Why We Go to The Movies

Carl Theodore Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc (still), 1928.

Aligning with this summer’s Art and Theory focus across e-flux publications, Film Notes continues revisiting texts from early film theory, highlighting their open-ended and interdisciplinary approach to cinema as at that time young art form and technology. We hope that republishing these texts would not merely remind historical debates on film, but also encourage contemporary reflection on how artistic practice and theoretical discussion might engage broader imaginative and social contexts beyond academic and disciplinary departmentalization. 

This week, we present Hugo Münsterberg’s seminal 1915 essay, "Why We Go to the Movies," a pioneering psychological analysis of cinema's unique appeal.1 Münsterberg, a prominent German-American psychologist and philosopher, explores the cognitive and emotional forces drawing audiences to the cinema. Rather than treating film merely as entertainment, Münsterberg emphasizes its power to engage human perception, imagination, and emotions distinctly from literature and theater. His essay anticipates crucial aspects of cognitive and phenomenological film theories, underscoring cinema’s extraordinary ability to shape psychological states through its visual and narrative techniques.

The "movies" themselves are moving all the time. To be sure, they move on different roads. One road is that of education and instruction. How modest were the means with which the kinematoscope of fifteen years ago showed us the happenings of the world and gave us glances at current events and exhibited a little of animal life! It was a long way indeed from there to the marvelous pictures of the European war or to those fascinating moving-picture journeys to the Antarctic and to the beasts of the African desert. We all have seen the wonders of the deep sea and the splendor of foreign worlds. Whatever is worth learning in the realm of visible things, from the microscopic Infusoria in the drop of water to the most colossal works of man and of nature, all can be made interesting and stimulating in the moving films. Millions have learned in the dark houses their geography and history and natural science. Yet this power of the moving pictures to supplement the schoolroom and the newspaper and the library is, after all, much less important than its chief task to bring entertainment and enjoyment and happiness to the masses. The theater and the vaudeville and the novel must yield room and ample room to the art of the pictures. But can we really say that the film brings us art in the higher sense of the word? Was it not for quite a while the fashion among those who love art to look down upon the tricks of the film and to despise them as inartistic? Those who could afford to visit the true theater felt it as below their level to indulge in such a cheap substitute which lacked the glory of the stage with spoken words. But that time lies far behind us. Even the most artistic public has learned to enjoy a high class photoplay. I may confess frankly that I was one of those snobbish latecomers. Until a year ago I had never seen a real photoplay. Although I was always a passionate lover of the theater, I should have felt it as undignified for a Harvard Professor to attend a moving-picture show, just as I should not have gone to a vaudeville performance or to a museum of wax figures or to a phonograph concert. Last year, while I was traveling a thousand miles from Boston, I and a friend risked seeing Neptune's Daughter, and my conversion was rapid. I recognized at once that here marvelous possibilities were open, and I began to explore with eagerness the world which was new to me. Reel after reel moved along before my eyes-all styles, all makes. I went with the crowd to Anita Stewart and Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin; I saw Pathe and Vitagraph, Lubin and Essanay, Paramount and Majestic, Universal and Knickerbocker. I read the books on how to write scenarios; I visited the manufacturing companies, and, finally, I began to experiment myself. Surely I am now under the spell of the "movies" and, while my case may be worse than the average, all the world is somewhat under this spell.

A New Form of Art

Why did this change come? Was it because the more and more improved technique brought the imitation of the theater nearer and nearer to the impression of the real stage and thus made the substitute almost as good as the original? Not at all. The real reason was just the opposite. The more the photoplays developed, the more it was felt that it was not their task simply to be an inexpensive imitation of the theater, but that they should bring us an entirely new form of art. As long as the old belief prevailed that the moving-picture performances were to give us the same art which the drama gave, their deficiencies were evident. But if they have an original task, if they offer an art of their own, different from that of the theater, as the art of the painter is different from that of the sculptor, then it is clear that the one is not to be measured by the other. Who dares to say that the marble bust is a failure because it cannot show us the colors which give charm to the portrait painting? On the contrary, we destroy the beauty of the marble statue as soon as we paint the cheeks of a Venus.

It is never the purpose of an art simply to imitate nature. The painting would not be better if the painted flowers gave us fragrance. It is the very essence of art to give us something which appeals to us with the claims of reality and yet which is entirely different from real nature and real life and is set off from them by its artistic means. For this reason we put the statue on a pedestal and the painting into a frame and the dramatic play on a stage. We do not want them to be taken as parts of the real world, and the highest art of all, music, speaks a language which has not even similarity to the happenings of the world.

