Abstract
Some of the most abiding theories of film that issued from North America and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century make striking and repeated appeals to the soul. This chapter deals mainly with key film theorists from three different countries in order to demonstrate where explicit reference to the term was most prevalent: namely, in specific strands of theory published in the United States, France, and the Weimar Republic from the 1910s to the end of the 1920s. From Hugo Münsterberg’s ‘soul psychology’ through the ‘photogénie’ of French Impressionist theory to the physiognomics of Weimar film theory, the soul enters early Western film theory in various ways. While these theoretical discourses are culturally specific, they bear each other’s influence (at the time, many signal texts circulated in translation across Europe, the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and the United States), and their implications also stretch beyond the borders of their countries of origin. Nineteenth-century Symbolism, Romantic concerns with inwardness, a revival of occultism, and spiritualist beliefs variously haunt these theories in the context of the twentieth century, and discussion of the soul within theoretical discourse at this time points frequently to tensions between tradition and modernity, as well as to archaic and more recent philosophies.
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Notes
Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America [1989] (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001 revised edition), p. 2.
John J. Cerullo, The Secularization of the Soul: Psychical Research in Modern Britain (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982), p. xii.
In the case of mediums, the desire to investigate their powers – to prove or disprove fraud – took disquieting turns. See Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), pp. 149–50, for an account of the intimate probing that many female mediums were subjected to, some more willingly than others. For astute points on the sexual and class power hierarchy between the researchers and mediums, see Warner, Phantasmagoria, pp. 302–3.
For different perspectives on the connection between photography and death, see Siegfried Kracauer ‘Photography’ [1927], in The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 47–64, and André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ [1945], in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 9–16. For a later text frequently cited in this regard, see
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1982). In recent years, the theoretical association between photography and mortality has been questioned, and oppositions between cinema and life, photography and death have been deconstructed. For a range of articles that revisit the bond between stillness and movement in photography and film, see
David Green and Joanna Lowry (eds), Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image (Brighton: Photoforum/Photoworks, 2006).
Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 42–7. McGinn speaks of ‘mindsight’ in addition to seeing with our eyes and suggests that our visual imagination thereby involves three eyes altogether.
See James Coates, Photographing the Invisible (London: L. N. Fowler & Co., 1911), p. 4. For two further compelling attempts to document and defend belief in spirit photography in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, see
Andrew Glendinning (ed.), The Veil Lifted: Modern Developments of Spirit Photography (London: Whittaker & Co., 1894) and
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1922).
See Tom Gunning, ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 42–71 (pp. 65–6).
John Harvey, Photography and Spirit (London: Reaktion, 2007), pp. 55–6.
See, for example, Hugo Münsterberg, ‘Psychology and Mysticism’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 83 (January 1899), pp. 67–85.
Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922), p. 177.
Hugo Münsterberg, ‘The Return of the Soul’, The North American Review, vol. CCI, no. 710 (January 1915), pp. 64–71 (p. 71).
Münsterberg is making a claim here that is similar to the one that psychoanalyst Carl Jung makes in the 1930s about the development of a ‘psychology without the soul’ (‘Psychologie ohne Seele’) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Jung refers to psychological explanations of the day that understand everything to be a function of the body, noting that granting substantiality to the soul or psyche is repugnant to the spirit of an age in which everything is given a physical explanation. The political context into which Jung’s article was published is different from that of Münsterberg and is more akin to the climate that will be discussed in the third section of this chapter with reference to Weimar film theory. See Carl Jung, ‘The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology’ [1931], in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 177–99 (p. 177).
See Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915), Chapter XXI. For Lindsay, art and religion exist in a perfect synergy, and there is a distinct strand of mysticism and wizardry that runs throughout his text, which is also scattered with loose references to the soul. While Lindsay writes of the relation between body and soul in his poetry, he does not theorize the soul in as precise or thoroughgoing a manner as does Münsterberg and is therefore of less relevance to my discussion here. See, for example, Every Soul Is a Circus (New York: Macmillan, 1929) and The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the Holy Spirit (printed by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay ‘expressly for gratuitous distribution in Springfield, Illinois’, n.d.). See also
Glenn Joseph Wolfe, Vachel Lindsay: The Poet as Film Theorist (New York: Arno Press, 1973), pp. 65–76 for discussion of Lindsay’s inter-denominalationist faith and its impact on his aesthetics.
Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Hardpress, 2006 [1916]), p. 14.
The different influences of Kant and Gestalt psychology on Münsterberg were by no means antithetical. As Benjamin Wolman explains, Gestalt psychology is another solution to the problems posed by Kant concerning the perceiving mind and the relation to the outside world. See Benjamin B. Wolman, ‘Immanuel Kant and his Impact on Psychology’, in Benjamin B. Wolman (ed.), Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 229–47 (pp. 243–4).
