The Future of the Past. Arnheim and Film Today

Exactly fifteen years ago, on June 9, 2007, psychologist of art and media theorist Rudolf Arnheim died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one month before his 103rd birthday (he was born in Berlin on July 15, 1904). He devoted his entire life to the study of the arts — starting with film in the 1920s — and is the author of Art and Visual Perception and Visual Thinking and many other masterpieces that continue to be essential points of reference for generations of students, scholars and professionals in the fields of analysis, criticism and the practice of the visual arts. Arnheim is also considered one of the classic film theorists for his application of the assumptions of Gestalt psychology to film analysis presented for the first time 90 years ago in his essay Film als Kunst. His radical positions have been criticized in various eras and intellectual spheres, but they are in some respects still valid and are often unwittingly adopted by critics and scholars. As the essays of this special issue demonstrate, a recontextualization and revitalization of Arnheim’s film theory and, more generally, a Gestalt approach to the film experience, can be still productive today.