If the aim of every art were simply to come as near as possible to reality, the photoplay would stand endlessly far behind the performances of real actors on the stage. But when it is recognized that each art is a particular way of suggesting life and of awaking interest, without giving life or nature themselves, the moving pictures come into their own. They offer an entirely new approach to beauty. They give an art which must develop in paths quite separate from those of the stage. It will reach the greater height the more it learns to free itself from the shackles of the theater and to live up to its own forms.

It is only natural that it began with a mere imitation of the theater, just as the automobiles were at first simple horse carriages moved by machinery. Any new principle finds its own form slowly. The photoplay of today is already as different from those theater imitations as a racing automobile is from a buggy. As soon as the two forms of art are recognized as belonging to two entirely different spheres, they do not disturb each other. Even the most ideal moving picture can never in the least give that particular artistic pleasure which a dramatic theater performance offers. But, on the other hand, even the best drama on the stage will not replace the photoplay as soon as this has reached its ideal perfection.

The Meaning of The Photoplay

What is the true meaning of the "movies"? What are their special ways of showing us the world? In the beginning, the public enjoyed simply the surprising tricks of a technique which showed actual movement in a photograph.

But this purely technical interest has long since faded away. What remains, then, as the lasting source of enjoyment? The color is lacking and so is the depth of the stage; above all, the tone of the voice is absent. Yet we do not miss the color, the depth, or the words. We are fully under the spell of this silent world, and the Edison scheme of connecting the camera with the gramophone, and so to add spoken words to the moving pictures, was not successful for very good reasons. It really interfered with the chance of the moving pictures to develop their original nature. They sank back to the level of mere mechanical imitation of the theater.

But while so much was taken away from the offering of every theater stage, how much has come instead! The most evident gain of the new scheme is the reductions of expenses. One actor is now able to entertain a hundred and a thousand audiences at the same time; one stage setting is sufficient to give pleasure to millions. The theater is thus democratized. Everybody's purse allows him to see the greatest artists, and in every village a stage can be set up. With twenty thousand picture theaters in this country alone, the hope that the bliss of art may come to everyone has been fulfilled. But this mere spreading over the globe is not in itself an enrichment of the artistic means. The gramophone brings music into every cottage, but no one can claim that the musical disks have brought us a new art. Their rendering of orchestra or opera is nothing but a mechanical repetition of the free musical art and does not add anything to the symphony or the song.

With the photoplay it is entirely different. It shows us far more than any stage can show, or, rather, it shows us something fundamentally different. The first step away from the theater was soon made. The moving pictures allow a rapidity in the change of scenes which no stage manager could imitate. At first, these possibilities were used only for humorous effects. We enjoyed the lightening quickness with which we could follow the eloper over the roofs of the town, upstairs and down, into cellar and attic, and jump with him into the motor car and race over the country roads, changing the background a score of times in a few minutes, until the culprit falls over a bridge into the water and is caught by the police.

This slapstick humor has not disappeared, but the rapid change of scenes has meanwhile been put into the service of much higher aims. The true development of an artistic plot has been brought to possibilities which the real drama does not know by allowing the eye to follow the hero and heroine continuously from place to place. Now he leaves his room, now we see him passing along the street, now he enters the house of his beloved, now he is led into the parlor, now she is hurrying to the library of her father, now they all go to the garden. New stage settings are ever sliding into one another; the limitations of space are overcome. It is as if the laws of nature were overwhelmed and, through this liberation from space, a freedom gained which gives new wings to the artistic imagination. This perfect independence from the narrow ties of space-reality gives to the photoplay a new life chance which alone would secure it the right of a new form of art.

But with the quick change of background, the photo artist also gained the power of a rapidity of motion which leaves actual men behind. And from here it was only a step to the performance of actions which could not be carried out in nature at all. This, too, was made serviceable at first to a rather rough humor. The policeman who climbed up the solid stone front of a high building was in reality photographed creeping over a flat picture of a building spread on the floor. Every day brought us new tricks. We saw how the magician breaks one egg after another and takes out of each egg a little fairy and puts one after another on his hand and how they begin to dance. For the camera, such magical wonders are not difficult, but no theater could ever try to match them. Rich artistic effects are secured, and while on the stage every fairytale is clumsy and hardly able to create an illusion, in the film we really see the man transformed into a beast and the flower into a girl.

