduce reality or rather instruct filmmakers to stray away from the reproduction of reality for your bazaans and your crack hours the idea is to say if that's
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what it does naturally let's let's think about aesthetic conventions that harness that power
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um so we can also think about formalism and realism in terms of not just filmmakers or rather theorists but kinds of films right the italian neorealists would be as you might guess placed under the realist camp on the other hand you might have soviet montage or something like battleship potemkin often associated with formalism we might also think about early cinema as very quickly giving rise to two caps of realism and formalism if we allow
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ourselves to stretch that definition um a bit further right we have lumiere with the realists and we have george melies with the formless simply because the lumieres we generally think of as tapping into the film's or the camera's natural proclivity for capturing material reality or melies who's obsessed with camera tricks and special effects that deny that natural ability so let's go back to those two basic questions from last time what is cinema and what does it do
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what makes cinema distinct from the other arts what we might think of arnheim as doing is taking the second question and expanding it and saying it's not just about what makes him a medicine from the other arts like in like theater of course that's a big part of his argument but he takes it a bit further and he says what makes cinema distinct from human perception so we can think about arnheim's project as starting with this problem that we mentioned
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a minute ago film cannot be art because it does nothing but reproduce reality mechanically and he kind of places it along a spectrum if this is the starting issue what kinds of um films might we make um in order to avoid the problem well in one part of his book arnheim will state the kind of most uh absolute formalist claim which is that cinema will be able to reach the heights of other
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arts only when it frees itself from photographic reproduction and becomes a pure work of man and an animated cartoon or painting so you can actually see this idea of formalism in its most extreme form with something like avant-garde non-representational animation which was indeed proliferating in the 1920s when arnheim was writing the essays that comprise the book film as art but for the most part arnheim's writing is not a detailed analysis of abstract animation
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is actually looking at cinematographic recording at in its place in film and he'll look at this kind of middle position he'll say film does not quite reproduce reality mechanically and i'm not only saying that film should avoid recording altogether by turning to animation he wants to say something like this in the middle by the absence of colors of three-dimensional depth by being sharply limited by the margins on the screen film is most satisfactorily denuded of
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its realism in other words he's saying that if we pay attention to the properties of filmic recording not just the capacities of storytelling and editing but even more basically the fact that the image is flat that it has firm rectangular boundaries that especially in the 1920s when he's writing it lacks color it also lacks sound um you can see that film is not in fact a pure reproduction of reality because of all the ways in which it doesn't approximate
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our perceptual richness when we encounter the world and this very idea is going to be linked up to a um a recurring concept throughout arnhem's writing in the excerpt that i asked you to look at and that concept is called partial illusion so he writes a little bit above and a little bit below this particular passage thus film provides a partial illusion it is always at one and the same time a flat picture postcard and the scene of a living action so one way to make sense
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of arnheim is to think about all the ways he wants to insist that film despite having a perceptual richness that's analogous to our visual perception of material reality is still nevertheless a picture an image it is flat and it can be thought of as a purely formal kind of object so what do we mean by formal object well you can see that displayed in a number of passages in fact he does a lot of kind of mini close readings of scenes from
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films and this one he does a kind of abstract reading of um what sounds like uh the famous uh train arriving at the station film and you can see what he means by form when you take a look at this passage this is what he says he says everyone has seen a railway engine rushing on the scene in a film it seems to be coming straight at the audience the effect is most vivid because the dynamic power of the forward rushing movement is enhanced by another
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source of dynamics that has no inherent connection with the object itself that is with the locomotive but depends on the position of the spectator or in other words the camera the nearer the engine comes the larger it appears the dark mass on screen spreads in every direction at a tremendous pace and the actual objective movement of the engine is strengthened by this dilation so what is he
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doing here well in some sense he's telling us to look at an ordinary scene something like this this famous you know first film from the lumiere brothers the train arrives at the station and he asks us to suspend our judgment that it is merely equivalent with what it represents that is a train moving close to the camera and one way we can think about this is if we start to take away the details that make it a very strong compelling representation of a train
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and start to think of it as an abstract um moving image of of masses of of particles or of of lines and shapes right thinking that thinking of it in terms of forms he's really interested in this idea that you can think about this as a swelling of an object rather quickly right it's almost as if arnhem thinks about film as if every film is an experimental film right devoid of representation
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he wants us to see that every film does indeed have those formal imaged qualities but sometimes we forget about them because we think of content first and form second so what's the kind of way we can think about this idea of partial illusion well one example is camera movement there's a section of the reading in which he talks about the phenomenon of the moving camera and he talks about the way that it appears to our senses in some sense a natural understanding of
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camera movement is that it approximates human movement right when i move through the world the world seems to rush by but for the most part i see it as myself moving and the world is static he thinks that that is in fact not always the case so let's take a look at this passage he says certain parallels which are sometimes drawn between the functioning of the human eye and the camera for instance the comparison between the mobility of the eyes and that of the camera
