Rudolf Arnheim, the author of seminal film theory text Film As Art, died in June at the age of 102. Like Chris Campbell, I’m just finding this out now, but as Arnheim was one of the few theorists whose work I really connected to in grad school, I thought a late mention was better than none at all. A few essential Arnheim links follow after the jump.

This long obit, which appeared in The Independent last week, is a fine introduction to Arnheim’s work. Film as Art, which was first published in Germany in 1932 and subsequently banned by the Nazis, was very much a product of its time, with Arnheim arguing that Hollywood’s embrace of sound had essentially crippled cinema as an art form:

Arguing that it was the very limitations of film as an accurate recording medium which made it an art, and that film images therefore have no business aspiring to reality, Film als Kunst went on to find a wide and enduring readership in a revised and expanded American edition of 1957, Film as Art; although by then Arnheim had ironically long since turned his back on the cinema as a field of study.

His sense of film aesthetics had been formed as an admirer of the silent film in its maturity (”For me the silent film possessed great artistic purity of expression”) and he came to feel that “film has become a victim of the entertainment industry, which considers telling stories more important than form or expression”.

Film theorist/historian David Bordwell also wrote a lengthy tribute to Arnheim after his death, in which he suggested “aspiring film critics, and especially bloggers, should go back and read Arnheim on Keaton, Eisenstein, Gance, Pudovkin, Chaplin, von Sternberg, and other greats, as well as the essays ‘Style and monotony in film,’ ‘Epic and dramatic film,’ and especially ‘The Film Critic of Tomorrow.’”

The revised version of Film As Art, published in 1957, is available for online browsing on Google Books.