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Einfühlung and Abstraction in the Moving Image: Historical and Contemporary Reflections

Robin Curtis

Science in Context / Volume 25 / Issue 03 / September 2012, pp 425 446DOI: 10.1017/S0269889712000178, Published online: 24 July 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0269889712000178

How to cite this article:Robin Curtis (2012). Einfühlung and Abstraction in the Moving Image: Historical and Contemporary Reflections. Science in Context, 25, pp 425446 doi:10.1017/S0269889712000178

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Science in Context 25(3), 425–446 (2012). Copyright C© Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0269889712000178

Einfuhlung and Abstraction in the Moving Image:Historical and Contemporary Reflections

Robin Curtis

Heinrich-Heine-Universitat DusseldorfE-mail: [email protected]

Argument

Despite the fact that “empathy” is often simply used as a translation of Einfuhlung, the two termshave distinct meanings and distinct disciplinary affiliations. This text considers the manner inwhich the moving image (whether within a film, video, or art installation) invites spatial formsof engagement akin to those described both by historical accounts of Einfuhlung, a form ofengagement that pertains not only to the activities of humans represented within images, butalso to the aesthetic qualities of images in a more abstract sense and to the forms to be foundthere.

To date, there has been surprisingly little scholarly interest in the manner in whichEinfuhlung and the filmic medium interact. Despite the fact that the advent of filmin 1895 roughly coincided with what was the peak of popular interest in the notionof Einfuhlung, no attention was paid at the time to the nascent medium within thosedebates and relatively little has been devoted to it since then within studies of Einfuhlung.This is not to say, however, that the role of empathy in film spectatorship has beenneglected ever since then. Despite the fact that “empathy” is often simply used as atranslation of Einfuhlung,1 the two terms have come to have distinct meanings anddisciplinary affiliations, with the former primarily being associated with the realm ofpsychological and social scientific research and the latter viewed as an issue of (usuallyonly historical) importance for aesthetic theory in general, and for art history inparticular. Although the manner in which both affect and somatic response may comeabout during film viewing is taken up within contemporary discussions of empathy,an understanding of Einfuhlung in its historical context has been neglected.2

1 A passage in Edward Titchener’s Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes is usually citedas the “birthplace” of the word empathy. He writes: “Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride andcourtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind’s muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy,if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfuhlung (Titchener 1909, 21).2 This question has been pursued in recent years with particular vigor by scholars interested in the significanceof cognitivist accounts of perception for film scholarship. For recent book-length treatments of empathy andfiction film, see Smith 1995; Tan 1996; Currie 1995; and Grodal 1997.

426 Robin Curtis

Einfuhlung rose to prominence during the last third of the nineteenth century andexamined a variety of forms of intense involvement with aesthetic objects. Whetherstudies of empathy make mention of Einfuhlung as empathy’s precursor, or not, withonly few exceptions, contemporary accounts focus on the forms of empathy that areinstilled by our alignment with animate – and mainly human – figures and therebyoverlook the broader, often more abstract sense of engagement with the world and withthe aesthetic object that was central to Einfuhlung as it was historically understood.3

Contemporary accounts therefore tend to neglect the more fundamental questionsraised by the moving image itself for aesthetic theory, contemplation and more broadly,the powerful engagement with the world that was suggested by Einfuhlung.

In an observation made in 1937 Erwin Panofsky highlighted the peculiar capacityof the filmic experience to, quite literally, move the viewer. In a famous passage (quotedhere by Siegfried Kracauer) Panofsky writes:

In a movie theater . . . the spectator has a fixed seat, but only physically . . .. Aesthetically,he is in permanent motion, as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera whichpermanently shifts in distance and direction. And the space presented to the spectator isas movable as the spectator is himself. Not only do solid bodies move in space, but spaceitself moves, changes, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing. (Kracauer [1947] 1974, 6)4

The spatial fluidity of the spectatorial situation has profound implications for anunderstanding of the manner in which Einfuhlung might be transcribed onto filmicreception: if one takes Panofsky’s account seriously, film not only introduces anaturalistic space in which the viewer may imagine him or herself situated; the movingimage offers access to a kind of kaleidoscopic space in which the viewer may losehis privileged status as subject and may be permitted to move as object among otherobjects. Panofsky’s depiction of the manner in which filmic space may both envelopand enthrall the viewer to the point of his or her own projection into that space, eitheras “a solid body” or even as a less coherent component in the kaleidoscope, is bothreminiscent of Einfuhlung while it also prefigures more contemporary forms of intensecorporeal involvement.

Such features of filmic experience as these are central to current accounts of theexperiences of “immersion” or “presence.” Immersion in particular seems lately to havebecome something of a placeholder for a very wide range of experiences of intensesensory engagement with other objects. It will be the goal of this paper to consider theextent to which such experiences as these are brought about by means of an intersectionof Einfuhlung, synaesthesia, and immersion. As such I will begin by examining someearly conceptions of Einfuhlung that arose in the mid- to late nineteenth century,

3 The German journal montage/AV has been an important source for discussions on this topic. See, for instance,Wulff 2003; Vaage 2007; or a more recent contribution by Italian scholar D’Aloia 2010.4 This passage originally appeared formulated in a slightly different fashion in Panofsky 1937, 124–125.

Einfuhlung and Abstraction in the Moving Image 427

and given these historical foundations, I will consider how contemporary discussionsof the nature of the moving image resonate with those early theories of Einfuhlung,despite the fact that no direct links between them have been established to date. Iwill offer the following three hypotheses, inspired by these early aesthetic theories ofEinfuhlung: first, that the illusory effects of the moving image are not dependent on thenaturalistic representational qualities of a given image or image environment; second,that the fundamental intermodality of human perception is a far more relevant factorin immersive experience than generally believed; third, that illusion and abstractionare not opposites, but each may contribute in their own fashion to a sense of spatialpresence.

What has gone unremarked in much contemporary theorizing about forms ofimmersion within film and media theory, is that these questions grapple with issuesthat were at stake within the debates around the notion of Einfuhlung in the latenineteenth and early twentieth century. Rather than following the line of investigationthat emphasizes either the distinction between the illusory and the real, or the oscillationbetween awareness and abandon, which are more commonly the province of discussionsof “immersion” or “spatial presence,” I propose instead that we re-examine how sucha compelling spatial involvement with the world (in both aesthetic and everydaysituations) is facilitated by the manner in which perception and imagination areengaged by a particular moving image. A particularly valuable resource in such anexamination can be found within several contributions that have been made in the fieldof psychology. I will take up the perspectives of affect and visual involvement offeredby one of the primary architects of the psychological aesthetic theory of Einfuhlungin Germany, Theodor Lipps, in addition to more recent work by the psychologistsDaniel Stern and Ivo Kohler, in order to better illuminate the internal processes thatmay contribute to such profound feelings of engagement.

