Rudolf Arnheim was a German-born author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist. He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art. Art is a way to help people understand the world, and a way to see how the world changes through your mind. Its function is to show the essence of something, like our existence.
Rudolf Arnheim
(1904 - 2007)
That the meaning of life and the world could be perceived in its patterns, shapes, and color. He believed that we have to study those patterns and discover what they mean. He also believed that artwork is visual thinking and a means of expression, not just putting shapes and colors together because they look appealing. considered (silent) film to be art because it does not merely mechanically record reality but rather, it transforms the normal ways in which the human eye perceives, through editing, camera angles, and black-and-white photography.
Arnheim's writing and thinking were most important to him, and his goal was to understand things for himself. Arnheim maintained that vision and perception are creative, active understanding, and that people tend to organize perceptions into structures and form with which to understand them. Without order we wouldn’t understand anything, so the world is ordered just by being perceived.
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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Artistic Formalist
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Believed that meaning exists primarily in the form or language of discourse rather than in the content or subject; Soviet movement of the 1920s.
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Believes that artistic value is found in manipulation of form and creative use of form limitations.
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Film's purpose and value equals artistic perception.
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Form separates art from mechanics
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Film can be, but does not have to be art.
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Believed that cinema is more than reality, because of the limitations on what can and cannot be seen.
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Argues that film is more than a mechanical reproduction of the real.
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Film transforms human perception into the special characteristics of a special medium (medium specificity).
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Mimesis - representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature.
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Authenticity - the quality of being authentic; genuineness.
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Medium specificity - stipulates that each kind of art should be differentiated from every other kind of art by means of the characteristics of its medium, and only hold worthy the characteristics which are unique to it.
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The two authenticities of the photographic media – subjective legitimization, and objective certification
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Relevant film: “The Immigrant” (1917)