Gestalt Filmology. Insights on Form and Embodiment in the Film Experience

The Future of the Past the duty of a critic, a scholar or a student to describe the communicative and artistic effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of audiovisual products (cinema, TV series, commercials, music videos...).The study of cinematographic formative means can still help us today.Film analysis could return to dwell more precisely on the compositional aspects of shots (e.g.off-screen space, camera angles and point of view, shots scale, editing and deep focus) and its dynamics (in terms of vectors, balance, configuration, etc.). 16 Today eye-tracking tools allow us to register and study empirically the viewers' gaze behavior and the dynamics of attention. 17This approach has the potential to enrich the analysis of the film experience with information on the quality and adequacy of stylistic choices.The way in which viewers process editing -or what Arnheim called the 'space-time discontinuity' -is inherently a gestaltic activity: in fact, the viewer mentally reconstructs the continuity behind the logic of events despite the fact that there are lacks in space and time, applying the law of 'good continuity', that is, filling the gaps and constituting a whole that does not derive from simple juxtaposition of the shots or narrative chunks.In this sense, editing follows the functions of the mind in tending towards a 'complete' or 'pregnant' -that is, simple, coherent, logically structured -figure.On closer inspection, in drawing attention to the differences between reality and the film, Arnheim legitimized infringements of the rules of continuity (and, more generally, of Hollywood's 'ideology').18 What matters is not balance per se, but the ability of the visual configurations to tend towards it, that is, to make themselves unstable, dynamic, in need of compensation. 19 As Gestalt approach thus identifies and describes the expressive potential of dynamic tension, and even of discontinuity, if this stimulates the viewer's propensity to comprehend the overall meaning of the narrative.Applied to the so-called 'puzzle films' or in general to complex storytelling, this approach allows us to conceive the film as a great mental game whose content is not the narration (or, the content), but the processes activated through the formal elements.An insight -another concept developed by Gestalt psychology -emerges as a reconfiguration of the relationship between the fragments in a new, sudden and intuitive way that allows a resolutive vision of a problem.If the film hides a real state of affairs until the last sequence, then there is no insight.If, on the other hand, it uses the space-time 'folds' of editing as formal means of expressing a momentarily incomprehensible state of affairs, then it involves the viewer actively in the comprehension of the content of the film.In short, it is likely that Arnheim would have loved Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) for its formalism in the use of editing (and also for the mixed use of cinematography), but not Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) or films that adopt the same type of 'unreliable' narrator.Among the formative means, the ability of the film to evoke non-visual sensory experiences is one of the most interesting.This affects primarily the negative effects of the dialogue on acting, that Arnheim conceived as mostly a pantomimic activity.Interestingly, contemporary filmmakers have spontaneously rediscovered the power of the absence of speech, when the predominantly D'Aloia, Verstegen, The Future of the Past Cinema', connects the notion of vectors and directed tension -a prominent feature of Arnheim's post-film writing to his earlier work, creating a useful consolidation of Arnheimian theory, moving vector discourse into film.Vectors for Arnheim create meaning by creating pictorial analogues of existence within artistic works.Following Herbert Zettl (a theorist whose relation to Arnheim would be useful to further explore), there are also motion vectors in cinema: primary motion, secondary motion, and tertiary motion.Armed with such concepts, Coëgnarts pushes Zettl's discussion of motion vectors into meaningful expression with case studies of three films: Akira Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and Brian De Palma's The Untouchables.The next essay, Philippe Bédard's 'Points of Anchorage: Exo-centric Images and the perceptual Relativity of Camera Movement', considers camera movement as a kind of illusion.The exo-centric image, wherein a fixed camera registers a character's fixed face and body, while the world moves, are slightly jarring (see Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, or Todd Phillips' The Hangover).Such subjective effects reverse body-space relations, denaturalizing the tacit acceptance of the camera as a fixed eye, recording events of the world.Bédard's analysis usefully moves filmic movement back into the general psychology of ego-centric motion.Next Maria Poulaki, in 'A Gestalt Theory for "Disorder": From Arnheim's Ordered Chaos to Brambilla's Entropic Art' returns to Arnheim's comments in his 1971 book Entropy and Art.This book, an homage to Arnheim's mentor Wolfgang Köhler, tried to place the physicist's notion of entropy, which by then had been overtaken by humanistic popularization, and revisit its meaning for contemporary discourse.Poulaki brings Arnheim's opposition of order and disorder into dialogue with newer approaches from dynamic systems theory (e.g.complexity theory) to the neurosciences.By using the example of the digital endlessly transforming creations of artist and film director Marco Brambilla, Poulaki reminds us of the dynamic emergence and breaking of order in the spirit of the Gestalt theory inspiring Arnheim.Brambilla's animations are a natural invitation to consider the topic more broadly, which is accomplished in Ryan Pierson's 'Gestalt, Animation and the Culture of Design'.Animation is a natural topic for Gestalt psychologists because experience itself is not regarded as a copy of reality.Accurately geometrically presented stimuli, for example, may not produce the most robust illusion.So too with animation, which though not live-action can be more 'real' than the former.For Pierson it is therefore fitting that Gestalt psychologists ought to have anticipated, and vice versa, been inspired by animators.Each also, for Pierson, participate in a culture of design, which can be construed as a parallel project of arranging senses and populations, a psychotechnics for a sociotechnics.In line with the reconnection of filmic ideas with larger traditions of Gestalt theory, Massimo Locatelli's 'Paul Fraisse's Psychology of Rhythm: A Case for Filmology?' connects Arnheim to the work on rhythm by Albert Michotte's student, Paul Fraisse (in effect, Arnheim's theoretical 'cousin').For Fraisse, rhythm follows Gestalt organization but also connects to sensory-motor

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