Einfuhlung and involvement with the world

In the last years of the eighteenth century both Herder and Novalis5 employed theverb sich einfuhlen to describe, in the former case, the attempt to vividly imagine pasteras and foreign culture, and in the latter, the desire to commune with nature in suchan all-encompassing manner that a thorough intermingling occurs. However, whileHerder’s contribution is oftentimes overlooked, in an influential overview text from

5 For Novalis the act of feeling into something (sich in etwas einzufuhlen) offered the opportunity to achieve afundamental wish of his period: to be close to nature. He wrote: “So wird auch keiner die Natur begreifen,der kein Naturorgan, kein inneres naturerzeugendes und absonderndes Werkzeug hat, der nicht wie vonselbst, uberall die Natur an allem erkennt und unterscheidet und mit angeborener Zeugungslust, in innigermannigfaltiger Verwandtschaft mit allen Korpern, durch das Medium der Empfindung, sich mit allen Naturwesenvermischt, sich gleichsam in sie hineinfuhlt” (Novalis 1837, 99). The fragment, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, was writtenbetween 1798–1799, and was published in 1802 posthumously.

428 Robin Curtis

1894 entitled “Zur Genesis eines asthetischen Begriffs,” Theobald Ziegler identifiedNovalis as the originator of the notion and Ziegler’s account of the term’s originshas tended to be replicated since (Ziegler 1894, 113–20, 116).6 It was in this periodin particular, in the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first years of thetwentieth, that Einfuhlung rose to its greatest prominence, a product of the dynamicoverlap between philosophical aesthetics and the nascent field of psychology, a dual,indeed even divided, allegiance that still reverberates to some extent within its successor,the term “empathy,” today. Indeed, it is helpful to distinguish between these “pre-scientific” approaches to Einfuhlung and those that followed: early practitioners ofexperimental psychology (such as Wilhelm Wundt or Edward Titchener) sought totest these hypotheses that had been developed in the realm of aesthetic theory, and indoing so, demarcated the parameters of the new science of psychology. It is particularlydue to the tensions produced by this overlap that Einfuhlung has gained something ofa new lease on life in recent years and may offer new perspectives for interdisciplinaryresearch into both affect and the perception of space.

The work of the German psychologist and philosopher Theodor Lipps explicitlyattempted to bridge this line of demarcation. That Lipps is referred to as botha philosopher and a psychologist is due to the position he held at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, a position that underwent a transition duringhis tenure there, a shift which marked an evolution in the understanding of the areas ofstudy proper to each of these disciplines. Thus Lipps was known officially as the Inhaberdes Lehrstuhls fur systematische Philosophie (systematic philosophy) and later as Inhaber desLehrstuhls fur Psychologie und Philosophie (or for psychology and philosophy). Regardedas the father of the first scientific theory of Einfuhlung, his innovation was to applyits tenets not only to inanimate objects (as an explanation of aesthetic response) butalso to other living beings, and in particular as a means of accounting for the mannerby which humans may apprehend the feelings of other humans. However, whileLipps’ contribution continues to be cited as the precursor to contemporary notionsof empathy,7 the breadth of his claims and those of the “pre-scientific” approaches isoften ignored.

Lipps sought to describe an inclination he believed was common to all humans toquite literally feel into (i.e. sich einfuhlen) or empathize with other creatures and objects,whether they be animate, inanimate, or indeed phenomena such as atmospheres, colors,

6 Despite this link Ziegler warns against the view that sees a direct link between Romanticism and the scientificconcerns of his own period: “Romantik ist Poetisierung des Lebens und der Wissenschaft; um sich der Naturzu bemachtigen, sagte ich oben, um sie sich zu gewinnen, dazu sollte ihnen jenes Heineinfuhlen dienen;um die Natur zu gewinnen – auch fur die wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis; denn darum handelt es sich fur dieLehrlinge’. Hier liegt der romantische Unfug” (Ziegler 1894, 118). Dies bedeutet nicht, dass die “Bezeugungder Einheit von Geist und Natur” aufgegeben wird, sondern “den tiefsinnigen Gedanken vom Symbol und vonder Einfuhlung da energisch fruchtbar zu machen, wo er sich innerhalb des Gegebenen und Fassbaren aufzeigenund allein wirklich fruchtbar machen lasst, d.h. im Gebiet des Asthetischen” (ibid., 119).7 In fact, both Murray Smith and Ed Tan fallaciously cite Lipps as the “originator” of the concept of Einfuhlung.


or sounds. Lipps’s famous formula that aesthetic enjoyment should be understood tobe objectified self-enjoyment,8 made this broad application possible. In other words:in the form of things we perceive an analogy to the expressive quality of the vitalityof the human body.9 According to Lipps, the basic inclination to this kind of broadengagement with the world (i.e. this kind of Einfuhlung) is based on an involuntary,instinctive mimicry of others. He describes its effect on the viewers of dancers whothemselves begin to sway or rock, or else in what he terms the sympathetic tension, orinternal mimicry felt by the observer of a tightrope walker. Although there are manysocial prohibitions in place that prevent such uninhibited mimicry, it nonetheless oftenemerges from the body unbidden and quite unconsciously and as such is experienced,according to Lipps, as a projection into another. He writes:

Even this, my own striving, I perceive as part of the movement that I am viewing. Iexperience it as something that belongs to that movement implicitly. I feel myself to bestriving with this movement, even striving with the kinaesthetic movement image thatcorresponds to the visually observable movement and thus feel myself to be striving ineffect together with that movement. To put it in more general terms, I feel myself to bestriving to complete a movement. (Lipps 1903a, 120)10

This automatic form of sympathetic experience is at the heart of Einfuhung. Theexperience of vitality is key here in that Lipps understands every object to be a potentialagent: “thus every object is, for me, an individual, perhaps not as a consequence of alogical perspective but rather as a psychological fact. A multifaceted kind of activityis exuded by the object and as such a unified self is felt to be within that object”(Lipps 1903b, 196).11 This perspective has consequences for the manner in which oneperceives the forms of objects. He continues,

