Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz

quite distinct terms in understanding technology sometimes matters. This is one of the key issues in Endless Intervals, which undoes the entanglement of digital and electronic. Jeffrey West Kirkwood revisits the prehistory of what we now call “the digital” to remind us that the division of a flow to produce a sign did not start somewhere in the mid-twentieth century but has a history that precedes even the controlled use of electricity as an energy source and a resonance that extends beyond technology to how the work of the mind has been understood. In this, the book follows Hugo Munsterberg, a prolific writer and strenuous advocate of public engagement with science who drew a connection between cinematic form and the psyche. More exactly, the way that narrative strategies imported from literature, theater, and film and moving image technologies were used in the cinema developed conventions that seemed to make explicit some ideas of how human cognition worked. Quite what the causal link was between these conventions—if there was one—is not a primary concern of film criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Munsterberg was active. What was important, however, was how a particular theory of human psychology was made apparent in productions for the cinema at the time. Endless Intervals makes a considerable effort to link what it calls early cinema and period psychology with a very well-informed account of the various players and moves in European theories of psychology, in particular the role of instrumental experimental psychology and the struggles at the time in Germany. It is a fascinating and intricately woven story that makes its case within its own terms but is not entirely convincing, in that while it is at pains to use precise language in some areas, in others it is less precise, as, for example, film, cinema, and the cinematographe become interchangeable terms at moments when it matters. Similarly, the invocation of early cinema, which may be a reasonable academic and publishing category, makes no sense in a context that predates the cinema as an institutional form of reception that developed its own modes of production and film form to maximize profits. Cinema is quite distinct from many other affordances of the technology that were also developing as products, including things called topicals, topographics, instrumental film, educational film, surveillance film, and of course narrow-gauge cinematography. Narrow-gauge film became a dominant format for the amateur film-maker and the “home movie” industry, which persists today and vastly exceeds the “footage” of mainstream cinema in the circuits of the estimated 15 billion mobile phones in use in 2021. Moreover, early cinema was a term that did not exist for people like Munsterberg and only took off in the late 1970s when material that was not widely available was released by the archives and ignited new interest in a form of film-making that was unfamiliar and dismissed as primitive. (It is estimated that due to neglect, fire, and willful destruction by studios, only about 5% of the films made up until 1928 survive.) Post-1978, the archives became more aware of the significance of their holdings, as the corpus of material available to inform the history of film and the history of cinema has expanded. Access to it has become ubiquitous through computerized digitization. The term “early cinema” cannot really sustain any historical credibility without a precise definition. The reductive analysis of the material available to film historians in the mid-twentieth century, while invaluable at the time and a way of periodization (for example in the famous “cinema of attractions”/“narrative integration” story), has been overtaken by more informed and nuanced accounts. Drawing a parallel between a well-documented discourse on human psychology and such a slender body of evidence as somehow typical becomes something of a stretch. The idea behind Endless Intervals is rich and fascinating. Its great strength is that it offers insight into the politics of the mind in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The assumptions that drive the book are also worth exploring, and recovering the work and reputation of Hugo Munsterberg is long overdue— he simply fell from fashion in the academic arm-wrestling between nations for the most ideologically useful explanation of consciousness. There is fascinating work to be done here, and the case for the particularity of the arresting of flow as the core of meaning would be more convincing with greater precision. Not least in the discussion of flicker in the projected image which, as much of the period technical literature reveals, was not something that needed to be eliminated but actually was subtly retained and combined with other instabilities of the film frame (e.g. weaving) to give the satisfactory appearance of movement in the darkened space of collective viewing that the cinema eventually offered. This instability is a quality that in some digital products used in cinemas today, on laptops and phones, is either compensated for in the flattening of the image or coded into the program to produce it artificially. Endless Intervals sets the panoply of inventions related to film and cinema technology as a paradigmatic fusion of science and art and is a valuable intervention to encourage more studies of film and cinema histories that recognize the importance of the history of film form and film aesthetics as evidence of interdisciplinary collaboration.