Time Determining Our Impressions of Moving Images

A Study of Michotte's Experimental Phenomenology of the Cinematographic Situation

In this dissertation project I explore a field that traverses the history of psychology, history of philosophy, and early studies of cinema. The project presents a historical and philosophical reflection on the use of moving images in psychological experiments on perception and on theories of moving-image perception in the first half of the 20th century. What kind of images and image techniques were used in the psychological laboratory? What were these images taken to be so that they were able to assume this role? Which perceptual theories favoured understanding the perception of moving images? And how was cinema perception understood by contemporary psychologists?
As a case study for the investigation of these questions, I turn to the work of the experimental psychologist Albert Michotte van den Berck (1881-1965). Michotte developed what he called an experimental phenomenology of perception, as part of which he studied the perception of more complex, dynamic and elusive phenomena such as phenomenal causality, phenomenal permanence, the impression of animate movement, and the impression of reality. Michotte was an innovative experimenter who designed specific instruments with moving images for these experiments.
In a first step, the images Michotte used in his experiments on the perception of specific phenomena take central stage. The type of images, their experimental setup, their supposed functions, and their relation to theoretical results are explored. Second, Michotte's extensive dealing with images in the experiments led him to reflect and experiment upon the special phenomenal status of images, and of cinema in particular. His contributions to the new Parisian cinema journal Revue International de Filmologie, made him to be one of the main psychologists of the time to write on the perceptual psychology of cinema.