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At the same time, René Clair adds a new dimension to this rhythmic theorization. According to Julian Henriques, Milla Tiainen and Pasi Väliaho, rhythm for Clair “encompassed the organization of both film form (its poetics) on the editing table and the flow of the spectator’s experience and consciousness, the intensive ebb and flow of sensations, emotions, imaginations and ideas in the process of film viewing.”^[4] In this sense, his work echoes the later approach of Sergei Eisenstein, who emphasized the capacity of editing to adapt to the spectator’s internal rhythm. In his text “Methods of Montage,” the Russian filmmaker discusses various practices, all of which he links to a rhythmic idea of cinema. Metric montage is thus understood as being structured by the proportional arrangement of shot durations; rhythmic montage as organizing the action’s movement; tonal montage as corresponding to the emotional expression of a shot; while overtonal montage takes into account the rhythm of all the previously mentioned stimuli.^[5] By bringing together and extending earlier theories, Eisenstein thus asserts, in a sense, the idea of an absolute rhythmic capacity of cinema characteristic of the early twentieth century.

At the time, this topic was not limited to filmmakers. In 1916, psychologist Hugo Münsterberg argued that a film’s rhythm has a vitalizing effect on emotions and is capable of stirring the spectator’s mind. He conceived cinema as a “psycho-technology”^[6] capable of intervening in the audience’s reality and contributing to the development of a measure of the human mind. Elsewhere, philosopher Walter Benjamin attributes to the seventh art the capacity to steer collective sensibility toward an attraction to industrial capitalism. He grounds this idea in the exchange between machine and human that film viewing entails. According to him, watching a film would lead spectators to align their physical and cardiac rhythms with those of the screen, revealing a level of sensorimotor bodily adjustment to the rhythm of a machine. From this perspective, he stated in 1939: “That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in the film.”^[7] In 1923, writer Ricciotto Canudo published his “Manifeste des sept arts,” in which he likewise attributed a rhythmic dimension to cinema. In this text, cinema is presented as the origin of a new artistic approach. Through it, science and art would finally unite in order to “capture and preserve the rhythms of light.”^[8] Canudo further writes that “the Seventh Art thus reconciles all the others: paintings in motion, a plastic art unfolding according to the laws of rhythmic art.”^[9]

The Evolution of Rhythm in Cinema, from Silent Film to the 1960s

In 2016, a study conducted by James E. Cutting examined the possible evolution of cinematic rhythm across different historical periods and proposed focusing on three determining factors. The researcher first identifies the importance of luminance because of the positive associations that film audiences tend to make with light—darkness, conversely, carries negative connotations—as demonstrated by the work of Patricia Valdez and Albert Mehrabian.^[10] He then identified editing as another determining factor—including shot duration, shot scale, and the introduction of characters on screen—as well as intra-image movement, since it had been shown to attract the spectator’s attention. Examining the quantification of these characteristics across 210 English-language films produced over a one-hundred-year period (1915–2015), Cutting concluded that few recognizable rhythmic patterns could be identified before 1960. Until 1925, whether or not intertitles were taken into account, none of the three factors appeared to conform to a shared rhythmic structure. With the emergence of sound cinema, only luminance exhibited an identifiable pattern. In films produced between 1930 and 1960, sequences depicting narrative complications thus tended overall to be darker, whereas sequences involving resolution or climax were generally more brightly lit.

However, a process of standardization appeared to emerge beginning in the 1960s. The results of Cutting’s study thus supported the emergence of production formulas within Hollywood cinema, while also demonstrating the development of a genuinely institutionalized rhythmic system over the course of the twentieth century. According to the researcher, it was furthermore possible to hypothesize a correspondence between the stability of this rhythmic model and the spectator’s ease of affective and cognitive engagement. As he explained, such formulae serve many functions, from aiding memory, to holding our attention, and offering the comfort of a familiar form.”^[11]