Recent work on the borderlands between science and cinema in the nineteenth century has explored the close links between experimental inquiry and cinematic play. “Cinema” here widens to include a wide range of machines used to register and project images, from the apparatus of “proto-cinema” like magic lanterns, zoetropes, and phenakistoscopes, to the apparatus used by physicists studying “transport phenomena” (local movements of matter and energy in fluid systems) and physiologists’ construction of “lecture projection facilities,” spectatoria in which the dynamic and temporal dimensions of animal functions were screened before large audiences in darkened spaces (Canales Reference Canales2009; Canales Reference Canales2011; Schaffer Reference Schaffer2012; Schmidgen Reference Schmidgen2011). In a recent essay, Lisa Cartwright (Cartwright Reference Cartwright2011) invites us to think about the relatively unexamined apparatus of projection and the projection process as one straddling the materiality of instrumentation and the psychological process of cinema spectatorship. In the present essay, I take up related themes in the film theory of Hugo Münsterberg and argue that the Harvard psychologist and philosopher's long experience with the broad family of cinematic laboratory apparatus led him to conceptualize both laboratory relations and cinema spectatorship in terms of theories of projection.

Projection metaphors abound in Münsterberg's The Photoplay and related writings on cinema (Koss Reference Koss2010, 196–199). “In the photoplay,” Münsterberg wrote, “our imagination is projected on the screen” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 91). Or, in a similar vein: “If we start from the emotions of the audience we can say that the pain and the joy which the spectator feels are really projected to the screen, projected both into the portraits of the persons and into the pictures of the scenery and background into which the personal emotions radiate” (ibid., 105). This essay considers some of the ways in which Münsterberg's film writing developed out of his larger body of philosophical and psychological work, where “projection” straddled the materiality of the laboratory and the psychological conditions of the knowledge obtained within its walls. It therefore encompassed both the scientific and popular cultures of projected images and purely discursive notions of self-projection developed in late nineteenth-century philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology.

Münsterberg cross-hatched his cinema theory with three distinct registers of projection. With a hint of scientific pride Münsterberg recounted early cinema's emergence within the material culture of scientific projection, casting himself – rightly – as a fellow traveler in that history. But Münsterberg treated the material dimension of cinema – what he called “outer cinema” – as subordinate to the automatisms of cinema aesthetics, or “inner cinema,” which stood at the heart of his theory of film spectatorship. In the spirit of this special issue on the “varieties of empathy,” this essay examines these automatisms in the light of Münsterberg's extensive work in experimental aesthetics, in which the notion of projection developed by theorists of Einfühlung, or aesthetic empathy, served as a crucial touchstone.Footnote ¹

Yet the projections of both inner and outer cinema were enfolded within an implicit third model of projection, a philosophical doctrine carried over from Münsterberg's radical Fichtean theory of laboratory relations, in which the transcendental self, or I, freely posits the material, objective world as a means to know itself. Münsterberg spent his career attempting to persuade North American colleagues that without this grounding in Fichtean idealism experimental psychology results in a “dangerous” enslavement to the empirical and material world. But his efforts proved mostly unsuccessful, and his attempts to get popular audiences to read Fichte failed dismally (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1898; Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1906, 29).Footnote ² But Münsterberg's turn to cinema was accompanied by the conviction that the new medium could complete the emancipatory philosophical gesture by showing the mind's “freedom from the bondage of the material world” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 134). Cinema, a popular offshoot of the psycho-physiology laboratory, thus offered an unforeseen route to the philosophical secrets of old Jena.

“this peculiar oscillation”

Cinema spectatorship in the decade or so before Muensterberg's intervention was most often discussed in terms of what Andreas Killen has called the “master-trope” of hysteria and hypnosis (Killen Reference Killen, Ligensa and Kreimeier2009, 106; Andriopoulos Reference Andriopoulos2002; Gordon Reference Gordon2001; Hansen Reference Hansen1991; Schweinitz Reference Schweinitz, Koebner and Meder2006). The language of clinical psychiatry seemed well suited to capture some of the key phenomena involved in viewing moving pictures, including suggestion, unconscious imitation, emotional contagion, and double consciousness (Gordon Reference Gordon2001; Gaupp [1912] Reference Gaupp, Kümmel and Löffler2002; Hellwig Reference Hellwig1916). It also provided a universal idiom for doctors, legal experts, and public moralists to campaign against the alleged social dangers of movie-watching (Curtis Reference Curtis, Ligensa and Kreimeier2009b; Killen Reference Killen2006; Rieger Reference Rieger2005). The linkage between cinema and mental pathology had much to do with its more fundamental association with downscale audiences drawn from the working classes, immigrants, and women. Cinema historians have sometimes described Münsterberg's The Photoplay as an act of gentrification, a resolve to, in the words of his employer, Adolphe Zukor of Paramount Pictures, “kill the slum tradition in the movies” (Zukor, quoted in Sklar Reference Sklar1975, 46; Hansen Reference Hansen1991, 83). There is much in The Photoplay to confirm this observation. But the best evidence should be found in an analysis of Münsterberg's textual strategy to supplant the clinical model of film spectatorship with an account drawn from the laboratory.

Münsterberg distilled his system into “one general principle [that] seemed to control the whole mental mechanism of the spectator, or rather the relation between the mental mechanism and the pictures on the screen” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 110). Ordinary cinema spectatorship featured a “peculiar oscillation,” in the attention of the viewer.

The most general principal of cinema concerned the oscillation or intermittency of affective, perceptual, or psychological projections onto the events of the screen.

