Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm: A Case for Filmology?

My contribution aims to take up the question about rhythm posed by a classic psychologist and filmologist like Paul Fraisse (1911-1994) in his founding studies, to understand its scope, and to think about the possible inheritance to be spent in contemporary research on film. I will first sketch out Fraisse’s contribution to the psychology of rhythm, a model grounded both on a value of Gestalt organisation and on related dimensions of sensory-motor activation. Secondly, I will deal with contemporary thinking in this field, showing on the one side how Fraisse’s contribution still helps the psychology of music in defining rhythmic listening experiences, and on the other how the multilayered notion of time perception of the French scholar finds legitimation in neuroscientific research on timing. Then, I will finally delve into film theory. In particular, I will conjecture that the sense of rhythm, due to its values of Gestalt organisation, plays a fundamental, enhancing role in narrative and event-based viewing; but for the dimensions of sensory-motor activation sound rhythms, in particular, constitutes in film an auditive analogon of those embodied and enactive visual processes recognised by the most recent neurofilmological approaches.