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Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory

by Volker Pantenburg and Kristina Hellmann

Amsterdam University Press, 2015

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-90-8964-891-4

eISBN: 978-90-485-2755-7

About the Book
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."
About the Author
Volker Pantenburg is assistant professor for visual media with emphasis on research on moving images at the Faculty of Media of the Bauhaus University Weimar.
Reviews
“A remarkable and strongly argued book that debunks many misconceptions regarding the reception of two significant auteurs.”
— Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

Tags
Film Culture in Transition, Art
Open Access Information

License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0