Article:

Arnheim versus Panofsky/ Modernismus versus Ikonologie. Eine exemplarische Diskursanalyse zum Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zum filmischen Bild

This article wants to analyse, in the historical case of early film theory, which methodical options art history offers for a specification of the moving image. Perhaps the accurate differentiation is between a history of art as a descrip-tion of the functional usage of the image in the modern culture that found prosecution in the industrially repeatable mass media and of aesthetic of fine arts, which evolves in an opposite dimension. It turns out, that the history of art in the perspective of modernism, represented by the film theory of the young Rudolf Arnheim as a counterpart to the historical avant-garde of its time in the classical media, mostly failed the specific elements of the young medium. In contrast iconology, repre-sented by the film enthusiast Erwin Panofsky, was able to describe cinema as a medium of social communication and symbolic self-improvement of society in an inspiring way. In actual debates on the character of the moving image, in the context of an image science discussion, this fact is not well reflected and perhaps a mode of unconsciousness in discourse. Simple confrontations of theory models such as dynamic and static images, auratic artefacts and ephemeral reproductions are indicated as aes-thetic strategies that could not define the character of pictorial images or moving images. They show instead of images or imaginations as components of different subsystems like art, design or mass communication. The assumption is, that the history of art of modernism fails the specific element of the dispositive cinema and the potential of iconology is not yet utilised.