The Close-Up


But while, through this power to break down the barriers of space and to make the impossible actions possible, new fascinating effects could be reached, the whole still remained in the outer framework of the stage, inasmuch as everything was the presentation of an action in its successive stages. The photoplay showed a performance, however rapid or impossible, as it would go on in the outer world. An entirely new perspective was opened when the managers of the filmplay introduced the "close-up" and similar new methods. The close-up, first made familiar to every friend of the photoplay by the Vitagraph artists, is indeed most characteristic of the emancipation of the moving pictures. As everybody knows, this is the scheme by which a particular part of the picture, perhaps only the face of the hero or his hand or only a ring on his finger, becomes greatly enlarged and replaces, for an instant, the whole stage. But while everyone is familiar with the method, too few are aware that here indeed we have crossed a great aesthetic line of demarcation and have turned to a form of expression which is entirely foreign to the real stage. Even the most wonderful creations, the great historical plays, where thousands fill the battlefields, or the most fantastic caprices, where fairies fly over the stage, could be performed in a theater.

But this close-up leaves all stagecraft behind. The stage can give us only changes in the outer world; but if we suddenly neglect everything in the room and look only at the hand which carries the dagger, the change is not one outside but inside our mind. It is a turning of our attention. We withdraw our attention from all which is unimportant and concentrate it on that one point on which the action is focussed. The photoplay is an art in which not only the outer events but our own inner actions become effective. Our own attention is projected into the life around us.

Novel Methods of Presentation

But attention is not the only function of our mind which becomes effective in the moving pictures. Let us think of another action of our mind, the act of memory. When we go through an experience in practical life, we are constantly remembering happenings of the past. The photoplay can overcome the limits of time just as easily as those of space. In many of the newer plays, an unusual fascination is secured by interrupting the pictures of the present events with quickly passing images of earlier scenes. It is as if a quick remembrance were flitting through our mind.

Two passengers are sitting in the smoking room of a ship; we see them talking about their adventurous life experiences. The one makes the gesture of speaking; in the next instant we see him climbing the glacier, and then crossing the jungle and shooting tigers, and then fighting in the Boer War, and then strolling through Paris; but every few seconds we return to the smoking room and keep thus the background of the story before us. Yet our mind does not only combine memories; our thought wanders from one event to another which runs parallel. Here is a dancing hall in which a man and a girl are flirting; the girl's mother sits at home in a modest attic room and waits for her anxiously; the man's wife is unhappy in her luxurious parlor. Now the three scenes are interwoven: the dancing hall is seen for ten seconds, then the attic scene for five seconds, the parlor scene for five seconds, then the dancing hall again, and so on. They chase one another like the tones of an orchestra.

The order of the pictures on the screen is no longer the order of events in nature, but rather that of our own mental play. Here lies the reason why this new art has such peculiar interest for the psychologist. It is the only visual art in which the whole richness of our inner life, our perceptions, our memory, and our imagination, our expectation and our attention can be made living in the outer impressions themselves. As long as the photo artist made no use of these possibilities, his play lagged far behind that of the real theater. But since he has conquered these new methods of mental interpretation, he has created an art which is a worthy rival of the drama, entirely independent from and in not a few respects superior to the theater.

As soon as the original character of the photoplay is understood, it can easily be grasped that we are only at the beginning of a great aesthetic movement. The technical development of the photostage and of the camera will go on, and yet that is entirely secondary to the much more essential progress of the new art toward its highest fulfillment. The producer of the photoplays must free himself more and more from the idea with which he started to imitate the stage and must more and more win for the new art its own rights. How reluctant as yet, for instance, are the efforts to introduce the power of the imagination! In many a photoplay the murderer sees the ghost of his victim. But such devices are, after all, not unfamiliar on the regular stage. Just here the possibilities of the camera are unlimited. The girl in her happy first love sees the whole world in a new glamour and a new radiant beauty. The poet can make her speak so; only the photoplay could show her in this new jubilant world. This is something very different from the charming plays which we already possess today in which Princess Nicotina bewitches us or Neptune's daughter arises from the waves. Such fantastic plays tell us a pretty story, but what we must expect from the photoplay of the future is that the pictures reveal to us our own imaginative play as music can do with its magic tones.

From an artistic point of view, it is entirely wrong to fancy that such imaginative molding of the world must be confined to fairytales because it does not correspond to the reality of the world. As long as we argue from such a point of view we have not reached true art. Even the most realistic art always gives us something different from reality. As long as the artistic means harmonizes with our inner view of an experience, it is welcome in the world of art. Even the most rapturous flights of the imagination projected on the screen may have as much inner truth as any melodramatic story. The photoartist needs only the courage to make the spectator feel that he is truly in a temple of art.