J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 14.
See D. W. Hamlyn (ed.), The Psychology of Perception: A Philosophical Examination of Gestalt Theory and Derivative Theories of Perception [1957] (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 48–75 (p. 48).
Ibid., p. 81. As Lee Grieveson notes, the power of the movies over the spectator that Münsterberg speaks of here lies at the margins of his account. Grieveson places the early theorist’s suggestive comments in this regard in the context of broader research into cinema and social conduct in early-twentieth-century America. See Lee Grieveson ‘Cinema Studies and the Conduct of Conduct’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 3–37.
Ibid., p. 23. In a reciprocal manner, Lindsay acknowledged the existence of Münsterberg’s book in an initially positive review. But he was to call it ‘all science and prophesy’ ten years later. Lindsay, cited in Wolfe, Vachel Lindsay, pp. 14–15. Victor O. Freeburg’s The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918) was published two years after Münsterberg’s book. As Laura Marcus acknowledges, Lindsay, Münsterberg, and Freeburg were aware of each other’s research. See
Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 188.
Stuart Liebman, ‘French Film Theory, 1910–1921’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1983), pp. 1–23 (p. 13).
See Pascal Manuel Heu, Le Temps du cinéma: Émile Vuillermoz père de la critique cinématographique 1910–1930 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), pp. 189–98.
Paul Souday, ‘Bergsonisme et le cinéma’, in Paris-Midi (12 October 1917), p. 3. Souday’s argument is indebted to Bergson’s, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1900): Souday quotes from page 153 through to the end of Bergson’s book to argue his case).
Ibid. Vuillermoz’s view that cinema possessed a soul acquires musical resonance in 1925, when he states: ‘this imprinting machine possesses a soul’ and that this soul is the same as that of music: rhythm. Vuillermoz, ‘Cette machine à imprimer possède une âme’ [1925], in Pierre Lherminier, L’Artducinéma (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1960), p. 54.
In a footnote to a more recent re-publication of this article in French, L’Herbier explains that Alfred Vallette first accepted it in 1917 for publication in Mercure de France, but only in abridged fashion. Louis Delluc accepted an unabridged version for Le Film in 1918, and in 1920 Marcel Raval accepted it for re-publication in the journal Les Feuilles libres. The most recent re-publication of the unabridged version in French appears in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinématographe [1946] (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1977), pp. 199–212. I am grateful to Francesco Casetti for first alerting me to the publication history of this article. The article is also available in full in English in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism vol. 1, pp. 147–55.
French film historiographers and theorists have been attentive to Bergson’s closer relation with cinema. Abel was the first to recognize Bergson’s wider views on cinema. See Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1, p. 33, n. 129. See also Paul Douglass, ‘Bergson and Cinema: Friends or Foes?’, in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 209–27. For a more in-depth look at Bergson’s wider views on cinema in the French context with specific reference to his hitherto overlooked association with the Albert Kahn film archive, see
Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Vuillermoz, ‘La Musique des images’, in L’Art cinématographique, tome III (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1927), p. 44, cited in Heu, Le Temps du cinéma, p. 197.
R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–1914 (Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1988), p. x.
Germaine Dulac, ‘Le Cinéma, art des nuances spirituelles’ [1925], in Écrits sur le cinéma (1919–1937) (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1994), pp. 51–2.
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis describes this film as employing backlighting silhouettes and shadows to create the atmosphere for Dulac’s art of spiritual nuances. See Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 50.
Noël Burch, Marcel L’Herbier (Paris: Seghers, 1973), p. 14.
Epstein’s repeated explorations of cinematic movement and time make his thought a richly suggestive precursor to the work of Deleuze, but recently scholars have also spoken of his Bergsonism. See, for example, Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Epstein suggests knowledge of Bergson, through brief reference to a Bergsonian position among other philosophies and religions in Le Cinéma du Diable, p. 165. Discussing the theorization of close-ups of faces in the work of Epstein and Balázs, Jacques Aumont comments on the belief that both share: that we are projected into a world, that is a face, and that what it reveals is a psyche, a soul. In contrast to Turvey, he argues that their work does not take the further step needed to make their vision Bergsonian on this point. See ‘The Face in Close-up’, in Angela Dalle Vacche (ed.), The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 127–48 (p. 145). For further discussion of Epstein’s characterization of the cognitive power of the cinema to reveal the soul of the world, see
Turvey, ‘Jean Epstein’s Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye’, October, vol. 83 (Winter 1998), pp. 25–50.
Jean Epstein, Bonjour cinéma (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), p. 94.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). For a more recent take on his initial argument and for a consideration of the body as a hysterical body, see also his ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution’, in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: BFI, 1994), pp. 11–24.
