The Münsterberg ‘Problem’: between Mind and Soul
Abstract
In post-war Europe, the academic enthusiasm for cinema as an object of study and an instrument of social and political significance initially focused on auteurist and some rather esoteric philosophical approaches to understanding cinema that characterized the middle part of the twentieth century. This intellectual style is captured in the work of Roger Manvell, Kenneth Macgowan and Paul Rotha who provide examples of the influential historical overviews of film practice that reflect this turn. In the burgeoning literature and academic journalism that followed the political revisions of 1968 and the conceit that cinema was both a tool for the political repression of the masses and an instrument for populist political change, Munsterberg appeared, or more exactly, reappeared, in film literature as someone to take notice of. He was presented mostly as an historical oddity who offered an alternative to the dominance of ontological accounts of cinema that detached it from the mass experience of the movies. Munsterberg followed in the wake of rethinking Kracauer, Arnheim, Balazs as a wider literature on the collaborative interaction between film-maker, world and viewer began to trigger new thinking about how the cinema ‘works’ in conjunction with what was understood as the apparatus of human perception.
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