From the early years of dramatic cinema, filmmakers and critics had noted how this intermittent form of awareness, which was weak or absent in theater and other forms of aesthetic engagement, was heightened in cinema. This striking feature of film-viewing had typically been described in the ready-to-hand language of “double-consciousness” or its synonymous forms (dual personality, splitting, or sometimes, the subconscious), which formed a critical part of the clinical descriptions of hysteria or hypnotic states. So close was the association of doubling with cinema-watching that doubling and dual personality became recurring narrative themes of early dramatic cinema.Footnote ³

The point here is that from the time of cinema's turn-of-the-century origins, dual consciousness or personality provided a ready-to-hand vocabulary for this kind of experience. Since “1880 or so,” writes Henri Ellenberger, “double personality had become one of the most widely discussed clinical disorders” (Ellenberger Reference Ellenberger1970, 126). Alternating personalities soon became a regular fixture in fin-de-siècle literature and arts, and, according to Henry Adams, “turned up constantly, even among one's friends” (Adams [1907] Reference Adams and Samuels1973, 433). For psychologists the question of dual personality hinged on whether the secondary personality was a “mechanism or subconscious,” that is, a “deeper” self or an epiphenomenal effect which could be experimentally produced. Alfred Binet's On Double Consciousness, for example, posited a “secondary consciousness” unknown to the first, which sees, hears, reflects, reasons, and acts (Binet Reference Binet1894; Azam Reference Azam1893; Dessoir Reference Dessoir1889). Binet sought to show that states of double consciousness which were easily produced in hysterics, might “with a little attention be found in normal subjects” whose psycho-motor centers had been disaggregated. Using graphic recording instruments to detect involuntary movements too subtle to awaken the attention of the subject, Binet showed the hidden personality producing automatic writing, making calculations, hearing whispered messages, and a range of physiological effects, including changes in the intensity or rhythm of respiration upon hearing the beats of a metronome.The second consciousness showed itself to be mobile and fluctuating, typically incorporating antagonistic impulses. It was the bipartition of consciousness, in which “each of the consciousnesses occupies a more narrow and limited field,” that served as a buffer against too many antagonistic ideas, and this retrenchment in dédoublement “constitutes what is called suggestibility” (Binet Reference Binet1894, 81).

Münsterberg rejected this “deeper self” interpretation of secondary consciousness, staunchly favoring the idea that doubling was a mechanism or parasitic effect that could be experimentally produced. Since the 1890s he had participated in local and international debates over the existence of the subconscious, or split or double consciousness, and several years later he considered the question of the subconscious resolved (Gelpi Reference Gelpi2001). “The story of the subconscious mind can be told in three words: there is none,” he famously declared (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1909a, 125). Much of his rejection hinged on his Fichtean philosophical convictions, for reasons that will become apparent below. The subconscious, he insisted, presents “a philosophical problem which must be settled by principle before the explanation of the special facts begins” (Münsterberg et al. Reference Münsterberg, Ribot, Janet, Jastrow, Hart and Prince1910, 22). But beyond the larger question of the subconscious, Münsterberg insisted that the phenomena associated with it could be better explained through laboratory experiments.

Münsterberg's views were particularly evident in research conducted under his direction in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory by Leon Solomons and the young Gertrude Stein (Koutsaal Reference Koutsaal1992; Edwards-Pitt Reference Edwards-Pitt1999; Meyer Reference Meyer2001). Solomons and Stein sought to test the established idea that automatic writing accessed a “secondary personality,” a question “capable of satisfactory solution by observation and experiment, and of great importance to scientific psychology” (Stein and Solomons Reference Stein and Solomons1896; Stein 1897). To do so they designed an experiment to elicit the same effects through a physiologically based “motor automatism” in which the normal subject produced the “essential elements of the ‘second personality,’ if possible, in so far as they consist of definite motor reactions unaccompanied by consciousness.” Through a method of “distraction,” Solomons and Stein produced the desired effects, showing them to arise not from a message from a hidden personality but through a rapid alternation of states of consciousness during which those states which produced automatic writing are not available to memory. What seemed automatic, in other words, was either the result of an intermittency of the will or a trained ability to attend to more than one condition at a time. What was important about this intermittency was the condition of oscillation it entailed. It was not a doubling of personality, then, but a gap or temps perdu of the sort that physiological psychology since Helmholtz had defined as the body's reaction-time, separating motor activity from apperception (Canales Reference Canales2009; Schmidgen Reference Schmidgen, Ligensa and Kreimeier2009; Schmidgen Reference Schmidgen2010a). In their account of how hysteria-related phenomena of double consciousness should be understood as a form of psychological oscillation, the Solomons and Stein experiments on the writing subject anticipated Münsterberg's later theory of the cinema spectator.

Experimental Aesthetics

Against theories of cinema spectatorship drawn from clinical or crowd psychology, Münsterberg advanced a model drawn from the laboratory. After all, Münsterberg reminded his readers in a chapter entitled, “The Outer Development of Cinema,” cinematography had been largely invented in laboratories of physiology and psychology, before going its own way as a medium of popular entertainment. The early experiments of Roget and Faraday on the optical illusions of movement, the inventions of phenakistoscopes by Plateau and Stampfer which led to the scientific principles behind stroboscopic effects, and the chronophotographies of Muybridge and Marey all paved the way for the entrepreneurial efforts of Edison, the Lumière brothers, and Robert Paul to launch the era of cinema (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 45–53).