I give expression to this kind of Einfuhlung in everyday life when I say that the linestretches or bends, surges up and away again, confines itself; and when I say that a rhythmstrives or refrains, is full of tension or resolution etc. This is all my own activity, my ownvital, internal movement, but one that has been objectified. (Lipps 1903b, 196)12

8 See, for example, Lipps 1906, 100–14, for a compact description of his thesis.9 This is a formulation offered by Karsten R. Stueber in his excellent overview (Stueber 2006, 7).10 “Eben dies mein Streben fuhle ich in der optisch wahrgenommenen Bewegung. Ich erlebe es als etwasunmittelbar dazu Gehoriges. Ich fuhle also mich in dieser Bewegung strebend, namlich strebend nach demkinasthetischen Bewegungsbilde, das der optisch wahrgenommenen Bewegung entspricht, und damit zugleichnach dieser letzteren. Ich fuhle, allgemeiner gesagt, mich in einem Wahrgenommenen strebend nach Ausfuhrungeiner Bewegung” (Lipps 1903a, 120).11 “So ist jedes Ding fur mich ein Individuum, nicht in der logischen Betrachtung, aber als psychologischeTatsache. Es ist in ihm das in ein mannigfaltiges Tun auseinandergehende und darin sich zur Einheitzusammenfassende Ich enthalten.”12 “Solcher Einfuhlung gebe ich schon im gemeinen Leben Ausdruck, indem ich von der Linie selbst sage, siestrecke sich, beige sich, woge auf und ab, begrenze sich; und vom Rhythmus: es sei in ihm ein Fortstreben und

430 Robin Curtis

Thus it would not be correct to say, with Lipps, that one is concerned with theobjective, given world or with the characteristics of the things in it, but rather one isoccupied with characteristics of one’s own embodied engagement with that world andits things, in short: with the sensations, activities, and atmospheric moods that comeabout through this engagement.

In Lipps’s book Raumasthetik und geometrisch-optische Tauschungen spatial experienceis examined in detail and architecture is introduced as an object of Einfuhlung. There,Lipps links the Doric column to a striving energy, claiming that

the forceful act of composure and erectness demonstrated by the Doric column is pleasingfor me, just as it is pleasing to me to compose and straighten myself, an activity that Irecollect. . . . I sympathize with the bearing exhibited by the Doric column or with itsinternal vitality, because I recognize a mode of bearing that is both natural and pleasurableto me. Thus all enjoyment of special forms, and we might add all aesthetic enjoyment ingeneral, is a product of an uplifting, sympathetic sensation. (Lipps [1897] 1966, 7)13

The Doric column is thus an example for a positive striving that leads to what Lippsterms “positive” Einfuhlung, one that is always perceived as a life affirming aestheticimpulse. Life and activity are synonymous for Lipps: “for what I empathize with [or feelinto] is life in general. And life is energy and internal activity, striving and achieving”(Lipps 1906, 100).14 Einfuhlung thus implies the sensation of kinship with a kineticdriving force.

Einfuhlung and Film

Despite the fact that the introduction of the moving image to the public in 1895seems to have provoked the sensation of partaking of just such a kinetic driving forceto which many contemporaneous reports attest (and I will return to these reportsbelow), any correspondence between the more visceral qualities of film viewing andEinfuhlung, particularly in its more traditional, “pre-scientific” formulations, remainsvirtually unexplored. There is, however, one very notable exception to this neglect:film scholar Scott Curtis’s contribution to a volume published in German in 2009

Zuruckhalten, Spannung und Losung usw. Dies alles ist meine Tatigkeit, meine lebendige innere Bewegung;aber eben objektiviert” (Lipps 1903a, 196).13 “Das kraftvolle sich Zusammenfassen und Aufrichten der dorischen Saule ist fur mich erfreulich, wie das eigenekraftvolle Zusammenfassen und Aufrichten, dessen ich mich erinnere, und wie das kraftvolle Zusammenfassenund Aufrichten, das ich an einem Anderen wahrnehme, mir erfreulich ist. Ich sympathisiere mit dieser Weise derdorischen Saule sich zu verhalten oder eine innere Lebendigkeit zu betatigen, weil ich darin eine naturgemasseund mich begluckende eigene Verhaltensweise wiedererkenne. So ist alle Freude uber raumliche Formen, undwir konnen hinzufugen alle asthetische freude uberhaupt, begluckendes Sympathiegefuhl” (Lipps 1966, 7).14 “Denn was ich einfuhle, ist ganz allgemein Leben. Und Leben ist Kraft, inneres Arbeiten, Streben undVollbringen” (Lipps 1906, 100)


entitled Einfuhlung. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines asthetischen Konzepts, following aninterdisciplinary conference that had taken place three years earlier in Berlin consideringthe relevance of Einfuhlung for aesthetic theory today.15 In his text, “Einfuhlung unddie fruhe deutsche Filmtheorie,” (or Einfuhlung and Early German Film Theory) Curtisreviews several brief texts on aesthetic experience and film that were published in thefirst two decades of the twentieth century, through the lens of the Einfuhlung debates inall their historical complexity. He cites a range of material here from essays by writerswho were primarily known as journalists, such as Walter von Molo, Alfred Polgar,Walter Serner, and Kurt Pinthus, to Georg Lukacs’s “Gedanken zu einer Asthetik desKinos” (Thoughts toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema) from 1911 as well as ErnstBloch’s 1914 examination of the experience of the cinema entitled “Die Melodieim Kino oder immanente und transzendentale Musik” (On Melody in the Cinema).It is particularly the text by Lukacs though, as Curtis points out, that sees in theexperience of the cinema an alternative to the tradition of Innerlichkeit and thus pointsthe way to a new, emancipatory aesthetic (anticipating similar arguments by bothSiegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin more than ten years later). By emphasizingthe attention paid avant-la-lettre by Einfuhlung’s theorists to the significance of theviewer’s embodiment for aesthetic experience in general, Curtis highlights the overlapbetween these two historical discourses and thus the profound challenge that thefilmic medium, both through its movement and its synaesthetic appeal, posed tothe parameters of what constituted that aesthetic experience. What is notable is thatthis challenge was already apparent to those viewers of early cinema whose textsCurtis cites. Although “empathy aesthetics” as he calls it (a direct translation of dieEinfuhlungsasthetik) envisage the body as the site at which art and understanding occur,but not as an active participant in aesthetic experience, Curtis argues that the experienceof the cinema contests the separation between contemplation and physical responseand thus the particular conceptualization of aesthetic experience which had beenpart and parcel of the Einfuhlung debate as it stood at cinema’s inception. Taking upGeorg Lukacs’s opposition between the “soul” or an appeal to Innerlichkeit, as the realmserviced by the theater, and the “soullessness” or “pure action” that was the province ofthe cinema, Curtis suggests that any contemporary reconsideration of Einfuhlung needsto re-evaluate the manner in which the movement of the cinematic image leads toa complex alternation between contemplation and distraction, between embodimentand disembodiment, between here (in the film theater) and there (in the film itself).16

This paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of precisely this issue.

