Cinema is mere gadgetry without narrativity- hugo munsterberg

Hugo Munsterberg was a German-American psychologist. He was one of the pioneers in applied psychology, extending his research and theories to Industrial/Organizational, legal, medical, educational and business settings. To Munsterberg films were getting closer to 'complete cinema' which is bad because it is getting closer to reality with color/sound/etc, betraying the silent film. He celebrated the flatness of the image, silent films, and the artifice in cinema. The photoplay mirrors how the mind works. Flashbacks are important to him.

In 1916, German-American psychologist and philosopher Hugo Munsterberg published The Photoplay, one of the first printed volumes on the new phenomenon of film. Taking his interest and training in applied psychology as starting point, Munsterberg “casts a psychologist’s eye on the physiology, perception, and mental functioning of the spectator, while the philosopher in him considers the intrinsic aesthetic qualities of the art and the emotions and moral attitudes that the medium can elicit and engender.”

He concludes, for example, that movement in film is not actual but rather created by the spectator; the viewer does not experience reality in the theatre, but rather a mental perception of reality. In essence, cinema stimulates the mental structures of the mind by way of its structural similarity to the mind itself. Munsterberg’s work was remarkably ahead of its time, precipitating a tremendous impact on what was to be the field of Film Studies.