Here is a simple overview of three of the major formalist theorists. This should give you a general idea of formalism. It's not the greatest writing, but interesting.
When cinema was not even thirty years old (in fact too young to even be called cinema) theorists and critics were already hard at work trying to understand, define, and encapsulate the film experience. Early theorists such as Münsterberg, Arnheim, and Eisenstein focused their attention on the formalist ideas of film. This is to say that each focused on defining film, as it is set apart from other mediums, by understanding what film alone can do, what the moving picture may accomplish that photography, painting, or theatre cannot. Much of this, though the unique apparatus of the camera allows for it, occurs in the mind of the spectator. Weight and validity to images arise only after perceived. Whether one focuses on the psychology of perception as Münsterberg does, the subtle play of illusion and reality that focuses on the medium as art as Arnheim states, or how editing and montage effect one’s perception of meaning as Eisenstein believes, it is the basic function of film that entreats these theorists to speculate. Defining what film is and what it is capable of centers on its formal attributes. These three early theorists, though each defines cinema differently, require the spectator, the audience, to be part of the formal aspect of film. It is only with a mind that is tricked by the optical illusion of film, one that places meaning and logic where there is none inherently, that film is not only realized, but made art.
Hugo Münsterberg’s writings center on the mind as the “raw material” of film. The mind of the spectator holds not only the miraculous ability to see a motion picture as one continuous event, but how through “attention, imagination and memory, and emotions” we create an experience unlike any other art form. In his work The Film: a Psychological Study, states “… the photoplay, incomparable in this respect with the drama, gave us a view of dramatic events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind (411).” To be “completely shaped” by the mind, for Münsterberg, held two understandings, a phenomenal and a noumenal. The phenomenal question itself is twofold, the “phi-phenomenom” and the “retention of visual stimulus”. The latter is the brain’s ability to hold an image for a moment after it is seen. Münsterberg, however, was more concerned with the former phenomenal question. In the book, The Major Film Theories: an Introduction, J. Dudley Andrew explained that Münsterberg “… shows that this passive phenomenon (the retention of visual stimulus) is not able to account for the way we bring a series of still pictures to life. The phi-phenomenon does account for this by emphasizing the active powers of the mind which literally sense (motion) out of distinct stimuli” (18). This knowledge of how the brain is able to understand the visual stimuli it is being presented half explains how the film is an art form “completely shaped” by the mind.
The other half of this explanation lies in the brain’s ability to, not only sense the motion pictures as a single image, but to understand the meaning of such an image. “The photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely attention, memory, imagination, and emotion” (Münsterberg 412). The inner-world forms complete the understanding of the brain’s role in motion pictures, making the spectator him/herself key to the existence of film. Münsterberg describes “attention” as the mind’s way to organize the images being presented. It is perhaps the difference between “watching” and “seeing” which lies in the realm of mise-en-scene. The next level of Münsterberg’s mental operation, according to Andrew, is the imagination and memory used to “give this world a sense, an impact, a personal direction” (19). Memory and imagination correlate to the editing of a motion picture, helping explain pace, continuity, and time. Finally, since Münsterberg speaks almost exclusively of the narrative aspect of the photoplay (movie), he considers the realm of “emotion” to be the highest level of perception. Emotions go beyond recognition, or understanding the logic of actions. This form, since the photoplay’s raw material is the mind, it must mirror mental practices, emotions. The story, only perceivable through the inner forms of attention, memory, and imagination, is culminated in the emotions. The point of the film is discovered only in this form. The emotions rendered because of these images are the transcendental nature of film. In this, Münsterberg gives an apologetic response for film weighted with the respected studies of philosophy and psychology.
The theorist Arnheim held to many of Münsterberg’s beliefs on perception, but he, instead of focusing on defining film itself through its form, focuses on the form to place film firmly in the realm of art. Arnheim defines art as something with the artistic function that makes us focus on the medium itself, as opposed to the subject matter. To Arnheim, the closer a medium was to reality, the less like art it actually was. It is instead what separates a medium from reality that makes it artistic. J. Dudley Andrew, in his summation of Arnheim within The Major Film Theories, gives a list of the functions of cinema keeping it from reality.
“These include: 1.the projection of solids on a two-dimensional surface; 2. The reduction of a sense of depth and the problem of the absolute image size; 3. Lighting and the absence of color; 4. The framing of the image; 5. The absence of the space-time continuum due to editing; 6. The absence of inputs from the other senses” (28).
These functions of the unreal in cinema are what make up the raw material of film as art. Arnheim thus dismisses technological advancements that bring the medium closer to reality such as: synchronized sound, anamorphic format, stereoscopic projection, color, etc. Because Arnheim believed that imperfections in film (that which separates it from reality) made cinema art, he sowed concern that film would gravitate toward reality by saying in Film as Art, “As distinguished from the tools of the sculptor and the painter, which by themselves produce nothing resembling nature, the camera starts to turn and a likeness of the real world results mechanically. There is serious danger that the filmmaker will rest content with such shapeless reproduction” (326). Besides his lamentation of film’s movement toward reality, another key aspect is raised in this, Arnheim’s apparatus-centered philosophy. In this, Arnheim says that the purpose of art is to draw attention toward the apparatus which in painting is paint, line , color; in poetry are words; in music are the notes and instruments. The apparatus in film is the “technical limitations of representationalism,” that which, though appearing to strive toward realistic representation, makes a distinction between reality while mimicking it enough to create an emotional transcendence within the audience.