15 See Curtis 2009, 79–104. Other contributions to this volume also consider the overlap of empathy aestheticsand film (such as those by Giuliana Bruno, Antonia Lant, Ed Tan, and Christine Noll Brinckmann) but noneof these offer as thorough an examination of the implications of the historical debates for the moving image asScott Curtis does.16 Precisely this oscillation and its relationship to the formal affinities between an object of aesthetic experienceand the viewer taken up by Einfuhlung has been the subject of my own research beginning with the monographConscientious Viscerality and “Immersion und Einfuhlung,” in particular.

432 Robin Curtis

One other contribution to that same conference and the subsequent volume madeby the architectural historian, Juliet Koss, deserves mention in this context, since shesimilarly highlights the temporal overlap of the advent of film and Einfuhlung (seeKoss 2009). However, in this text (which is a translation with some revisions of hertext, Koss 2006), Koss only peripherally takes up the implications of Einfuhlung for anaccount of film’s aesthetic impact. She describes, instead, what she considers to be anunbridgeable gap between the experience of contemplation associated with the art of thenineteenth century and Einfuhlung, and that of the distraction, Siegfried Kracauer’s term(see Kracauer 1995), that was, to his mind, a central characteristic of film viewing. Itis important to note that, far from being pejorative (as Koss implies in her text), inKracauer’s view the experience of distraction offered by the cinema marks a turningpoint in aesthetic experience, which might have revolutionary potential, in that itpoints out a critical practice embedded within aesthetic experience that is particularlywell-suited to examining the art and media of the twentieth century. Overlookingthis crucial emancipatory aspect implicit in Kracauer’s position on film, Koss describesthe advent of cinema as the death knell for Einfuhlung; it is precisely the “shallow,passive, weak-willed” (Koss 2006, 152) film viewer, wholly absorbed by the on-screennarratives (ibid.), who is most at home in the cinema, and stands in her account inmarked contrast to the subject implicit in the Einfuhlungsasthetik. Koss’s attention to thebirth of the cinema seems to be first and foremost a result of her interest in tracing theclass-based implications of contemplation contained within the theories of Einfuhlung:cinema provides the populist foil for the elitist Einfuhlung.

Koss’s examination of the relationship between film and Einfuhlung is notsignificantly expanded within her book, Modernism after Wagner, which was publishedin 2010.17 Although the chapter entitled “The Specter of Cinema” again highlightsthe temporal proximity of the advent of cinema and the Einfuhlung debates, rather thanexamining the complexities of filmic space experienced during a film projection, Kossfocuses her attention on the sociology of early cinema audiences, and the architecturalstrategies (and the implicit notions about the needs of the cinema-goer) undergirdingthe development of early film theaters. The challenges that cinema posed to traditionalconfigurations of aesthetic experience by way of its emotional and somatic impactcannot be adequately discussed without an examination of the manner in which thefilmic medium both replicates and creates space. Film’s continual mingling of therepresentational with the more formal, even abstract qualities of the areas of lightand darkness that make up the moving image itself, undoubtedly contributes to the

17 In fact, Koss’s misunderstanding of Kracauer’s notion of distraction is more apparent in the following passagefrom the book, where she states that “while the intense absorption of nineteenth-century spectators had beencalled Einfuhlung, Kracauer named that of the Weimar mass audience Zerstreuung, or ‘distraction,’ and treated it asshallow and passive. The distinction reveals more than just a conceptual shift from the solitary spectator to a massaudience, or from a bourgeois male individual to a middle-class group that contained women; it also reflectsthe introduction of technology into the cultural arena, following which the authentic aesthetic experience ofEinfuhlung was, many believed, no longer possible” (Koss 2010, 203; emphasis added).


visceral effects it is oftentimes capable of producing in its viewer. Herein lies myown focus with respect to a re-evaluation of the significance of Einfuhlung for filmaesthetics.

The Abstraction of the Moving Image

Rather than focusing attention on the circumstances of the human figures depictedin filmic narratives, or the movement of those figures or other objects through space,this paper seeks to address the potential for complex spatial engagement that is offeredby the moving image, even when there is no human figure in sight, or in the case offilmic abstraction. Although this space cannot be entered physically, cinematic space isstrangely absorbing. It calls forth a host of complex responses and seems to be at theroot of visceral effects that can be overwhelming, even while their perceptual sourcemay remain somewhat inscrutable. The sense of space made accessible while viewingthe moving image should not be understood merely as a reproduction of architecturalspace, a simple documentation of space as a container of objects, in which variousactivities occur. Despite consisting of nothing more than oscillating areas of light,dark, bright or in-between, the spatial experience offered by the filmic medium has astriking palpability. In short, the cinema introduces a very different spatial experiencefrom that offered by any other medium and thus carries with it a multiplicity ofspatial capacities all of which beg to be considered within the context of the notion ofEinfuhlung.

However, the abstraction that is named both in the title of this paper and obliquelydescribed above should not be understood to solely refer to the tradition of non-objective art in general and the various recorded histories of non-representationalfilmmaking from the 1920s onwards more specifically, but rather to the effectsand potentialities of non-illusionistic form in film as a moving-image medium.Furthermore, any mention of abstraction in the same breath as Einfuhlung automaticallyrecalls the title of a work that is, perhaps, most readily associated with Einfuhlung’s legacy,particularly within the discipline of art history and other fields of aesthetic inquiry:Abstraktion und Einfuhlung. Wilhelm Worringer’s fantastically successful dissertation,first published in 1907 (and in print continuously ever since), offered an early accountof the experience of abstraction in art (hence its popularity, particularly among artistsat the time of its publication), which Worringer posited as the diametrical opposite ofthe experience of Einfuhlung. The logic of this opposition has been contested recentlyby several authors. In her previously mentioned book, for instance, Juliet Koss pointsout quite correctly that Einfuhlung as it had been set out by Worringer’s forerunnersin the debate, provided an avant la lettre (albeit implicit) account of abstraction in thatthe most basic elements of perception, such as horizontal lines or vertical lines, ratherthan the semantic content of images, are the focus of analysis. For instance, referringto Robert Vischer, Koss writes,