Yet the parting of the ways between science and entertainment meant that in its early years cinema had stalled as a psychological art, failing to keep pace with psycho-physiology. Two decades later it had finally caught up. “The advance was first of all internal,” Münsterberg observed, “it was an aesthetic idea” (ibid., 54). The aesthetic education of cinema-goers was set on a course of incremental advancement. “No training demands a more persistent and planful arousal of the mind than aesthetic training,” Münsterberg observed, yet “the moving picture audience could only by slow steps be brought from the tasteless and vulgar eccentricities of the first period to the best plays of today”(ibid., 158).

The time was ripe for reuniting cinema with its lost laboratory sibling through the discipline of psycho-physiological aesthetics.

Münsterberg here alluded to the new field of “physiological aesthetics,” which had its roots in Helmholtz's great investigations in the physiology of musical perception, and had since burgeoned as a field in pockets across Europe and North America (Allesch Reference Allesch1987; Brain Reference Brain2008; Brain Reference Brain2011; Drüe Reference Drüe, Mai, Waetzold and Wolandt1983; Jarzombek Reference Jarzombek2000; Nachtsheim Reference Nachtsheim1984). The general aim of the field, as British writer Grant Allen explained, was to “elucidate physiologically the nature of our Aesthetic Feelings” and “to exhibit the purely physical origin of the sense of beauty, and its relativity to our nervous organization” (Allen Reference Allen1877, 1–2). The new field went by different names, indicating differences in approach or simply national and linguistic variation. Besides “physiological aesthetics,” there was “AEstho-physiology” (a Spencerian approach), Kunstphysiologie (German approaches derived from Helmholtz, Brücke, and others), ésthétique scientifique (coined by Frenchmen Charles Henry, with ties to the French avant-garde), Einfühlungsaesthetik (developed by German psychologists, philosophers, and art historians) and “experimental aesthetics,” a laboratory approach pursued by German experimental psychologists, including Münsterberg. What all of these approaches shared was an interest in investigating aesthetics “from below,” opposing philosophical approaches to art with laboratory studies examining how the shape of a line, a pattern of color or sound, a perception of movement would produce a corresponding movement in the viewer's eye-muscles, breathing, vascular system, or bodily musculature. Experimental aesthetics, Münsterberg explained, “simply gathers the empirical facts, describes them with scientific exactness, starts with the simplest elements and leads slowly from the most elementary aesthetic experience to the appreciation of the highest treasures of art” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1909b, 122).

Münsterberg counted himself as one of the leading players in experimental aesthetic research. “Among psychological laboratories,” he proudly noted, “my Harvard laboratory is the only one which pursues a series of systematic aesthetic investigations year after year” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1914, 615). From the start Münsterberg also sought to translate his experimental work in aesthetics to public edification, through pedagogical publications like Principles of Art Education (1905), and later, by making art and aesthetics a leading area of his ambitious program of “psycho-technics” or applied psychology (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1905). The focus of psycho-technical aesthetics was on the spectator, on the “increase, deepening, enrichment and extension of the spiritual pleasure offered by the work of art” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1914, 601). After 1915, cinema became the centerpiece of Münsterberg's psycho-technical aesthetics, with the hope that the new medium would enable ordinary Americans to replace their national propensity for “business, ragtime, and sentimentality” with genuine aesthetic education (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 152).

Münsterberg arrayed his laboratory's investigations as a systematic picture of the problems of experimental aesthetics: the balance of simple forms, symmetry, unequal division, the repetition of spatial forms, vertical division, simple rhythmic forms, rhythm and rhyme, impressions of linguistic elements of poetry, psychophysics of melody, dissolution of dissonances, unmusical intervals of tone, interactions of feelings, combinations of feelings, rhythmic exchange of feelings, and many others (MacDougal Reference MacDougal1902; MacDougal Reference MacDougal1903; Pierce Reference Pierce1896; Rowland Reference Rowland1907; Stetson Reference Stetson1903; Stetson Reference Stetson1905; Givler Reference Givler1915). These experimental studies rarely dealt with complete works of art. Rather, they examined “basic elements” (Grundelemente), “automatisms,” or in the terminology of The Photoplay, “elementary excitements of the mind” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 65) of aesthetic experience in different artistic media. Laboratory apparatus made these aesthetic elements perceptible in isolation (Müller-Freienfels Reference Müller-Freienfels1908; Külpe Reference Külpe1907; Dessoir [1906] Reference Dessoir and Emery1970). Tones were captured with resonators or manometric flames; articulation and versification with vocal polygraphs; color perception analyzed with color-mixers and prisms; lines and optical illusions with various visual devices (like the waterfall illusion for studying illusions of movement); rhythms of different kinds were measured with a Hipp chronoscope or kymograph.Footnote ⁴

The notion of basic aesthetic elements arose from a psycho-physical model, in which physical reactions are taken as reliable indices of psychical activity. Psycho-physics took many forms in the late nineteenth century, but in Münsterberg's experimental aesthetics it was a confluence of two strains – from Helmholtz and Fechner, respectively – that organized research. The Helmholtzian line of research emphasized a kind of somatic formalism, and was adopted by key proponents of the Einfühlung doctrine. Fechnerian psycho-physics proposed frameworks for measuring pleasurable or painful aesthetic experiences as discharges of energy.

