Quotes H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York and London: D. Appleton, 1916).
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'The other resource that film offered to the sciences of mind was an overt response to the challenge of gaining access to the consciousness of another human being. That this was recognized at the time may be inferred from the earliest sustained reflection on how audiences respond to film. This discussion came from one of the most prominent early 20th-century figures in the history of forensic psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, a German physiologist and psychologist in the Harvard philosophy department. Münsterberg wrote his famous essay, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, in 1916. It was widely influential in his day and has since become a classic in the history of film studies.

Münsterberg’s reflections on what films do that print and theater do not are intriguing in any light, but especially so in that of the question of how the medium of film might affect the study of unconscious thought. Münsterberg (1916) argued that a film’s content is an externalization (into the film’s structure and content) of the internal workings of the mind; that is, imagining the film as the work of an individual, that individual’s intimate thoughts, memories, and so on, could be shared in a way that felt more direct and powerful because of the way that visual materials could be assembled, delivered in close up, and presented in a particular aspect.

Moreover, according to Münsterberg (1916), the medium also does more. A film takes on some of the processes that ordinarily go on internally within our minds and invites us to let it do them for us. The process of focusing our attention, which is ordinarily internal to each individual, is, he wrote, structured by the way scenes and close-ups are ordered in a film: “The close-up has objectified in our world of perception our mental act of attention... It is as if that outer world were woven into our mind and shaped not by its own laws but by the acts of our attention” (Münsterberg, 1916). [note: 'There are some excellent studies of how films were designed to, and did indeed affect, audiences in the very early period of the film, that is, before the era of filmmaking with which this article is concerned. See, for example, Gunning (1990) and Gunning (2003). For a sense of how the arguments about what film communicates have evolved during the last century, see Bazin (1960), who presents film as a transparent medium giving viewers direct access to nature (i.e., presumably particular aspects of the world that can be viewed even more directly through this medium because of the possibilities for closer and more specific inspection); see also Cavell (1971). Cavell is greatly indebted to the “realism” or “transparency” argument provided by Bazin.'] One implication Münsterberg saw in this was the ability of film to deliver (with apparent directness) to the mind of a viewer a message or phenomenon that was ordinarily difficult to convey because of its ineffable or nonverbal character.

Much of Münsterberg’s (1916) essay was therefore devoted to the question of how film conveys emotion to audiences. He thought the ability to orchestrate visual sensations had enormous potential for imparting particular emotional messages. For instance, the ability to use visual metaphor could awaken particular emotional associations in an audience; or, more simply, the power of a close-up could create a feeling of intimacy and shared experience. The latter would be especially powerful when applied to something that ordinarily would be a private act or that could not normally be seen from such proximity, especially by a group. One obvious example would be a kiss - a roomful of viewers can feel they are inches away from the passionate couple. Another example, for the present purposes, would be the detailed play of expression on the face of an individual experiencing some powerful emotion in or after experiencing an altered state of mind. Münsterberg’s (1916) argument was made before the advent of talkies, but the addition of a richer array of sensory resources would clearly only strengthen his case.Such a technology evidently had enormous implications for the scientific representation of consciousness and states of mind. I do not mean to suggest here that Münsterberg’s (1916) specific words directly influenced the use of moving images in sciences of mind but rather that they give an indication of possibilities that were more widely conceivable for the power of film to access and convey intimate phenomena.' (372-373)