434 Robin Curtis

In this late-nineteenth-century context, the representational nature of these objects wasnever questioned, his [Vischer’s] examples include Albrecht Durer’s Four Apostles. Butin combining psychology, optics, fine art, and the notion of universal spectatorship, thediscourse of Einfuhlung that Vischer and others developed unwittingly helped set theterms for the theory and practice of visual abstraction. The “pure form” of the twentiethcentury was embedded within an idea of embodied perception. (Koss 2010, 70)

This issue has, in fact, been taken up at much greater length within recent Germanscholarship. The close relationship between abstraction and Einfuhlung is the subjectof a highly regarded book-length study by Jutta Muller-Tamm, entitled Abstraktionals Einfuhlung, from 2005 which examines the function that Einfuhlung (or asshe terms it, in a broader sense, “projection”) had for aesthetics, philosophy, andpsychology throughout the nineteenth century. With Worringer’s work in mind,Muller-Tamm argues that abstraction is a form of projection, rather than its polaropposite.18

Early Cinema

In the very few written accounts of the experience that have survived, the individualswho belonged to film’s first audiences often highlight the degree to which the simplestelements of the filmic image had the power to transfix. The rustling leaves of trees,the smoke emerging from a smokestack, the water pulsating and crashing onto shore:these were the motifs that made a lasting impression around the turn of the twentiethcentury. Even the earliest film viewers understood that the medium introduced a verydifferent spatial experience from that offered by any other medium. For instance, film

18 In her introduction to Abstraktion als Einfuhlung Muller-Tamm writes: “One can see through the examplethat Worringer provides [in his Abstraktion und Einfuhlung] that the manner in which abstraction was positedin modernism came about due to a division of the psycho-physiological processes of projection intotwo polar opposites: a particular era’s will to art [Kunstwollen] and the feeling for and perception of art[Kunstempfinden]. [Muller-Tamm’s own book] Abstraktion als Einfuhlung suggests that both of these oppositesare united in the notion of projection and thus point pars pro toto to the fundamental process of analysisthat – as long as it is applied to aesthetic objects – consists in certain conceptual oppositions (such as, forinstance, abstraction and Einfuhlung), the contrast of epochs (such as those defined by aesthetics of content vs.aesthetics of form, Impressionism vs. Expressionism), as well as conceptual contradictions within the poeticsof Expressionism . . . all of which purport to illuminate the perspectives fundamental to a particular discursiveconstellation” (Muller-Tamm 2005, 15–16). “Es laßt sich aber gerade am Beispiel Worringers zeigen, daßsich das moderne Abstraktionspostulat auch einer Aufspaltung des psychophysiologischen Projektionsdenkensder Einfuhlungslehre in polare Moglichkeiten des Kunstwollens oder Kunstempfindens verdankt. Abstraktionals Einfuhlung besagt, daß beide in der Denkfigur der Projektion zusammenkommen und verweist insofernpars pro toto auf das grundlegende Verfahren der Untersuchung, das – soweit es um asthetische Gegenstandegeht – darin besteht, bestimmte begriffliche Oppositionen (wie eben Abstraktion und Einfuhlung), epochaleKontrastierungen (wie Gehalts- und Formasthetik, Impressionismus und Expressionismus) sowie konzeptionelleWiderspruche innerhalb der expressionistischen Poetik . . . als perspektivische Ausgestaltungen einer diskursivenKonstellation zu begreifen” (Muller-Tamm 2005, 15–16).


theorist Siegfried Kracauer’s description of his own first experience with film is atestament to exactly this kind of fascination. He recalled,

I was still a young boy when I saw my first film [Kracauer was born in 1889]. Theimpression it made upon me must have been intoxicating, for I there and then determinedto commit my experience to writing. . . . I immediately put on a shred of paper, Filmas the Discoverer of the Marvels of Everyday Life, the title read. And I remember, as if itwere today, the marvels themselves. What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary suburbanstreet, filled with lights and shadows, which transfigured it. Several trees stood about, andthere was in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house facades and a piece of thesky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the facades with sky below began to waver.The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle—this image has never left me. (Kracauer[1960] 1997, li)

Kracauer’s account of his experience has often been viewed as a description of the wayin which film offers a very powerful kind of realist representation, an engagement withthe world in a naturalistic sense; however, it might be more productively viewed as adescription of the type of perceptual experience film offers to its viewers. “The tremblingupper world in the dirty puddle” offers a replication, but one that is muddied, obscured,kinetically altered – in a word, dispersed.

In his numerous texts exploring the astonishment experienced by those viewersand their particular form of engagement with what he dubbed the “cinema ofattraction,” film scholar Tom Gunning has noted the degree to which that fascinationwas predicated on an abstract form of involvement. Blending the semantic identificationof an undulating object (such as “waves,” “smoke,” or “the leaves of a tree”) with a purekinetic pleasure that caused that object to dissolve into rhythmic intensity, the “cinemaof attractions” offered both an alternative form of visual pleasure and pointed to film’scapacity to offer an aesthetic experience quite separate from the impulse towardssemantic cohesion implicit in narrative film. It additionally suggests that, from thebeginning, the filmic image’s capacity for realist representation has perhaps distractedfrom other qualities inherent to the moving image that may have provided the basis fora form of involvement with the image comparable with Lipps’s account of Einfuhlung.

A Trip Down Market Street

Consider the example of a short film, known as “A Trip Down Market Street” (fig. 1):19

This document was filmed in 1906 in San Francisco (only days before the catastrophicearthquake destroyed the city) with a fixed camera perched at the front of a cable car asit travels through space towards the vanishing point, which eventually can be seen to belocated approximately where the Ferry Building stands. During the (roughly) real-time

19 The film is in the public domain. A copy is held by the Prelinger archives and is available athttp://www.archive.org/details/TripDown1905 (last accessed 9 February 2011).

436 Robin Curtis

Fig. 1. A Trip Down Market Street (Anonymous 1906, 13:52 minutes).

travels of the camera through this space, humans, animals and vehicles cross the pathof the cable-car at random, often seeming to misjudge the speed of that cable-car andjust barely move out of its path in time, creating a surprising amount of suspense in ashort film that would seem to depict nothing more than an everyday street scene. Such“phantom rides” (as they were called) as this, shot by a camera positioned in a movingvehicle, whether a car, subway or passenger train, have enjoyed a more recent revivalwithin film and media scholarship in recent years and have been called upon in a widevariety of texts, to act as the precursor to virtual reality, and as the paradigmatic exampleof the kind of spatial immersion available to viewers of film. In Raymond Fielding’saccount of motion picture realism, for instance, depth perception is achieved in anadditive fashion, with various apparatuses speaking to each of the senses individually.In fact, for Fielding, it was the Trip to the Moon Ride introduced at Disneyland in the1950s that was the pinnacle of motion picture realism: in an updated version of theHales Tours attractions of the beginning of the twentieth century, Disneyland offereda similar kind of “phantom ride” representing a trip to the moon in a movie theatredecorated like a spaceship that shook and tilted.