Timothy Barnard argues that Moussinac approaches ‘photogénie’ in such a way as to move from Impressionism to Communism, in ‘From Impressionism to Communism: Léon Moussinac’s Technics of the Cinema, 1921–1933’, in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, http://www.frameworkonline.com/Issue42/42tb.html, date accessed 3 September 2012, p. 4 of 22 pp. Barnard contrasts his reading of ‘photogénie’ with that of Paul Willemen whose eloquent psychoanalytic reading of the term approaches it in terms of a viewer’s aesthetic. See Paul Willemen, ‘Photogénie and Epstein’, in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (London: BFI, 1994), pp. 124–33.
‘[L]es foules modernes exprimeront ce mysticisme sans quoi aucune époque ne saurait délivrer sa beauté.’ Léon Moussinac, Naissance du cinéma [1925] (Paris: Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et des Gens de Lettres, 1983), p. 8.
Gance ‘Le Temps de l’image est venu [1926]’, in René Jeanne and Charles Ford (eds), Abel Gance (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1963), pp. 81–90 (p. 88).
Norman King, Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle (London: BFI, 1984), p. 140 and p. 177.
Sophie Daria, Abel Gance: hier et demain (Paris: La Palatine, 1959), pp. 85–6.
See Frank Kessler, ‘Photogénie und Physiognomie’, in Rüdiger Campe and Manfred Schneider (eds), Geschichten der Physiognomik: Text, Bild, Wissen (Freiburg: Rombach, 1996), pp. 515–34 (p. 528).
Sabine Hake, German National Cinema [2002], 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 24.
‘Et les fantômes, qui avaient déjà hanté le romantisme allemand, se ravivaient tels les ombres de l’Hadès, quand elles ont bu du sang.’ Lotte H. Eisner, L’Écran démoniaque: influence de Max Reinhardt et de l’expressionisme (Paris: André Bonne, 1952), p. 12.
Anton Kaes, back matter, Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film [1947] (ed.), Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, revised and expanded edition). Kaes writes: ‘Although Kracauer is not afraid of using such contested concepts as collective psychology and German “soul”, his productive readings of Weimar films as harbingers of emerging fascism still resonate today.’
For a detailed discussion of the controversy, but also an acknowledgement that this has become one of his best-known books, see Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 76–90.
Carl Hauptmann, ‘Film und Theater’, in Hugo Zehder (ed.), Der Film von Morgen (Berlin-Dresden: Rudolf Kaemmerer, 1923), pp. 11–20 (p. 20).
Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. xxxvii.
See August Sander, Face of Our Time [1929], trans. Michael Robertson (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2003).
For further discussion of these relations see Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), pp. 214–15. Hake discusses Balázs’s Weimar writ-ings in context and in detail in Chapter 10 of her book, pp. 212–46. See also Erica Carter’s editorial introduction to Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone (ed.), Erica Carter (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), pp. xv–xlvi.
Hans Richter addresses some of the innovations for which D. W. Griffith was responsible as early as the 1910s and when he discusses the close-up, he comments on the new art of facial expression that thus became apparent when a slight move of Asta Nielsen’s mouth made the audience feel an inner event. See Hans Richter, The Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema [1976], trans. Ben Brewster (Hants: Wildwood House, 1986), pp. 69–70.
Béla Balázs, ‘Physiognomie’, in Schriften zum Film: Band I: Der sichtbare Mensch; Kritiken und Aufsätze, 1922–1926 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), pp. 205–8 (p. 206).
Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’ [1947], in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (London: Oxford, 1974), pp. 151–69 (p. 156) (originally delivered as a lecture in 1934).
The influence of medium Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical belief in the essential unity of the cosmos and universal order is to be found in the search for universal shapes apparent in van Doesburg’s paintings. The interest in universality also extends to his encounters with Eggeling and Richter who co-wrote the essay ‘Universelle Sprache’ in 1920, which is published in De Stijl, the journal founded by van Doesburg in 1917. For further information about connections between members of this avantgarde, see the exhibition catalogue, Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hötte (eds), Van Doesburg & The International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World (London: Tate Publishing, 2009). For a personal account of the relations between Richter, Eggeling and van Doesburg, along with their interwoven practices, see also Hans Richter, ‘Easel-Scroll-Film’, Magazine of Art (February 1952), pp. 78–86.
Lev Kuleshov, Art of the Cinema [1929] in Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov, trans. and ed. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 41–123 (p. 50).
V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, trans. Ivor Montagu (New York: Grove Press, 1960), ‘Introduction to the German Edition’, p. xv.
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Cooper, S. (2013). Classical Souls. In: The Soul of Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328588_2
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