Summary This article questions certain assumptions concerning film form made by the recent psychological film research and compares them to those of precursors of film psychology like Hugo Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim, as well as the principles of Gestalt psychology. It is argued that principles of Gestalt psychology such as those of ‘good form’ and good continuation are still underlying the psychological research of film, becoming particularly apparent in its approach to continuity editing. Following an alternative Gestalt genealogy that links (...) Gestalt theory with more recent dynamic models of brain activity and with accounts of brain complexity and neuronal synchronisation, the article concludes that psychological research on film needs to shift the focus from form to transformation, both in conceiving the perceptual and cognitive processing of films and in approaching film aesthetics more broadly. (shrink)

This article examines the trend of looping videos online. It distinguishes between different types of loops (photography-based and video loops) and their functions (background and foreground). It also argues that the loop through its unit multiplication serves the human need for duration, self-reference and communication.

This paper uses the recent ‘network film’ of Mateo Garrone Gomorrah in order to let Alain Badiou’s theory of subjectivization-in-decision percolate through the immanent networks of contemporary ‘risk societies’ and the narrative structures through which they find expression in cinema. Adumbrating a tension between choices and decisions I seek to create ‘edges’ between two worlds that in the most part of Badiou’s work have been decisively and platonically separated: the world of being and the one of our embodied social experience. (...) Cinema lends its dynamical and ‘tensed’ mediation in order for this new and open topology to be explored. (shrink)