In his Vorschule der Aesthetik, Fechner proposed a “hypothesis of inner psychophysics,” in which he made the central problem one of correlating aesthetic satisfaction (Wohlgefälligkeit) with the measurable oscillations and periodic movements of aesthetic elements such as color, tone, line, and surface. “We can think this hypothesis more broadly and forcefully,” Fechner noted, if we remember “that all sensations and actions of consciousness rest entirely upon oscillations (Schwingungen) in our nerves, and all pleasure or displeasure follow from the oscillations in simple or composite periodicities” (Fechner [1876] Reference Fechner1978, 79). The task of a psycho-physical aesthetics was to gauge the formal elements that demanded the minimum or maximum expenditure of energy in the affected parts of the body. A lesser expense of energy correlated with pleasure or consonance, while a greater expense of energy meant displeasure or dissonance (Fechner [1876] Reference Fechner1978). By 1900 this problem of basic elements had become the focus of experimental aesthetics, “its solution constituted the test of all aesthetic theories” (Stern Reference Stern1898, 11).

In his On The Sensations of Tone (1863), Helmholtz laid the basis for a different kind of psycho-physical aesthetics. He showed how all the principal musical effects in the Western tradition – consonance and dissonance, chords, timbre, etc. – can all be explained by the physiology of human hearing. Wilhelm Wundt, his student (and Münsterberg's Doktorvater) took a similar approach to the visual perception of forms, demonstrating associations between certain kinds of eye movements and different feelings of pleasure and pain (Wundt Reference Wundt1862; Lenoir Reference Lenoir and Cahan1994). Even though Helmholtz and Wundt preferred to draw a firm line around the science and keep final aesthetic questions at an arm's length, their somatic formalism found fertile reception among the theorists of aesthetic empathy.

The German aesthetician Robert Vischer took up these somatic theories of perception in a full-blown doctrine showing how aesthetic experience depends on the body functioning as a natural organic norm when viewing the world. Physical correspondences exist between worldly objects and the structure of sense organs, Vischer asserted in The Optical Sense of Form ([1873] 1994), and pleasure arises when aesthetic attributes such as symmetry or regularity mimic the forms of the human body (Vischer, in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Reference Vischer, Mallgrave and Ikonomou1994, 89–124). Vischer sought an aesthetics showing how “pure forms” – lines, colors, surfaces, tones – gave rise to a range of specific physiological effects, derived from human somatic structures. Some of these effects could be pinpointed by localizations mapped out by the physiologists for perceptual experience. But Vischer parted company with Helmholtz and Wundt when he insisted on the many ways that the sensorium and nervous system reconstitute the wholeness of the body through interior “self-motions” (Vischer, in ibid., 97). These included the ways in which one sensory response can trigger another, or in our experience of rhythm in a series of forms. “The whole body is involved; the entire physical being is moved. For in the body there is, strictly speaking, no such process as localization. Thus each emphatic sensation ultimately leads to a strengthening or weakening of the general vital sensation” (Vischer, in ibid., 99). It was with this notion of the activation of the bodily whole through the vital sensation that Vischer's Einfühlung emancipates itself from the somatic formalism of the physiologists and restablishes its ties with older Romantic notions.

Yet within German aesthetics Vischer's theory had the effect of decisively tilting the emphasis in aesthetic investigation away from the object and toward the psycho-physiological modes of perceiving it. Vischer positioned this physiologizing turn as a scientific update and renewal of the older Einfühlungsgedanke in German aesthetics, developed by Romantic thinkers to describe aesthetic intuition as a reading of feelings and emotions into the object.Footnote ⁵ Central to this tradition was the notion of projection, in which the subject's emotions, bodily senses, and even its very vitality become projected on to (i.e. perceived as part of) an inanimate object. This was a physiological reading of the idea of Hegel, in which thought reaches into the material world and reconstitutes it so that material nature is born again in the mind. The aim of art, Hegel wrote, is to “strip the world of its inflexible foreignness,” so that “man can enjoy in the shape of things an external realization of himself” (Hegel [1832–1845] Reference Hegel and Moldenhauer1970, v. 1, 41).^. Vischer gave this process an analytical structure and purpose:

It was this capacity of the body and sensorium to objectify itself in spatial form that Vischer called Einfühlung. There was something radical and, looking ahead to the invention of cinema, eerily prescient, about Vischer's projection model of aesthetic empathy. We have the “wonderful ability to project and incorporate our own physical form into an objective form,” Vischer wrote, “in much the same way as wild fowlers gain access to their quarry by concealing themselves in a blind” (ibid., 99). In Vischer's metaphor the projecting self has to flatten itself out on the floor and hide, becoming, in effect, a negative of the projected physical and objective form. “Only ostensibly do I keep my own identity although the object remains distinct” (ibid.). In these remarks Vischer anticipated the odd condition of the cinema spectator several decades later, whose experience required sitting invisibly in darkness, responding to feelings experienced in an external world whose boundary with the self seemed vertiginously fragile and unstable.

Oscillation and Aesthetic Isolation

In various aesthetic works Münsterberg developed his own version of the core doctrines of somatic formalism at the heart of aesthetic empathy. In Principles of Art Education (1905) he illustrated his approach through discussion of the role of line in visual art and architecture. When viewing a painting, sculpture, or building, we are not aware of ourselves as empirical objects, nor are we aware of all of the motor impulses and muscular effort involved in viewing the work before us: only the optical impression is in our mind. This is because, Münsterberg wrote,

Continuing with the example of line, Münsterberg illustrated his doctrine of aesthetic isolation by describing three different psycho-physiological outcomes that were possible in any encounter with an aesthetic object. One might, for example, encounter the object with stronger ideas or thoughts that inhibit aesthetic excitement. Reading a map or looking at a microscopical slide, for example, “the eyes follow the outlines of the visual objects, but the body as a whole remains unmoved.” Or we might approach the object in the visual field as demanding an action, say, grasping a handle or moving a pen, in which case the optical impression becomes attached to another idea. In the third case, the optical impression presents itself alone, absorbing the mind, and sets in motion the motor impulse to the organism and leads to localized tensions and movement sensations. While all three modes of perception are normal and valid, only the third counted as aesthetic for Münsterberg. Its hallmark was the condition of isolation.

