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Article ID: CBB588794000

Film, observation and the mind (2024)

Evans, Bonnie (Author)
Janet Harbord (Author)

History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 37
Issue: 2
Pages: 3-11
Publication date: 2024
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951241235800

DOI: 10.1177/09526951241235800

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This special issue considers the significance of film to the establishment and development of scientific approaches to the mind. Bonnie Evans explores how the origins of film technologies in 1895 in France encouraged a series of innovative collaborations, influencing both psychological theorisation, and new filming techniques. Jeremy Blatter explains how Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg created early films specifically designed to engage audiences using psychological tactics. Scott Curtis’ article examines how Yale psychologist Arnold Gesell was able to extract scientific data from a film. Felix Rietmann’s article explores a collection of infant observation films from the 1930s and 1960s and how they developed unique narratives of mothers’ engagement with their children that did not necessarily match up with dominant scientific theories. Janet Harbord's article considers how a trilogy of films made at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1950s engaged with innovative film-making techniques that captured behaviour as discrete units. Seth Watter further examines how William S. Condon's use of the unique technology of the Bell and Howell 173BD projector in the 1960s created new understandings of human behaviour that could not have been predicted in advance, and which were highly influenced by the technology itself. Finally, Des O’Rawe explores how radical approaches in both anti-psychiatry, and documentary film-making in the 1960s created new opportunities for audiences to engage with different psychological states. All of these developments in film and psychology continue to influence understandings in both these fields to the present day.

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Includes Series Articles

Article Seth Barry Watter (2024) The discovery of synchrony: By means of the projector as a scientific instrument. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 138-165). unapi

Article Des O’Rawe (2024) Contrary to reason: Documentary film-making and alternative psychotherapies. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 166-183). unapi

Article Janet Harbord (2024) The visualization of autism: Filming children at the Maudsley Hospital, London, 1957–8. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 117-137). unapi

Article Felix E. Rietmann (2024) Mother-blaming revisited: Gender, cinematography, and infant research in the heyday of psychoanalysis. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 87-116). unapi

Article Scott Curtis (2024) Behavior takes form: Tracing the film image in scientific research. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 63-86). unapi

Article Jeremy Blatter (2024) Reanimating experimental psychology: Media archaeology, Hugo Münsterberg, and the ‘Testing the Mind’ film series. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 41-62). unapi

Article Bonnie Evans (2024) The origins of film, psychology and the neurosciences. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 12-40). unapi

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