Cinematography as a Medium of Communication: The Promotion of Research by the League of Nations and the Role of Rudolf Arnheim

Abstract

The following article describes an as yet almost unknown episode in the history of twentieth-century communication research. It starts in the 1920s with initiatives by the League of Nations to promote scientific approaches to the fledgling medium of cinematography, which began the expansion of (audio)-visual communication in the twentieth century. In these initiatives a German, Rudolf Arnheim, was involved, who later became one of the founding fathers of communication research and visual aesthetics in the United States. The episode shows how institutional preconditions were connected with an individual biography in science, which furthermore was implanted in the tragic historical events of this century.