The second major aspect of Arnheim is in this transcendence of image, what Münsterberg called “emotions”. The beauty must be evident in art. Art for art’s sake, too heavily weighted in formalism, has no purpose. In the same way that postcards, doghouses, and striptease is not art though it is certainly media, Arnheim demands a certain aesthetic attention (Andrew 27). And like Münsterberg, Arnheim believes that the spectator’s role in cinema is crucial. The spectator has two roles: 1. to be conscious of the filmmaking apparatus; 2. to understand the purity in transcendental cinema. Without these two functions of the spectator, film falls flat as art. So it is in this “equilibrium” between artist and spectator that the art truly expresses itself. That is to say, an artwork leaving an ambiguous statement (whether by fault of the artist or spectator) in Arnheim’s words, “confuses the artistic statement because it leaves the observer on the edge between two or more assertions which do not add up to a whole” (Arnheim 31). This is Arnheim’s formalist theory of film. He, like Münsterberg and Eisenstein, believe the perception of the formal aspects required involves the spectator in a unique way.
The Russian-born Eisenstein found his formalist arguments not in the mechanics of capturing an image, but the arrangement of such images, montage and editing. The key difference from any other art form was the moving image and its relation to other moving images. For Eisenstein art needed conflict. And it was conflict within an image or between images that provoked his most notable writings (and films). Not only did film’s form dictate the given of montage, Eisenstein argues that its purposeful and artistic application give rise to the notion of film as art and not just a social event. To explain this he begins to define the “attraction” in what he calls the “montage of attraction” in his aptly named article, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” by stating,
“An attraction is in our understanding any demonstrable fact (an action, an object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination, and so on) that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that, combined with others, possesses the characteristic of concentrating the audiences emotions in any direction dictated by the production’s purpose.” (20)
As this is Eisenstein’s working definition of attraction, the “montage of attraction” is the combination of these demonstrable facts into an organization holding meaning for the production. Within this the types of images hold a meaning as well as the speed and pace with which they are delivered. In Eisenstein’s 1928 film October, a moment in which a machine gunner fires on a crowd is edited by a series of quick transitions between the barrel of the gun and the face of the gunner. The feverish pace at which this section is edited represents and enhances the rapid fire of the machine gun, two images of attraction edited with a specific pace in order to bring about an understanding and emotional reaction from the spectator. This type of montage is but one of several that Eisenstein defines.
Inn the article, “Eisenstein and Social Cinema,” Vance Kepley Jr. describes each of Eisenstein’s methods of montage: metric montage, rhythmic montage, tonal montage, overtonal montage, and intellectual montage (44). A metric montage occurs when a shot is cut based only on the length of the shot, almost mathematically. A rhythmic montage cuts to the cadence of an image on the screen for example: a man walking down the stairs. Tonal montages center on the dominant foci of the frame. This derives meaning from the prevalent images as it cuts. The overtonal montage, though more abstract, acts similar to the tonal in that it derives meaning from the images to dictate cutting. However, the overtonal images are the less pervasive, less dominant images/objects in the frame. Finally, and ultimately, the emotional montage connects images through editing to elicit the emotions of the spectator, to find the attractions of montage. Defining the subtleties of montage allows Eisenstein greater maneuverability when discussing editing’s role in film. But, again, like Arnheim and Münsterberg, the role of spectator in this process is crucial. Montage holds no meaning in and of itself. The meaning is applied only after the spectator’s sudden perception of incongruity. And Eisenstein argues, this perception is able to be crafted by the production eliciting emotions or meaning for its own purposes.
In summarizing these early theorists, it should be noted that though their obvious connection is the formalist elements of film, they also place great importance on the spectator. While most art needs a spectator to give it meaning, film requires of the spectator not only their attention, but their logic and emotions as well. To see an image is an inconsequential part of film. It is only when the brain is tricked into seeing a solid moving image (Münsterberg), when that image brings attention to the apparatus (Arnheim), and when logic and memory link varying images together to form cogent content (Eisenstein) that film’s full potential as an art is realized. The spectator is key to (and indeed a part of) the formalist theories of film. And while all three formalist theorists lament the movement towards realism in technological advances such as sound, color, and 3D, they also realize films undeniably social role. Perhaps there is a part of them that would understand not film’s journey into realist tendencies, but its impact on society, for this is what first brought their attention to this new medium.
Works Cited
Andrew, Dudley. The Major Film Theories: an Introduction. London: Oxford UP, 1976. Print.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception; a Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley:
University of California, 1954. Print.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California, 1957. Print.
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Montage of Film Attractions. Ed. Peter Lehman. Defining Cinema. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U.P., 1997. Print.
Kepley Jr., Vance. Eisenstein and Social Cinema. Defining Cinema. Ed. Peter Lehman. Defining
Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U.P., 1997. Print.
Münsterberg, Hugo. The Film: a Psychological Study; the Silent Photoplay in 1916. New York:
Dover Publications, 1970. Print.
October. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. 1928. DVD.
