Roundabout methods: Kinetic clues and cinematic experimentation in the social sciences

This article analyzes the historical emergence of a decidedly cinematic approach to social-scientific experimentation: The shift from a model of inquiry in which film serves as a tool to record kinetic events generated under experimental conditions to one in which experimental situations are arranged and filmed narratively to maximize their demonstrative power. This evolution becomes starkly visible when one compares the pioneering use of film by Wolfgang Köhler in his studies of chimpanzee intelligence on the eve of World War I with the techniques that his protégé and colleague Kurt Lewin would adopt in the 1920s and refine in the 1930s. By the time Lewin produced his famous motion picture of democratic and authoritarian “group atmospheres,” and in active dialogue with developments in avant-garde filmmaking, an unabashedly cinematic mode of social-scientific inquiry had become acceptable. This mode of inquiry aligned the production of laboratory events with codes of documentary filmmaking recognizable to mass audiences, so as to speak more directly to those audiences’ political stances. The article draws on this history to reflect on the revelatory power of modes of experimentation that establish a genuine relationship with the medium in which they seek to make social phenomena manifest.