In a similar fashion, contemporary notions of immersion have been largelycontingent on the attempt to recreate the elements of the external world as completely


as possible in order to allow the viewer to be inserted in some fashion into that evermore holistic spatial construct. In formulations from Oliver Grau’s to Alison Griffith’s,immersive media are generally defined by and are said to acquire their affective powerthrough their ability to suggest a three-dimensional space that envelops the viewer oruser.20 However, this emphasis on realist strategies has been a hindrance to a betterunderstanding of immersion’s and indeed spatial perception’s, fundamental connection,not to an apparatus or indeed even to a particular illusory mode of representation, butrather to perceptual capacities that are quite independent of the audio-visual technologyemployed. Nonetheless the notion of realism that is at the heart of the majority oftreatments of immersion, whether it be filmic or based upon a more interactive settingsuch as computer games or virtual reality apparatuses, is based on the additive replicationof three-dimensional space. In other words: the more spatially detailed a work is, themore immersive it will be.

I would like to question the assumption that involvement and immersion aredependent on the specific apparatus-based21 qualities of a given medium (that is,its dispositif) by offering some alternative examples of moving images; additionally, thepart played by abstraction in spatial involvement deserves a closer examination. Twothings are important to note here: one is that the trappings of “genuine” travel (suchas “real” kinaesthetic stimuli) would seem to be unnecessary to produce for the viewera sense of sharing in the velocity of the moving image. The Austrian Psychologist IvoKohler already noted in 1965 that

Perception allows itself to be quite easily deluded . . . when stimuli are simulated (as is thecase for instance . . . in scenes which have been filmed with a moving camera or a zoomlens, or else when there are pans or tilts in which the background is undifferentiated andso on). . . . That kinaesthetic information regarding the movement of one’s own bodywas utterly lacking in such cases as these was amazingly quite insignificant. (Kohler 1965,630)22

20 Indeed the accessibility of the space to the viewer is precisely what, according to Manovich, distinguishes“interactivity” from “illusion” since the navigation of a 3D space is “something one cannot do with anillusionistic painting” (Manovich 2001, 184). I would suggest, however, that the distinction between illusionand non-illusion is something of a red herring in the discussion of immersion, since it clearly is not and hasnever been the case that viewers are deluded about the status of what they see.21 Apparatus is one of the two possible translations in use for the French Foucault-inflected word dispositif,the other being dispositive. Within film and media studies the translation “apparatus” was preferred. It referswithin this disciplinary context to the technological, experiential, and also institutional characteristics of a givenmedium: for instance those technologies and aesthetics enabled by the projector and the camera, the movietheater and the notion of “going to the cinema” are each parts of the apparatus of the cinema. It could alsobe called the cinematic dispositive but the latter does not sufficiently underscore technological aspects of themedium and the expectations that oftentimes accompany them for my purposes in this context.22 “Die Wahrnehmung [lasst sich] in der Tat leicht tauschen . . . , wenn Reizanderungen der oben besprochenenuniversellen Art kunstlich geboten werden (z. B. bei Verwendung der Machschen Trommel oder in Filmszenen,die mit fahrender Kamera oder mit Gummilinse aufgenommen wurden, bei Drehungen oder Schwankungnevon vorgeszeigten Objekten ohne differenzierten Hintergund u. dgl. Mehr). Es hangt in solchen Fallen von

438 Robin Curtis

Furthermore, in Kohler’s brief examination of the manner in which the senses somehowcooperate within consciousness to provide information about one’s surroundings, heemphasizes that, “even when the stimuli would seem to be visual, it is difficult todistinguish between the information provided by vision and that which is contributedby the other senses and integrated into a vivid whole” (ibid., 619). Kohler highlightsthe extent to which consciousness effects a blending of the senses. The impact of thiseveryday amodality of the senses deserves closer attention as well.

The Avant-garde and Immersive Experience

Consider a second example: the reworking of my first example, “A Trip Down MarketStreet,” provided by Ernie Gehr’s Eureka from 1974, which slows the original materialby half. While the chaotic street scene from the original film is no less suspenseful, thewear and tear on the film material itself becomes all the more perceptible to the viewer.Thus despite the fact that the viewer here may be oscillating between surface and depthperception – an oscillation which is usually viewed as the on-off switch of immersiveexperience – the movement towards the vanishing point is still inevitable, and may noteven be key to the spatial experience offered by this film. While the image is ostensiblyless realistic because it is slowed, it is nonetheless equally spatially engrossing.

On this basis, and this is the second point that should be emphasized here, I wouldlike to introduce some doubt into the assumption that it is the illusory depiction ofthree-dimensional space which creates immersion, or moreover, that the ever greater“perfection” of that representation will lead to ever more spatial engagement andimmersion. Instead the extent to which our experience of moving images takes on adegree of plasticity would seem to be equally a product of our own perceptual apparatusindependent of this particular illusory “quality.” Indeed an intense spatial involvementcan come about independent of three-dimensional “realism” or indeed, in a strict sense,of representation, and is likely to be, in general, a product of intermodal perceptionor amodal representation, and is, more specifically, related to such compound effectsas intensity, vitality, and rhythm.

Einfuhlung and Spatial Memory

In 1858 the philosopher and physician Rudolf Hermann Lotze described aphenomenon that he called a “Theory of Internal Co-experience.” It was in thesecond of his three-volume work Microcosm that he wrote:

der Große des Gesichtswinkels ab, unter dem man diese Dinge sieht, bzw. von der Abwesenheit sonst nochsichtbarerer – und nicht mitverandernter – anderer Objekte, wie lange es dauert, bis man der Tauschungverfallt, dass nicht das Gesehene, sondern man selbst sich bewegt. Das Fehlen kinasthetischer Nachrichten uberdie eigene Bewegung, macht in solchen Fallen erstaunlich wenig aus” (Kohler 1965, 630).