Münsterberg's doctrine of aesthetic isolation establishes broadly Kantian initial conditions: art differs from nature in that it is a “making,” a free production, and therefore promotes, in Kant's words, “the culture of mental powers” (Kant [1790] Reference Kant and Pluhar1987, 173). Art is governed simply by the purposiveness of its forms, and its proper perception therefore requires a condition free from all intellectual and practical intrusions. Münsterberg insisted that isolation of the artwork allowed all practical impulses in the beholder to dissolve and personal will to become extinguished (Fredericksen Reference Fredericksen1977).Footnote ⁶ But in Münsterberg's account, the Kantian “culture of mental powers” became thoroughly psycho-physiological.

Isolation, he continued, serves to “engage the inner imitation (innere Nachahmung), inner impulses and organic co-sensations” (ibid., 607). Or sometimes the discharged motor impulse incites actions which cannot be carried out, creating a “system of tensions and contractions which gives us subjective feelings of strain, of effort, of tension, of direction, of movement-intention.” Yet we do not experience these as our own actions but as the “volition” of the visual forms, or melodies, or other aesthetic elements acting in and through us. Münsterberg's use of the term volition or will of the aesthetic object captured the experience of its special power to make us submit to its effects.

Although Münsterberg's notion of aesthetic isolation was formulated to encompass the experience of all kinds of art, it implied a dynamic condition of spectatorship especially suited to film. “Psycho-physiologically, the aesthetic effect comes thus into nearest neighborhood to the processes of attention and suggestion. Attention and suggestion also involve that increase of vividness in the idea by which the antagonistic ideas, that is, those which would lead to antagonistic actions, are suppressed and eliminated” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1905, 104–5). Antagonistic ideas continued to mean thoughts of practical actions, but from a psychological standpoint they also referred to simple modes of distraction. It is in this sense that Münsterberg's notion of aesthetic isolation made itself especially useful for his notion of cinema spectatorship. It also marked a key point where he differed from most theorists of aesthetic empathy. Whereas empathy theorists postulated an attentive, undisturbed contemplative gaze, Münsterberg offered isolation as a transient condition in constant antagonism with the distraction of the subject. Aesthetic isolation triggers the muscle-sense, which is then overcome as heightened attention and suggestion sets in and for a spell the body is mostly forgotten. But “antagonistic ideas” eventually interrupt absorption and break the spell of isolation – the condition of “oscillation” that Münsterberg took to be the essence of cinematic spectatorship.

On this view, it is not so much that Einfühlung theories are incorrect but that their emphasis on static modes of contemplation fails to grasp the larger process involved in aesthetic perception. Münsterberg's position arose from the difference in his approach: whereas theorists of Einfühlung from Vischer to Lipps concerned themselves exclusively with static forms of art and architecture, Münsterberg worked with dynamic laboratory instruments, and often with music, verse, and other dynamic artistic forms that involved reaction-times, rhythm, and movement.

Münsterberg contended that even conditions of static aesthetic contemplation, aesthetic empathy involved far more dynamic processes than most theorists admitted. He devised experiments to test whether the empathic effect was achieved in small intervals of time. Images of architectural forms were shown to subjects for two to three seconds, and tests assessed how thoroughly the forms could be remembered or reproduced. The results confirmed that the phenomenon of aesthetic empathy occurred, not with the work as a whole, but with aesthetic elements, and in a very dynamic fashion.

Closer inspection of temporal factors revealed that empathic responses with specific works of art occurred spontaneously, but were marked by intermittencies produced by antagonistic ideas. Aesthetic empathy was less a continuous state of absorption than a flickering, rhythmical, or oscillating relation to the object – a finding of cardinal importance for cinema spectatorship.

Elementary Excitements of Cinema

The dynamic temporal conditions that Münsterberg added to aesthetic empathy theory were precisely those that distinguished cinema as an art form developed “under entirely new mental conditions” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 63). Unlike the established arts, “each with histories of many centuries,” the cinema marked “a new form of beauty in the turmoil of a technical age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the mind” (ibid., 160). Not surprisingly, his account of cinema's key automatisms – what he called its “elementary excitements” – prominently featured this oscillation between contrasting forms of immersion and distraction, or stasis and dynamic movement. Under separate chapter headings Münsterberg offered a psychological account of “Depth and Movement,” “Attention,” “Memory and Imagination,” and “Emotions,” showing why these automatisms set cinema apart and why it demanded a new account of aesthetic spectatorship.

The first problem concerned impressions of “Depth and Movement” in motion pictures. The problem of depth perception arises from the fact that although cinematic images are presented on a flat plane, we experience them as having a kind of depth akin to the plastic objects of the real world around us. The perception of depth was one of the most striking features of early cinema for its viewers; one critic, Vachel Lindsay, called the photoplay a kind of sculpture in motion (Lindsay Reference Lindsay1915). What interested Münsterberg was the contrast between our knowledge of the flat plane of the screen and our impression of depth. “Nevertheless we are never deceived; we are fully conscious of the depth, and yet we do not take it for real depth,” he wrote (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 69). The stereoscope, long familiar as a Victorian parlor device (Silverman Reference Silverman1993), raised an analogous problem – and solution. In both cases, but for different reasons, the image generates an internal conflict or interference, which forces the eye to adapt and localize independently. “It brings our mind into a peculiar complex state,” Münsterberg wrote, adding, “and we shall see that this plays a not unimportant part in the mental make-up of the whole photoplay” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 71).

If stereoscopic perception enshrined the “peculiar oscillation” at the heart of viewing cinema, it showed the new art to perfectly reflect his own “two standpoints” approach to experimental psychology. Just one year earlier, in the introduction to the English version of his treatise on psycho-technics, Münsterberg explained the relation between causal and purposive psychology by analogy to the stereoscope. Just as the “two accounts do not exclude each other” but “supplement,” “support,” and “demand” each other in the same way that the two pictures combine in stereoscopic vision. “But we shall see,” Münsterberg wrote, “if both are grasped together and combined in a higher unity of understanding, that they blend into one plastic view of the personality, with the true depth and fullness of real life” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1925, 17–18).

Movement forced itself upon the spectator with a similar duality of awareness. What we actually see is a series of motionless images, but these bring the effect of motion. These phenomena were well-known before cinema, of course, in the zootropes, stroboscopes, thaumatropes, and phenakistoscopes that had amused bourgeois parlors for decades. Modern laboratory psychology had studied these phenomena carefully, too, identifying the phenomena of afterimages, but also concluding that a “characteristic content of consciousness must be added to such a series of visual impressions” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 78). Münsterberg discussed several experiments to show how the mind would fill in missing phases of movement, or superadd a sense of movement when certain visual cues were present, even when the subject was made aware of the mechanisms involved. Such perceptions stood in contrast to ordinary real world situations, where movements occurred in the world of space and in the eye at the same time. In the film world, by contrast, “the motions which [one] sees appears to be a true motion, and yet it is created by [one's] own mind” (ibid.).

A similar form of oscillation marked the act of attention in viewing cinema. As we saw above with respect to the Solomons and Stein experiments, Münsterberg marshaled experiments in attention as a means of showing the fallaciousness of double consciousness. Cinema exploited the key intermittencies of attention on a constant basis, drawing awareness to one impression while leaving other impressions faded or unnoticed. The cinema's way of riveting of attention was unlike the theater stage, or any other life situation, Münsterberg observed. In ordinary life our experience of attention is an intertwining or compromise between voluntary, goal directed attention and the constant distractions of stimuli that force involuntary attention upon us, especially things which stir up “hope or fear, enthusiasm or indignation, or any strong emotional excitement” (ibid., 87). Theater draws our attention using words, movements, gesture, and countless other means. But the cinema has unique methods for drawing in our attention to the exclusion of all other stimuli.

The primary technique for achieving this effect was the close-up, which “objectified in our world of perception our mental act of attention” (ibid., 88). With the close-up, Münsterberg wrote,

Münsterberg's account of the close-up as the technique of attention did not privilege the human face, but referred to any use of the camera to bring focus to a single point to the exclusion of all others. Ordinary acts of voluntary attention could thus be exaggerated to a degree of vividness which surpassed ordinary capacities and therefore brought the mind to an awareness of its own native powers of attention. In film, “it is as if that outer world were woven into our mind and were shaped not through its own laws but by the acts of our attention” (ibid.).

But it was through “Emotions,” the fifth and final automatism, that cinema most profoundly showed its kinship with psychology. “To picture emotions must be the central aim of the photoplay” (ibid., 99). Early silent cinema consisted overwhelmingly of melodrama, of course; and it was in the mute dramatization of morality plays that the emotional language of gesture or pantomime presented itself as a universal or natural language (Brooks Reference Brooks1976). Gesture and pantomime constitute humankind's first natural language and hence became the basis of theater, wrote Charles Aubert in the major technical acting treatise of the period, The Art of Pantomime, because the spectator's own mimetic sense leads him “to share, to feel himself the emotions for which the signs are presented to him” (Aubert [1902] Reference Aubert2003, 7).

Münsterberg affirmed the common experience of basic empathy or inner imitation of the screen characters and their actions. The “happy lover, the despondent mourner, the indignant cuckold, or the woman in danger,” all triggered bodily emotions within the spectator. “The visual perception of the various forms of expression of these emotions fuses in our mind with the conscious awareness of the emotion expressed; we feel as if we were directly seeing and observing the emotion itself.” The photoplay excites all of the appropriate reactions: we really shrink with horror, and relax with happiness, as

Münsterberg emphasized here the close relationship between the emotional techniques of cinema and contemporary work on the bases of emotion in imitative motions of inner organs. The impressions which come to eye awaken sensations, he wrote, “but it is well known that in the view of modern physiological psychology our consciousness of the emotion itself is shaped and marked by the sensations which arise from bodily organs” (ibid., 107). Münsterberg presumably referred here to the studies of Lipps, Groos, and Carl Lange on the “internal reconstruction” of emotions and the role of “organ projection” in perception (Groos Reference Groos1909; Lipps Reference Lipps1903; Lange Reference Lange1903).

Yet according to Münsterberg this was not the source of cinema's emotional wallop: even the most supremely skilled actor usually failed to “produce those processes which are most essential for the true life emotions, namely those in the glands, blood vessels, and involuntary muscles” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 100). Besides the usual forms of empathic mimicry, cinema produced a whole range of counter-imitative emotions, in “which the spectator responds to the scenes on the film from the standpoint of his independent affective life.” We do not identify with the malicious scoundrel, but respond with malice, for example; or we react to the overbearing pompous person with humor or ridicule.

