Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory
Author(s): Pantenburg, Volker
Abstract
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."
Preferred Citation
Pantenburg, Volker: Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2015 (Film Culture in Transition). DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3558.
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