The world becomes alive to us through this power to see in forms the joy and sorrow ofthe existence that they hide. . . . No form is so unyielding that our imagination cannotproject its life into it. We do not only partake of the particular senses of being alive whichare closest to our own, the joyous flight of the singing bird or the graceful fleetness of thegazelle; we do not pull on the heartstrings of our own spirits in order only to dream ofthe compact existence of a clam or the pleasurable monotony of its opening and closing;we do not only feel ourselves expand into the tall slim form of a tree, whose finest twigssuggest and animate the pleasurable sensation of sinking and swaying; indeed even theinanimate is the receptacle for these interpretive sensations thus transforming the deadsubstance and supports of a building into as many limbs of an animate body as may betransferred to us in the form of internal tension. (Lotze [1858] 2001, 201–202)23

Lotze emphasized the significance of the experience of gravity upon our own bodiesfor our perception of other phenomena, indeed the significance that our recollectionof the sensations of embodied experience have always and everywhere. The act ofprojection implied here had broad implications for aesthetic experience in general,and, in particular, for the discussion of the manner in which we perceive the formalqualities of our surroundings.

The historical debates around the notion of Einfuhlung are useful in that they describelittle discussed forms of engagement with aesthetic objects that have many similaritieswith the notions of immersion and presence current today. Indeed, the search for anadequate form to describe the aesthetic experience of space implied by architecture wasof special interest in discussions of Einfuhlung. Art historian Harry Mallgrave describesLotze’s treatment of this phenomenon as follows:

The pleasure of symmetry is due not so much to the regularity or proportion of membersas to the pleasure we take in emulating this movement. This “remembrance” of theconcrete world, the self-experience of our own physical condition, altogether pervadesour spatial viewing.

and, continuing, he quotes Lotze:

For all spatial forms affect us aesthetically only insofar as they are symbols of a weal orwoe personally experienced by us. (Malgrave and Ikonomou 1994, 20–21)24

23 “Kein Gestalt ist so sprode, in welche hinein nicht unsere Phantasie sich mitlebend zu versetzen wusste . . ..Nicht allein in die eigentumlichen Lebensgefuhle dessen dringen wir ein, was an Art und Wesen uns nahe steht,in den frohlichen Flug des singenden Vogels oder die zierliche Beweglichkeit der Gaselle; wir ziehen nichtnur die Fuhlfaden unseres Geistes auf das Kleinste zusammen, um das engbegrenzte Dasein eines Muscheltieresmit zu traumen un den einformigen Genuss seiner Offnungen und Schliessungen, wir dehnen uns nicht nurmitschwellend in die schlanken Formen des Baumes aus, dessen feine Zweige die Lust anmutigen Beugensund Schwebens beseelt; vielmehr selbst auf das Unbelebte tragen wir diese andeutenden Gefuhle uber undverwandeln durch sie die toten Lasten uns Stutzen der Gebaude zu ebenso vielen gliedern eines lebendigenLeibes, dessen innere Spannungen in uns ubergeben” (Lotze 2001, 201–202).24 Quoted from Lotze 1868, 80. “Und so wirken denn alle raumlichen Gebilde asthetisch auf uns, sofern sieSymbole eines von uns erlebbaren eigenthumlichen Wohls oder Wehes sind.”

440 Robin Curtis

One aspect of the kind of holistic engagement with objects and environmentsexternal to oneself at the heart of empathetic response deserves to be emphasizedin particular. The role played by a kind of spatial memory that appears explicitly inMalgrave’s account of Lotze’s position is key to spatial engagement with audio-visualmedia.

The implementation of spatial memory is a key part of a very thoroughand imaginative recent trans-European research project conducted in the field ofCommunications Studies on “Spatial Presence” that was led by Werner Wirthof the University of Zurich. While the study recognizes that “spatial presence”can be enriched by “external (media-based) information such as visual, haptic, orproprioceptive impulses and feedbacks” (Wirth et al. 2007, 496), it is more interestedin considering not only such a media-based approach, but also in incorporatingimagination into the equation. Thus, “if immersive impulses are not provided bythe media product, internal processes, for example imagination, can compensatefor that deficit in external stimulation – at least to a certain degree” (ibid., 496).For the authors of this study, the experience of spatial presence is contingent onthe capacity of a given medium to induce the viewer, reader or user (as the casemay be) to process the spatial cues offered by the medium and incorporate theminto their own “mental representation of the depicted space” (ibid., 501), a processthat results in the viewer’s creation of her or his own Spatial Situation Model orSSM. This process is intimately connected to spatial memory, for, according toWirth,

To create an SSM from perception and memory, users must have a “library” ofspatial experiences in their mind and must be able to imagine objects and spaces (i.e.,they must possess figural imagination). Both spatial knowledge and spatial imaginationbecome more relevant if the mediated representation of the space is less intuitive andmore fragmented (for example, when reading textual descriptions of space). (Ibid.,502)

The introduction of imagination into this account allows for more multifacetedforms of engagement with space than those described initially, which were dependenton the simple replication of a three-dimensional space defined by realist representation.Indeed it is only when the operation of all that may be considered part of the“imagination” is included here that the link between “spatial presence” and Einfuhlungbecomes clearer. Of course Einfuhlung suggests a far more wide-ranging engagementwith another than spatial presence does, in that it goes so far as to imply not only theinsertion of the subject into another space but the complete destabilization of otherand self. However it might be more to the point here to address the extent to which themerging or intermingling of the senses might be responsible for such an overwhelmingeffect as that which was described by Lotze, and also that such effects have gone bymany different names at different points in time.


Lightplay: Black/White/Grey

Consider now the spatial implications of a third work that will underscore the diversetypes of spatial engagement made available by the moving image. The 6-minute film,“Lightplay: Black/White/Grey,” which was made by the Bauhaus artist and teacher,Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1930,25 offers a different kind of engagement with spacethat is of a more uncertain status than the first two examples (fig. 2). While thefirst two examples each depicted a street scene with recognizable depth cues, this“documentation” of Moholy-Nagy’s “Light Space Modulator” is of far less certainstatus spatially. The object represented here was not to be observed itself, as a sculpture,but rather as what he termed a “Light Prop” as its original name suggested (Moholy1972, 79–84),26 It evokes not only the overlap of various spaces achieved by means ofa reflection on all possible views of a single object in three dimensions or even on theoverlap of past and present spatial experience, but also suggests the plurality of levels ofspatial attention, which may focus variously, for instance, on the speck of dust in theair and the surface behind it.

