I bimbi di Lewin. Immagini mediali, percezione della realtà, agire sociale

Kurt Lewin, considered the founder of contemporary social psychology, as a young scholar at the end of the ‘20s used to film with an amateur camera the children whose behaviour he was interested in, and from these observations he worked out some of his seminal reflections about the way we build our field of experience [Lebensraum]. This paper aims, on the one hand, to illustrate how Lewin’s social psychology could be indebted to modernist film culture, at least for what refers to his “field” theory, where a “visible” behaviour is basically involved. On the other hand, my contribution aspires to rediscover Lewin’s long-forgotten view and use of the film medium, even if it was secondary in his career. His approach will reveal to be noteworthy not only for the purposes of a cultural history of film and media, investigating the influence of Gestalt psychology on the modernist debate, but also as a tool to understand the constraints posed by contemporary audiovisual media, partially explaining how we can get into some kind of order the fragmentary, modular, multilayered images of the digital era as well as our daily multimedia environment.