Münsterberg emphasized these as non-imitative emotions, functions of the psychological reaction to the impressions rather than impressions themselves. This class of emotions “which the spectator superadds to the events” recurred regularly in viewing motion pictures, yet “photoplaywrights have, so far, hardly ventured to project [them]” (ibid., 106). These self-projected emotions, moreover, distinguished cinema from theater, insofar as they arose from the formal techniques of cinema, such as camera work and editing. Soft focus of the camera can inflect mood, for example. Still more interesting psychologically were camera movements and rhythmical editing. Succeeding images can be shown with greater or lesser speed, or in changing order. So, for example, to produce the experience of trembling, pictures taken sixteen frames per second in a particular order might be reproduced on the screen in a new sequence. “After giving the first four pictures we go back to picture 3, then give 4, 5, 6, and return to 5, then 6, 7, 8, and go back to 7, and so on.” The rhythmic possibilities here seemed limitless: events could be made to go backward, or to vibrate in unexpected ways. Similarly, the camera can be placed on a slightly rocking support, making every point in the image trace out strange curves or whirling motions. Or through editing “not more that one-sixteenth of a second is needed to carry us from one corner of the globe to the other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene. The whole keyboard of the imagination may be used to serve this emotionalizing of nature” (ibid., 103).

Emotions that arose from the subject's independent affective life had been a key area of psycho-physiological research for decades. Since the 1870s scientists had used graphic inscription technologies to register subtle changes in blood pressure, respiration, or muscle contraction with emotional or aesthetic stimuli (Dror Reference Dror1999a; Dror Reference Dror1999b). “Every ripple on the . . . mind,” wrote Münsterberg, “reflects itself in the changes of the pneumographic wave – it may be an agreeable or disagreeable smell or taste, it may be exciting or depressing news from without or a fancy from within” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1909c, 127). Scientists often turned their affective experimentation upon themselves, making public their private interior lives by trading emotional autographs, and charting the strange emotional landscape of the laboratory and its inhabitants (Dror Reference Dror1999a). Münsterberg, for his part, had carried physiological instruments with him since his graduate student days, measuring his own pulse or reaction-time or muscle fatigue rates in moments of anger, despondency, and mental exhaustion, parsing the difference between externally induced emotions and those that arose from his own affect (Hale Reference Hale1980). The oscillating self-reflective awareness that Münsterberg found in cinema had long been a feature of his own daily life as a psychologist. It also stood at the basis of the lie-detector tests which Münsterberg tried to introduce into American courts of law: the experience of lying under oath would produce psychic conflict that would manifest itself in physiological disturbances of the interrogated subject (Alder Reference Alder2007).

Each of the cinematic automatisms illustrated different aspects of dynamic psycho-physiological projection. But cinema differed from laboratory experiments in its capacity to spontaneously channel awareness back and forth between different elements of perception. And it featured still more: “the moving pictures appeal not merely to the imagination, but . . . they bring their message also to the intellect” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 54). In the film different modes of projection – imaginative (psychological) and intellectual (philosophical) – “stand side by side” like “artistic stories” and “instructive essays” within the pages of the same magazine. In the same way, he noted, “the photoplay is accompanied by a kinematographic rendering of reality in all its aspects” (ibid.). The kinematographic rendering of reality consisted in the philosophical mode of projection.

Eye and I

Münsterberg's discussion of the automatisms of cinema showed the medium to be the true stepchild of the psychophysiology laboratory, and because of this, the first artistic medium to operate within “entirely new mental life conditions” (ibid., 63). This did not mean, however, that cinema had achieved a naturalized aesthetic. Throughout most of his career, Münsterberg championed a radical and often controversial philosophical vision of laboratory relations, which treated the empirical relations of space, time, and causality as entirely artificial. Without philosophical framing, he argued, the causal-mechanical relations of modern laboratory science would amount to a dangerous form of enslavement to an illusory vision of the world. A further step was required, a philosophical step, to redeem the objective reality of the laboratory and to tether it to a transcendental account of freedom.

Münsterberg appears to have regarded cinema in precisely the same terms: cinema offered the spectator an obviously artificial world in the way that the scientist's laboratory functioned as an artificial creation. After many years of unsuccessful attempts in the United States to promulgate this philosophical account of experimental science – his “double-standpoint” theory – Münsterberg seems to have recognized that cinema achieved similar effects without the ardors of reading philosophers like Fichte. Ordinary Americans, those of “business, ragtime, and sentimentality,” might achieve philosophical liberation after all.

To explain Münsterberg's unusual vision of cinema requires a closer examination of his radical philosophy of laboratory relations (Cohn Reference Cohn1900; Cohn Reference Cohn1902; Stern Reference Stern1902). Münsterberg insisted upon a sharp distinction between psychological theory and the reality it purports to describe and explain. Psychology had to operate from the “two standpoints” of “causal” and “purposive” psychology: on the one hand, scientists voluntarily choose to understand the world mechanically, because it yields an orderly, knowable, and ultimately, masterable world. “Our mental life is free, and through an act of freedom we decide to consider it as a mental mechanism in which nothing is free” (Münsterberg [1914] Reference Münsterberg1925, 296).

The causal-mechanical framework functioned as a voluntary system of constraints maintained by the scientist to keep the will in check.

