Gestalt Psychology and Film

The application of Gestalt psychology to film is famously discussed in Rudolf Arnheim's Film as Art, first published in 1932. Arnheim had occasion to update some material on film in his Art and Visual Perception of 1954, but since the arrival of cognitivist, ecological, and neuroscientific approaches to film the Gestalt position has not been synthesized. The following chapter grounds a Gestalt psychology of film in event perception, reviewing the basics of motion perception as investigated by Gestalt psychologists in America, Germany, and Italy. After discussing the basic principles of motion perception and editing, it moves on to filmic expression. The chapter ends with a brief analysis of a scene from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey".