Hugo Münsterberg, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The moving picture is a new art, and it is not a mere photograph of the stage; its true nature is revealed when we see that it obeys not the laws of the outer world but the laws of the mind.1 Consider its devices. The close-up, which suddenly enlarges a face or a hand — this is attention, made visible: the film fixes for us what our own mind would fix upon.2
The cut-back, the vision, the flashback, which carry us in an instant to another place or a past scene — this is memory and imagination, objectified on the screen: the film remembers and imagines as we do, leaping across space and time by association, not by the plodding continuity of the theater. The photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world — space, time, and causality — and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world — attention, memory, imagination, emotion.34
It is, uniquely among the arts, a picture of the mind's own acts. That is the source of its power and the secret of its beauty.5
In short, it can act as our imagination acts. It has the mobility of our ideas which are not controlled by the physical necessity of outer events but by the psychological laws for the association of ideas. In our mind past and future become intertwined with the present. The photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.The Photoplay A Psychological Study
It would not be able to draw the attention. But in the film it is a favorite trick. At the moment the bit of paper falls, we see it greatly enlarged on the rug, while everything else has faded away, and we read on it that it is a ticket from the railway station at which the great crime was committed. Our attention is focused on it and we know that it will be decisive for the development of the action.The Photoplay A Psychological Study
If we ask now what are the characteristic means by which the photoplay succeeds in overcoming reality, in isolating a significant dramatic story and in presenting it so that we enter into it and yet keep it away from our practical life and enjoy the harmony of the parts, we must remember all the results to which our psychological discussion in the first part of the book has led us.The Photoplay A Psychological Study
If this is the outcome of esthetic analysis on the one side, of psychological research on the other, we need only combine the results of both into a unified principle: the photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion. We shall gain…The Photoplay A Psychological Study
They do not consider that the roses of the summer which we enjoy in the stanzas of the poet do not exist in reality in the forms of iambic verse and of rhymes; they live in color and odor, but their color and odor fade away, while the roses in the stanzas live on forever. They fancy that the value of an art depends upon its nearness to the reality of physical nature.The Photoplay A Psychological Study
The Photoplay is now recognized as the first sustained psychological and aesthetic theory of cinema and a founding text of film theory, and this position is essentially vindicated and celebrated. Münsterberg's insight — that film's distinctive devices (the close-up, the cut, the flashback, the dissolve) work by externalizing the operations of the mind (attention, memory, imagination, emotion) rather than by copying external reality — anticipated major currents in film theory (Arnheim's formative theory, the montage theorists, and especially the later cognitive film theory that analyzes film in terms of perception and cognition). It is one of Münsterberg's most durable and admired contributions, dated only in idiom.