Hermann Kalkofen: Pudowkins Experiment mit Kuleschow
Regula Fankhauser: Visuelle Erkenntnis. Zum Bildverständnis des Hermetismus in der Frühen Neuzeit
Beatrice Nunold: Die Welt im Kopf, ist die einzige, die wir kennen! Dalis paranoisch-kritische Methode, Immanuel Kant und die Ergebnisse der neueren Neurowissenschaft
Philipp Soldt: Bildbewusstsein und ›willing suspension of disbelief‹. Ein psychoanalytischer Beitrag zur Bildrezeption.
n accordance with Groden & Kreiswirth 1997 may the Kuleshov effect – »the basis of film language« (Mitry 1998/1963) – be generously understood as »the inherent magic of the film medium itself, the creation of meaning, significance, and emotional impact by relating and juxtaposing individual shots«. The reality of such a Kuleshov effect sensu lato – »the meaning of a shot depends on its particular context« and »a change of the succession of shots in a sequence modifies the meaning of the individual shots and of the whole sequence as well« (Wulff 1993) – is virtually without doubt. The question remains, nevertheless, in what the interesting experiment which he, as Pudovkin told, carried out with Kuleshov, really consisted and whether the effect Pudovkin communicated, a Kuleshov effect sensu stricto, ever existed. »When considering the history of the reception of this experiment«, Möller-Nass wrote (n.d.), »the fact should stupefy, that there are such various descriptions and intepretations of that experiment«. ca. 40 descriptions disseminated up to January 2003 in the internet were classified, the configurations frequency-analyzed. The tradition of the »famous experiment« has seemingly since Pudovkin been subjected to processes of meaning attainment and meaning enrichment like those that have been reported in the 1930s by the British memory psychologist F.C. Bartlett: Creative psychology.
The borderline between scientific knowledge and imagination isn’t as clear as it was believed for a long time. If we look back to the origins of modern scientific thought we can see how close visual arts and scientific thought used to be. A gaze at the pictorial cosmos of the hermetics shows how important visuality was for epistemological issues. Considering picture-writing, hermetic diagrams and alchemistic emblems one can understand the crucial role of Renaissance imagery for the development of scientific thought. It shows the heuristic power of image production and makes clear that the hermetic concept of visuality can be seen as a forerunner of modern ideas about scientific models.
Dalis Critical-Paranoid Method can be understood as a consequence of Kants »Critique on Pure Reason«. Paranoia produces Reality for us as like reasonable realizations. Dali anticipate theories of new Neuroscience about the informational clothing of the brain or the claim that we live in a imagine world.
The presented paper contributes conceptually from a psychoanalytic perspective to interdisciplinary image research, especially concerning perceptive processes. Originating from certain intense phenomena of image reception the relation of reality and fantasy comes into question. This is associated with the philosophical topic of the so called ›iconic difference‹. It is argued that the corresponding theoretical differentiation of image experiences in ›image‹ and ›tableau‹ can intrapsychically not be conceptualized as an ›either-or‹ but rather as a certain kind of ›at the same time‹. This is then elucidated as a certain interrelation of consciousness and the Preconscious as well as cognitive and emotional processes. The paper is completed with some considerations about the impact of the dynamic Unconscious on the reception of images.
