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

Recent advancements in the encounter between media studies and the cognitive sciences raises the possibility of re-launching some of the assumptions of Gestalt psychology as productive insights for film theory, analysis, and criticism. ‘Gestalt Filmology’ would be a body of knowledge taking hints from Rudolf Arnheim’s pioneering film theory but anchored in core Gestalt ideas about the multimodal functioning of the senses, motion and ego-perception and resulting filmic expressiveness and symbolism. Elaborated in this way, a Gestalt Filmology might be able to offer suggestions and correctives to an ‘embodied cognition’ and ‘neurofilmological’ approach in visual media studies. This special issue of Cinéma & Cie connects together elements of Arnheim’s thought from different periods of his career. It bolsters Arnheimian ideas with research strains from general gestalt-theoretical psychology, and it brings elements of those same Gestalt-theoretical traditions to parts of film theory that Arnheim never touched.