Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lee Grieveson is Reader in Film Studies and Director of the Graduate Programme in Film Studies at University College London. He is the author of Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America and a co-editor of The Silent Cinema Reader.

Haidee Wasson is Associate Professor of Cinema at Concordia University. She is the author of Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema.

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"This collection contributes new understandings to the history of film studies, particularly regarding the discipline's development in the humanities and its gradual abandonment of the methodological practices of the social sciences, in which it had its origins." Inventing Film Studies" will be welcomed by academics working in cinema studies, and it will provide new entrants to the field with an important introduction to the history of their study."--Richard Maltby, author of "Hollywood Cinema"

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INVENTING FILM STUDIES

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................xiMAKING CINEMA KNOWABLE........................................................................................................................3LEE GRIEVESON Cinema Studies and the Conduct of Conduct......................................................................................38MARK LYNN ANDERSON Taking Liberties: The Payne Fund Studies and the Creation of the Media Expert.............................................66ZO DRUICK "Reaching the Multimillions": Liberal Internationalism and the Establishment of Documentary Film..................................93MAKING CINEMA EDUCATIONAL.....................................................................................................................121HAIDEE WASSON Studying Movies at the Museum: The Museum of Modern Art and Cinema's Changing Object...........................................149CHARLES R. ACLAND Classrooms, Clubs, and Community Circuits: Cultural Authority and the Film Council Movement, 1946-1957.....................182MICHAEL ZRYD Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America..................................................................217MAKING CINEMA LEGIBLE.........................................................................................................................235HADEN GUEST Experimentation and Innovation in Three American Film Journals of the 1950s......................................................264PHILIP ROSEN Screen and 1970s Film Theory....................................................................................................298AMELIE HASTIE, LYNNE JOYRICH, PATRICIA WHITE, AND SHARON WILLIS (Re)Inventing Camera Obscura.................................................319MAKING AND REMAKING CINEMA STUDIES............................................................................................................353ALISON TROPE Footstool Film School: Home Entertainment as Home Education.....................................................................374D. N. RODOWICK Dr. Strange Media, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film Theory.....................................................399Appendix: STEPHEN GROENING Timeline for a History of Anglophone Film Culture and Film Studies................................................419Selected Bibliography.........................................................................................................................425About the Contributors........................................................................................................................429

Chapter One

LEE GRIEVESON

* In his 1916 book The Photoplay: a Psychological Study, the philosopher and psychologist Hugo Mnsterberg-a leading figure within applied psychology in America-argued that the "relation between the mind and the pictured scenes" is characterized in part by imaginative, emotional, and associative or memorial responses that find their "starting point" in the "outer impressions" of the photoplay and that are thus felt as "subjective supplements." In the photoplay, Mnsterberg writes, "the massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness." Yet perception is not simply subjective, Mnsterberg observes in his chapter "Memory and Imagination," for ideas can be "forced on us" through the "mental process" of "suggestion" and hence not "felt as our creation but as something to which we have to submit." Attention is "forced," that is, drawn away from the socially useful attentiveness critical to industrial discipline-and to the discipline of industrial psychology-toward a dangerously absorbed and directed attention. Outer impressions overwhelm the subject-spectator. In this way, film viewing, as an abandoning of conscious mental processes, is akin to hypnosis: "The extreme case is, of course, that of the hypnotizer whose word awakens in the mind of the hypnotized person ideas which he cannot resist. He must accept them as real." Audiences can thus be analogous to hypnotized subjects.

While the balance of this relation between the mind and pictured scenes was, for the neo-Kantian Mnsterberg, in favor of the shaping influence of the mind, the converse of this influence, the power of movies over subject-spectators, hovers at the margins of his account of the psychology of the photoplay. In a curious passage toward the end of his chapter "Emotions," for example, he returned again to the example of hypnosis, invoked now as a way of explaining how emotions "take hold of us" in both a psychological and physical sense. To explain this emotional effect, Mnsterberg imagines a scene from a film where a man is hypnotized in a doctor's office: "The doctor and the patient remain unchanged and steady, while everything in the whole room begins at first to tremble and then to wave and to change its form more and more rapidly so that a feeling of dizziness comes over us and an uncanny, ghastly unnaturalness overcomes the whole surrounding of the hypnotized person [and] we ourselves become seized by the strange emotion." Although technologically unrealizable, he admitted, the imagined scene of hypnosis was a compelling example for Mnsterberg of the connections between "outer impressions" and the movie spectator's "submission" to the power of the other as a "seizure" of the conscious mind and a loss of self.

It was also certainly not a randomly chosen scene. Mnsterberg was a trained doctor who had himself practiced hypnotic therapy-following the so-called Nancy school of Auguste Libault and Hippolyte Bernheim-using the power of hypnosis as "suggestive therapeutics" to seek a cure for physical and psychological illnesses. For the self-confessed cinephile, watching pictured scenes placed Mnsterberg on the other side of the doctor/patient and hypnotic relationship, rendering him dizzy with the uncanny and strange emotions dictated by the other.

Yet if this loosening of the connection to the "outer world" and the undermining of rational response was part of the pleasure of cinema for Mnsterberg, explaining in part why he was "under the spell of the 'movies,'" it could also have deleterious social and psychic effects on other audience members who were not apparently capable of the self-discipline and absorbed attention of a university professor. Toward the close of his book, Mnsterberg returned to the question of hypnotic suggestion, and the "seizing" of the emotions of audiences, to delineate these dangerous effects: "The intensity with which the plays take hold of the audience cannot remain without social effects ... The associations become as vivid as realities, because the mind is so completely given up to the moving pictures ... But it is evident that such a penetrating influence must be fraught with dangers. The more vividly the impressions force themselves on the mind, the more easily they become starting points for imitation and other motor responses ... The possibilities of psychical infection and destruction cannot be overlooked." Minds "forced" and "penetrated" by influences and impressions, hypnotized by the vivid intensity of cinema, were prone to imitative acts and corporeal "motor" responses that were potentially psychically and socially destructive. Watching...