Here Münsterberg spoke in the idiom of Fichte, his philosophical beacon after 1900. Fichte held that self-consciousness is the seat of the free impulses of the will to act, a will not determined by physical causes of the physical process of action. Knowledge acquired beyond self-consciousness – knowledge of the external world – comes about through judgments about actions of self-consciousness. Hence, the external world, as given to us through sensations and perceptions, while unreal in itself, provides a tool to inferentially know our own mind. This position required the crucial assumption that the self-positing Will recognize itself as subject to a law, the law of determining itself in accordance with the principle of self-determination. This recognition provided grounds for the rigorous disciplinary constraints of “objective” experimental science. In the act of submission to the determinate law, the scientist assured that the phenomena would appear as mechanical and causally connected, as “objective.”

The critical philosophical question hinged on how practical laboratory relations should be regarded.Footnote ⁷ In psychological experimentation, the mind comes to know itself through its actions upon the material world of the laboratory. By freely positing the externalized world of the laboratory, the self creates the phenomena it schematizes as objective reality. Therefore, the very space of the laboratory, its methodology, and instrumentation, all represent the freely chosen submission of the self to causal systems.Footnote ⁸ The implementation of artificial conditions allowed the subjective consciousness to know itself as an object by transforming consciousness from living reality to a knowable yet lifeless object. Hence, Münsterberg defined empiricism as the substitution of artificial objects for the true reality of the mind.

Münsterberg's account of laboratory psychology might thus be characterized as a philosophical projection of the self into the workings of worldly objects in order to differentiate the causal laws of mental activity. Even though Münsterberg's notion of self-projection involved a primordial act of thought, it could – and did – become quickly entangled with the materiality of the projected world, including the body and technical media. In this he followed Fichte, who frequently linked the I with the organ of sight, the eye (Henrich Reference Henrich1982). For Fichte the coming about of the I through a “blindly” felt drive to absolute independence joined with the “sight” provided by thinking, a process in which “eyes are, as it were, inserted into the drive that is itself blind” (Fichte [1800] Reference Fichte and Chisholm1986, 84).

Fichte contrasted his insight with the views of earlier philosophies that understood the I as a mirror, passively reflecting its objects, with his theory of the I as originally generative and conscious of its absolute independence. The image of the mirror in older philosophies, he argued, does not explain that the image mirrored by the I is also seen by the I. Rather, the I must be “a mirror that mirrors itself” – a mirror that we can see – as an eye. The object of the eye's gaze is not some external reality, but the very activity of the I itself. “We see everything in us, we see only ourselves, only as acting,” wrote Fichte (Fichte [1801/2] Reference Fichte, Heath and Lachs1982, 154). Münsterberg's vision of laboratory processes extended this very metaphor of the I projected as Eye. Not just the mirrors and lenses of an earlier philosophy, however, but the armory of modern physiological and psychological instruments that made manifest the activity of the I through more complex modes of indirection.

Cinema realized this set-up in stunningly direct ways. It was not the remarkable capacity of the medium to present to the spectator the causal mechanical laws of psychophysiology that gave it its highest function, however. The “function of the photoplay” and its “richest source of satisfaction,” Münsterberg argued, was to enable the spectator to detach the grip of those laws at the very moment when they seemed most real, and to assume the transcendental standpoint, understanding the experience as a form of self-projection. This was to enact the primary act of philosophical reflexion: the free-activity of the I became manifest when the activity of thinking was directed back at itself.

Cinema thus enacted Fichte's famous philosophical exercise to explain the trope of reflexion. In his lectures the philosopher famously exhorted his audience to “think about the wall . . . now think about whoever it was that thought about the wall.”Footnote ⁹ Cinema involved the spectator in a similar oscillation, saying, in effect, ‘Ladies and gentleman, observe the screen and immerse yourself in its moving images; now think about whoever it is that is immersed in the screen.’ Cinema thus brought home Münsterberg's adamant lesson that “the existing world . . . is a shadow of the real world. . . . The world we will is the reality, the world we perceive is the deduced and therefore unreal system” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg1899, 25). Similarly, Münsterberg wrote, while viewing motion pictures, “our mind is here and there . . . the photoplay can equal it in its freedom from the bondage of the material world” (Münsterberg Reference Münsterberg and Langdale2002, 134).

Similarly, with the oscillation from immersion in moving images to the standpoint of the I, a true perspective on the unreal character of the projection, and hence of the nature of reality itself, became possible:

When viewing cinema, space, time, and causality cease to follow the ordinary formal laws of empirical perception because the spectator assumes a position that can be described as transcendental. Münsterberg here describes a position akin to Stanley Cavell's assertion that the cinema spectator views the screen as if from behind the self (Cavell Reference Cavell and Rothman1985, 116–117). On this view the self appears as something interposed between this transcendental standpoint, or the Will, and the world. Cinema offered fleeting opportunities to occupy this standpoint and the philosophical freedom it heralded. Aesthetic isolation provided the condition for the possibility of assuming a transcendental position.

The fact that cinema houses were constructed as “temples for the new goddesses” suggested that movie viewers intuited the exalted Fichtean spiritual freedom that Münsterberg described. Münsterberg repeatedly asserted that it is only through the discovery of the transcendental standpoint that humans discover themselves to be free. One therefore might use the cinema (as one might the laboratory, or the philosophical text) as the occasion to begin disengaging the self from particularity in all its guises, to recover the spontaneity that marked the free-acting I. In ordinary cinema-watching this oscillation happened of its own accord, and in all viewers, and irrespective of the content of the film, but without significance. All that was needed was to teach movie-goers a properly Fichtean mode of apprehension, inculcating the freedom of the mental world of the will unconstrained by causal laws. Cinema would effortlessly achieve the philosophical emancipation of the masses that university lectures never could.