Discussion published in:
The Soft Power of War: Legitimacy and community in Iraq war discoursesEdited by Lilie Chouliaraki
[Journal of Language and Politics 4:1] 2005
► pp. 161–168
Film as language: The politics of early film theory (19201960)
The case of Siegfried Kracauer as émigré intellectual
Markus Rheindorf | University of Vienna
While conventional accounts of the history of film theory portray early theoretical writings as ‘naïve’, ‘unsystematic’, and ‘impressionistic’, this paper argues that, although there is a factual basis for this dismissive appraisal, such accounts thoroughly ignore the many contradictions that mark these writings.This paper focuses on a historically specific case, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, and relates the major contradictions in Kracauer’s theory of film and his conception of ‘film as language’ to a changing socio-cultural context. This case study serves to illustrate the fact that theoretical discourses, especially in their formative, pre-institutionalised stages, are open to a variety of ideological and political struggles. The specifics of early film theory also throw some light on the politics of discursive strategies establishing analogies (and difference) between ‘film’ and ‘language’ decades before the ‘structuralist turn’ in film theory.
Keywords: critical discourse analysis, cultural studies, context, film theory, Kracauer
Published online: 08 June 2005
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.4.1.08rhe
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.4.1.08rhe
References
References
Andrew J, Dudley
Elsaesser, Thomas and Poppe, E.
Fairclough, Norman andWodak, Ruth
Grossberg, Lawrence
Kracauer, Siegfried
Reisigl, Martin and Wodak, Ruth
Rheindorf, Markus
Toman, Jindřich
Cited by
Cited by other publications
Wiegand, Viola
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