RUDOLF ARNHIEM theory on film

 

 

Rudolf Arnheim was born on July 15, 1904 he was a German-born author. Arnheim was born in Berlin, where his father, Georg Arnheim, owned a small piano factory. Despite the expectation that he should become a businessman, he enrolled at the University of Berlin in 1923. There, he majored in psychology and philosophy, with secondary emphases in the histories of art and music. It was there that he studied with the Gestalt psychologists, including Max Wertheimer (his Doktorvater), Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Lewin. His doctoral dissertation, which he completed in 1928, was a study of expression in human faces and handwriting art and film theorist and perceptual psychologist.


 His major books are Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954), Visual Thinking (1969), andThe Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982), but it is Art and Visual Perception for which he was most widely known. Revised, enlarged and published as a New Version in 1974, it has been translated into 14 languages, and is very likely one of the most widely read and influential art books of the twentieth century.


..While a graduate student, Arnheim wrote weekly film reviews for progressive Berlin publications. In 20014, having finished his dissertation, he became a junior editor for film and cultural affairs at Die Weltbühne, and on one assignment was sent to Dessau, where he wrote an article on the new Bauhaus building there, designed by Walter Gropius.


His preoccupation with film led to the publication in 1932 of his first book entitled Film als Kunst (Film as Art), in which he examined the various ways in which film images are different from literal encounters with reality. However, soon after this book was released, Adolf Hitler came to power, and because Arnheim was Jewish, the sale of his book was no longer allowed.

 
 

In 1933, he moved from Germany to Italy, where he remained for six years. He continued to write about film, and, in particular, contributed to an encyclopedia of the history and theory of film for the League of Nations


In the fall of 1940, he left England for the U.S.Only two years after arriving in the U.S., he also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, with which he proposed to research perceptual psychology in relation to the visual arts. In 1943, he was hired to teach psychology at Sarah Lawrence College, in Yonkers, New York, where he remained on the faculty for 26 years, and where he produced most of his work.


He wrote his pioneering book titled Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). In 1959, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, with which he studied in Japan for a year. Ten years later, in 1969, he accepted an appointment at Harvard University as a Professor of the Psychology of Art. And then, in 1974, he retired from Harvard University and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where (formally and informally) he was connected with the University of Michigan for many years. He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2007.