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95 In 1916 German immigrant and Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg asked the readers of his treatise The Photoplay to perform a brief thought experiment. Its purpose was to persuade highbrow intellectuals and academics to recognize the specificity of the filmic medium and its inherent artistic qualities. In the first decades of the twentieth century, many had argued that cinema at its best could never be more than canned theater. The screen’s rectangle, for these critics, simulated the shape and appearance of a stage, yet due to its essential flatness it negated true perceptions of depth and thus denied any possibility of what had made the theater stage into a site of the aesthetic, namely, its ability to present human action in all its plasticity across the solid and continuous space of the visual field. Though a late convert to the pleasures of cinematic viewership, Münsterberg’s ambition in suggesting his experiment was to turn such arguments upside down. For what Münsterberg proposed is that the film screen’s evocation of spatial depth might come much closer to art’s task of representing and transforming the real than the classical art form of theater itself and that cinema therefore is at least as aesthetic as the kind of art endorsed by highbrow academics up to Münsterberg’s own present. Let us imagine, he wrote, that a large glass plate is put in the place of the curtain covering the whole stage. Now we see the stage through the glass; and if we look at it with one eye only it is evident that every single spot on the stage must throw its light to our eye by light rays which cross the glass plate at a particular point. For our seeing it would make no difference whether the stage is actually behind that Early Cinema and the Windows of Empire 3 Framing Attention 96 glass plate or whether all the light rays which pass through the plate come from the plate itself. If those rays with all their different shades of light and dark started from the surface of the glass plate, the effect on the one eye would necessarily be the same as if they originated at different distances behind the glass. This is exactly the case of the screen. If the pictures are well taken and the projection is sharp and we sit at the right distance from the picture, we must have the same impression as if we looked through a glass plate into a real space.1 Like many others before and after him, Münsterberg considered the cinematic screen a window onto the world whose material flatness does not inhibit the viewer from receiving captivating impressions of spatial depth and plastic movement. The screen’s flatness is part of the objective technical arrangement of cinema, but for Münsterberg this flatness had nothing to do with how the viewing subject sees and perceives the world presented. As long as spectators take up proper positions in front of the screen, as long as their physical location in the auditorium allows them to identify with the camera’s perspectival construction of space, their perception of what is behind the screen’s imaginary glass plate is quite superior to how classical proscenium stages define the visual field. Whereas the space of the theater stage is broadest in the front and becomes ever narrower toward the background, the cinematic image—as conjured by the monocular eye of the camera—is narrowest in the foreground and opens up the greater the distance from the camera. Because the camera is merely the apex of a viewing angle that may include miles of open space in the background, cinematic images can thus direct the viewer’s attention far more effectively than stage plays. For whoever in film comes toward the foreground gains much more importance in relation to his or her surroundings than he or she could achieve in the theater. And whoever moves away from the screen’s imaginary window experiences a reduction in importance far more dramatic than he or she could on the stage. To speak of cinema as canned theater, for Münsterberg, misses the point. The moving picture stage screen might be objectively flat, but in its function as a window onto the world it provides a means of representing space, of defining spatial relationships, and of guiding the viewer’s perspective fundamentally different from those used in the classical theater stage. Cinema...

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