ABSTRACT
Reflecting on his seminal 1932 Film as Art in the oft-cited introduction to his revised 1957 English edition, Rudolf Arnheim explained the guiding concern of this early work as what he called Materialtheorie: “a theory meant to show that artistic and scientific descriptions of reality are cast in molds that derive not so much from the subject matter itself as from the properties of the medium-or Material-employed.”1 The goal of Film as Art, as he elaborated in a later article, was “to show that the very deficiency of the screen image, its lack of sound, its flatness, its confined space, its reduction to black and white, was [a] means of interpreting the sensory world” that provided the foundation for a distinctive visual art form.2 This same method, he continued, had been used in his lesser-known 1936 book, Radio: “as the countermedium of the silent film, radio offered ways of interpreting the world by sound alone,” existing solely in “the realm of speech and the realm of noises” with “all sorts of possibilities which weren’t possible in visual space.”3 While in Arnheim’s view, “[the] two books complemented each other” as two sides of the same analytical coin, his radio work had never gained the same recognition as his film writings; whereas Film as Art was
published in multiple translations throughout the world, Radio, he lamented, remained largely unread, “ ‘surviv[ing]’ as a sleeper or more exactly in a state of comatose slumber.”4
