Volker Pantenburg: Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory (2006/2015)

“There is a tension between the requirements of theoretical abstraction and the capacities of the film medium, where everything that we see on screen is concrete: A train arriving at a station, a tree, bodies, faces. Since the complex theories of montage in Soviet cinema, however, there have continuously been attempts to express theoretical issues by combining shots, thus creating a visual form of thinking.

This book brings together two major filmmakers-French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and German avant-gardist Harun Farocki 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’.”

First published as Film als Theorie. Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und Jean-Luc Godard, transcript, Bielefeld, 2006.

Translated by Michael Turnbull
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Film Culture in Transition series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9789089648914
285 pages

Reviews: Dietmar Kammerer (taz.de, 2006, DE), Toni Hildebrandt (Senses of Cinema, 2015), Alex Fletcher (Review31, 2015), Chiara Marchini (Medienwissenschaft, 2016).

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OAPEN
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Susanne Knaller (ed.): Realität und Wirklichkeit in der Moderne. Texte zu Literatur, Kunst, Fotografie und Film (2013) [German]

An online anthology of 78 theoretical and philosophical texts from the last two centuries presenting a range of conceptions of the reality, in particular exploring the ambiguity of the German notions of Realität and Wirklichkeit. The website also allows reading of the texts through occurrences of 40 selected concepts.

Maintained by Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
Open Access

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Konstantin Akinsha: The Second Life of Soviet Photomontage, 1935-1980s (2012)

“This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.”

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
University of Edinburgh, 2012
328 pages + 368 pages of illustrations

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