Since the arrival of cinema, film theorists have studied how spectators perceive therepresentations that the medium offers to our senses. Early film theorists have bent theirheads over what cinema is, how cinema can be seen as art, but also over what cinema iscapable of. One of the earliest film theorists, Hugo Münsterberg argued in 1916 that theuniqueness of cinema, or as he calls it photoplay, lies in the way it offers the possibility torepresent our mental perception and organisation of the reality, or the world we live in: “thephotoplay 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” (Münsterberg [1916] 2004, 402).
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