How The Film Expresses Emotions

But even memory, attention, and imagination do not tell the whole story of our inner mind. The core of man lies in his feelings and emotions. As soon as the photoplay moves along its own way, the expression of feelings and emotions will come to the foreground. Of course the producer would say that he shows love and hate and fear and delight and envy and disgust and hope and enthusiasm all in his reels. Certainly he shows them, but simply with the methods of the ordinary stage. The angry man clenches his fist and the frightened man shows signs of terror. We see the gestures and the actions; and yet how inferior is all that to the emotional words which the dramatist can put into the mouth of his persons on the stage! What Romeo and Juliet have to express is, after all, better said by Shakespeare's words than by any mere gestures of tenderness. As long as the photoplay works only with the methods of the theater, we must regret that we are deprived of the words.

But what a different perspective is opened if we think of the unlimited means with which the film may express feeling and sentiment through means of its own. We saw that, in the close-up, the camera can do what in our mind our attention is doing; the camera goes nearer to the object and thus concentrates everything on one point. In our feelings and emotions, the mind takes a sort of stand toward the surroundings. Again, the camera must be made to imitate such a mental action. In the excited mind, the smooth flow of impressions is interrupted. Let the camera break the flow of the pictures. Give us a thought-effect which the musician calls "staccato." We can produce it in the film by omitting certain pictures so that the action seems to jump from one stage to another. Or let the pictures vibrate. We can do this by quickly reversing the order of the pictures which follow one another with the rapidity of sixteen photograms to the second. After pictures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, we give once more 6, 5, 4, turn then from 4 to picture 9, go back from 9 to 6, then from 6 to 12, and the effect will be that a trilling, vibrating motion goes through the surroundings. Or let the camera turn the straight lines into curves, or the rhythm slow down like a musical adagio, or become rapid like an allegro or presto. In every case effects are produced in which changes of inner excitement seem to take hold of the surrounding world.

Imitating Mental Action

The violinist may play one piece after another and we may see in the film the sentiments of those various pieces through the melodious movements around him. His own face may remain unchanged, but everything around him may enter into the mood of the tones and chords. It is in the spirit of the theater to express horror by the wild gestures of the body. It would be in the spirit of the photoplay to make the world around the terrified person change in a horrifying, ghastly way. The camera can do that, and the spectator would come deeply under the spell of the emotion to be expressed. It becomes his emotion, just as in the close-up it is his attention which is forced on the single detail. If a man is hypnotized in the scene, the change of his feelings can only clumsily be shown in his face, but his surroundings may take uncanny forms until a kind of hypnotic spell lies over the whole audience.

Of course the general public would need slowly to be educated toward the higher and higher forms of the photoplayers' art. The masses prefer Sousa's Band to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It needs a certain training to appreciate the highest forms of art, but nobody doubts that the symphony program, from Beethoven to Debussy, stands on a much higher artistic level that the marches and dances which the unmusical hearers love best. The straight melodrama of the film, offering nothing which the drama of the theater could not present better, will attract the "unmusical" minds more than the true high art of the photoplay. But he who believes the message of beauty for the masses of the people will not yield to such superficial desires. He will unceasingly lift the photoplay to higher and higher art, and to do so he must become conscious of the principles which are involved. But this can be done only if he breaks with the tradition of the theater and understands that the photoplay expresses the action of the mind as against the mere action of the body. Of course the drama presents this inner side of the spoken word which is missing in the pantomime of the film. The inner mind which the camera exhibits must lie in those actions of the camera itself by which space and time are overcome and attention, memory, imagination, and emotion are impressed on the bodily world.

The photoplay of the future, if it is really to rise to further heights, will thus become more than any other art the domain of the psychologist who analyzes the working of the mind. We have seen in recent years how the work of the modern psychologist has become influential and helpful in many different spheres of practical life. Education and medicine, commerce and industry, law and social reform have been greatly aided by the contact with the psychologist, who has put the results of his psychological laboratory into the service of daily life. In the film world, the only scientist who has been consulted in the past has been the physicist, who prepared the technical devices for the work of the camera. The time seems ripe for his scientific brother, the psychologist, to enter the field and to lead the photoplay to those wonders which its progress has begun to suggest since the leaders dared to leave the paths of mere theatrical performance. The more psychology enters into the sphere of the moving pictures, the more they will be worthy of an independent place in the world of true art and become really a means of cultural education to young and old. The presentations of the films will never supersede those of the theater any more than sculpture can supersede painting or lyrics can supersede music, but they will bring us the noble fulfillment of an artistic desire which none of the other arts can bring.

This is truly the art of the future.

1915