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are false um once again think about the kind of the the large claim being made here it's an intuitive claim that when a camera moves through the world it's analogous to our eyes moving to the world he says that's false if the camera was rotated while the picture was being shot very much so like in this well-known experimental film by chantal ackerman called lashambra
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the bookcase table window and door will proceed across the screen when the picture is projected it is they which are moving in other words he wants to say that while when i look at this particular image i may indeed read it as a camera panning in a kind of 360 degree fashion he wants to say that there's also a sense in which the objects move leftward across a two-dimensional bounded image in almost every case there is an element of twofoldness of twoness or rather a partial
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illusion that's happening right um i might say that the partial illusion is at its smallest um in forward camera movement because it's very hard to look at these instances without thinking about me moving through the space depicted they have a very strong illusory quality um but as a formal experimental filmmaker like ken jacobs will demonstrate there are ways in which we can say unlock the picture-ness or the partial illusion that's always bound up in
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cinematic images including that strongly illusory feeling of moving through the world ushered in by a forward moving camera this is a film of ken jacobs called georgetown loop in which he takes a early cinematic film a what's known as a phantom ride a conventional form in which a camera was placed on the front of a locomotive and then he quickly juxtaposes it with its mirror image and very soon what happens is that this no longer feels
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like a forward moving camera it looks like a two-dimensional abstract a two-dimensional abstraction looks like a rorschach inkblot in many ways or rather a moving rojak inkblot and i think hornheim would be very pleased with this experimental film because it seems to demonstrate that that partial illusion even though our habits of perception suppress it we can kind of activate activate it through particular ways of making movies
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i want to say that even in less experimental or not at all experimental examples you can see a kind of partial illusion or maybe a twofoldness happening this is one of my favorite sequences from movies it's a scene in leocarex's movie song in which the lead character runs across the screen but just think about what arnheim might say about it as purely a kinetic moving composition
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okay so imagine what rudolph arnheim would say if he was presented with this particular sequence i think that he would it would demonstrate the fact that the effect that's produced what we might call a kinetic effect that's produced in this in this sequence a kind of rhythmic visual intensity is produced because not just the fact that the camera moves but the way that it moves that is completely sideways and the fact that it is moving
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rightward with respect to a flat um surface that is corrugated with alternating stripes of black and gray and when we move across them they kind of vibrate and and give us this quality and the quality is very much kind of flat it's kind of a picture postcard you might say of a living action and it's both a representation of a man running through space but it's also much more than that right its formal qualities are pronounced um over and against the simplicity
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of its of its content um so how do we get from partial illusion to what arnheim will call later in his uh in his writing two-fold effects well here's what i mean by two-fold effects he says
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a two-fold effect can be produced by a clever position of the camera if an artist's impression is to be achieved this double effect is necessary it must not only show the subject in characteristic fashion but must at the same time satisfy the spectator sense of form so he's saying a lot here first what i mean by two twofold effect is something like this there's a couple moments where he reads moments in charlie chaplin's films this particular one is a gag
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in which we first see a kind of rolling ship the camera is going back and forth to give us a sense that the ship is extremely rocky and then we cut to chaplin looking as if he's likely vomiting over the edge of the boat due to seasickness but very soon chaplin will reveal the fact that this is not the case but he was trying to reel in a fish there's a twofoldness that is responsible for the gag happening that we saw it as one thing with respect to what we saw before and then it
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revealed that it was in fact another thing now arnheim is very obsessed with this kind of thing why is he obsessed with it he seems to think that there's a particular artistic impression achieved with two-fold effects like this partly because for arnheim they emblematize the idea that film is always a partial illusion that it's always two things at once and also the fact that in each of these cases the illusion is only produced with respect to where the camera is placed in space
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in other words it matters absolutely that we shoot charlie chaplin precisely from this angle otherwise the gag would not happen munzerberg might say that this is important as a way to distinguish film from theater arnheim wants to say that there is a kind of greater importance to this kind of possibility in the cinematic medium right the effect of surprise is achieved by making use of the fact that the spectator will be looking at the situation from a certain definite position
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right so this two-fold effect is a kind of aspect perception or multi-stability so another reason that we might think arnhem gravitates towards these examples is because they're extremely important in gestalt psychology they represent our proclivity for seeing the world in terms of holes right in this case i see two things at once or rather back and forth a duck and a rabbit once again here i see two different positionalities of the necker cube and here i see two faces and
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i go back and forth between that between seeing that and a vase these things are ways of making sense of how we see the world he's applying it to how we see film as distinct from how we see the world and we already talked about this image in logite as having a kind of multi stability right it can be seen both as our protagonist kind of flying backward after he's been shot but it also looks as if it's the figure of of death hooded with his right hand extended into the air so
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that's all we're going to have for this particular video lesson next time we're going to apply these ideas of partial illusion aspect perception and cinematic seeing to jacques tati's play time
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