An investigation of the manner in which space was perceived was key to Moholy-Nagy’s project. Space needed to be investigated by all of the senses in unison. Indeedthe fundamental intermodality of spatial experience was already clear to Moholy-Nagywho wrote,

Each of our senses which can record the position of bodies allows a grasping of space.Thus space is known to man, first of all by means of his sense of vision. This experience ofthe visible relations of the position of bodies may be checked by movement – alterationof position – and by means of touch; it may be verified by another sense too. Fromthe point of view of the subject, space is naturally to be experienced most directly bymovement, on a higher level, by the dance. The dance is at the same time an elementalmeans for realization of space-creative impulses. It can articulate space, order it. Spaceexpands, sinks and floats – it fluctuates in all directions. (Moholy-Nagy 2005, 163)

Both Moholy-Nagy’s films and his sculptural works attempt to make just such anexperience of space as this tangible; they allow us to perceive the “dance” of the specksof dust as an oscillation between illusory space and abstraction.

Vitality Affects

But how may one analyze such vague aesthetic qualities as these? I would briefly like tointroduce the model for such inquiry offered by the developmental psychologist Daniel

25 It should be noted that Moholy-Nagy made no films during his tenure at the Bauhaus from 1923–1928 butonly began working with film after his departure from Dessau in 1928.26 This, according to Lucia Moholy’s account of the development of the object and the variations in its title thatcame about long after Moholy-Nagy’s death.

442 Robin Curtis

Fig. 2. Lightplay Black/White/Grey (Moholy-Nagy, 1930, 6 minutes).

Stern’s notion of “vitality affects.” In his studies of pre-verbal infants, published in 1985under the title, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Stern established that babies arecapable of transposing information that is perceived in one particular sensory mode intoanother. This doesn’t mean that they translate, for instance “hearing” into “seeing,” butrather that, percepts are encoded into what Stern calls “amodal representations,” whichmay be recognized in any sensory modality. He writes, “These abstract representationsthat the infant experiences are not sights and sounds and touches and nameable objects,but rather shapes, intensities, and temporal patterns – the more ‘global’ qualities ofexperience” (Stern 1985, 51).

Such “amodal representations” as these, are given the name “vitality affects.”These are affects which are both experienced in one’s own body as well as beingrecognized in the bodies of others. These elusive qualities are better captured bydynamic, kinetic terms, such as “surging,” “fading away,” “fleeting,” “explosive,”“crescendo,” “decrescendo,” “bursting,” “drawn out,” and so on, than by the morefamiliar categorical affects that were already set out by Charles Darwin (angry, sad,


happy, and so on). Moreover they are well suited to describing the states of otherhuman beings. Stern writes,

Like dance for the adult, the social world experienced by the infant is primarily oneof vitality affects before it is a world of formal acts. It is also analogous to the physicalworld of amodal perception, which is primarily one of abstract qualities of shape, number,intensity level, and so on, not a world of things seen, heard, or touched. (Stern 1985, 57)

Thus Stern describes a perceptual capacity that has much more to do with qualitative,nearly atmospheric aspects of perception, than with concrete actions and events in anarrative sense. These are capacities that we have all experienced in the earliest phasesof our development.27

“Space travel” and Abstraction

Finally, consider one final – and very different – example that challenges some of theassumptions that were described above about spatial engagement and its source, butdoes so in a very different way from the filmic examples offered. I would again like toreturn to the way in which a “library” of spatial experience is retained and is alwaysbrought to bear on present spatial experience. I would also like to recall the objectivethat has long been central for game and console design to improve image quality inorder to suggest ever-greater three-dimensional realism, which in turn, is meant toincrease spatial involvement or immersion. As an alternative consider the example of atwo-dimensional game that had surprising and disturbing effects on its players causingan intermingling of the player’s “world” and the “object world” represented in thegame. Recall that the researchers of “Spatial Presence” noted that the experience ofpresence is contingent on the capacity of a given medium to induce the viewer, reader,or user (as the case may be) to process the spatial cues offered by the medium andincorporate them into their own “mental representation of the depicted space.”

Tetris

My final example is the old 2-D video game Tetris, which has been known to createsomething called the “Tetris Effect” in the user – indeed in nearly every user (fig. 3).The object of this simple game, created in 1985, is to rotate the shapes as they appearin the field and descend until they fit into a space available at the bottom of that field.A full row allows that same row to disappear and make more space for the shapes (or

27 For a useful overview of Daniel Stern’s importance for investigations of affect within humanities scholarship,see Papoulias and Callard 2010, 29.

444 Robin Curtis

Fig. 3. Tetris.

tetrominoes), which continue to appear, ever more quickly, at the top. The “TetrisEffect” describes the fact that players, after they cease playing this game, continue tosee the shapes falling and continue to be occupied mentally with fitting them intothe spaces at the bottom of the field – even into their dreams when they try tosleep at the end of the day. A study from 2000 conducted at Harvard Medical School(Stickgold et al. 2000), found that even anterograde amnesiacs, who are unable totransfer experiences to long-term memory and were therefore unable to recall havingplayed the game at all, also dreamt of the shapes falling. It would appear, and this isthe outcome of that study, that sleep and especially dreaming function to solidify theexperiences of the previous day and thereby aid in learning. The researchers wrotethat “‘what was most striking about the data, was the strong similarity in reports fromdifferent individuals.’ All the subjects dreamed of pieces falling and sometimes rotatingor fitting into empty spaces – and none reported seeing the picture surrounding thepieces, the scoreboard or the keyboard” (quoted in Leutwyler 2000).

While this example clearly has more to do with sleeping than with waking life, tomy mind it introduces additional doubt into the clear-cut version of the way we processspatial information that I described at the outset of this paper. It should encourage usto look beyond the most obvious explanation for our engagement with moving imagesand therefore impact the ongoing investigation of the way that representation andabstraction interact for us in our experience of space.

Einfuhlung was one rich psychological and aesthetic model developed at the endof the nineteenth century that offered a multi-modal immersive experience, althoughit had not been explicitly applied to film during its prominence in aesthetics. Anexamination of Einfuhlung at its historical roots, along with other psychological models(such as Kohler’s de-emphasis of the role of the apparatus in the creation of impactin the viewer, or Stern’s description of the intermodality of affective experienceamong infants) problematize accepted categories of visual and aesthetic experience


and challenge the neat distinction between representation and abstraction that currentlyreigns in discussions of aesthetic experience, providing additional depth and complexityto recent theorizing on the moving image. Moving back and forth from historicalEinfuhlung to contemporary empathy and immersion opens up a new angle of insightfor understanding the complex spatial experience and affects activated by the movingimage.

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