This book brings together two major filmmakers—German avant-gardist Harun Farocki and French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard—to explore the fundamental tension between theoretical abstraction and the capacities of film itself, a medium where everything seen onscreen is necessarily concrete. Volker Pantenburg shows how these two filmmakers explored the potential of combined shots and montage to create “film as theory.”
Things and objects have been at the center of theoretical debate for some years. However, the question what Film and Media Studies can contribute to questions of human and non-human agency has been largely absent from these discussions.The essays in this book address this lack and scrutinize cinema's specific way of dealing with objects. If we consider cinema not as a mere mode of representation but as an epistemological machine: What does it know about things and objects?How does it process the relations between humans and non-humans? Alternating theoretical approaches with individual case studies, this book provides answers from different perspectives and sheds light on the peculiar ontology of the 'Cinematographic Object'.Published by August Verlag.
This book examines the rise of screens in both private and public spaces, challenging the notion of cinema's decline. It explores the viewer's position, cinema's transformations due to digital distribution, and the influence of experimental film on installation art. Additionally, it analyzes cinema's interactions with other arts and media, addressing current challenges for film theory.