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

References

Andrew J, Dudley

1976 The Major Film Theories. An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Elsaesser, Thomas and Poppe, E

1994 Film. In: R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson (eds.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Vol. 31. Oxford et al.: Pergamon Press, 1225–1241.

Fairclough, Norman and Wodak, Ruth

1997 Critical Discourse Analysis. In:Teun A. Van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Volume 21. London: Sage, 258–284.

Grossberg, Lawrence

1992 We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Post-modern Culture. New York: Routledge.

Kracauer, Siegfried

1931 Lichter der Großstadt. In: Karsten Witte (ed.) 1974 Kino. Essays,Studien, Glossen zu Film. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 173–176.

1947 From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1960 Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality. London: Oxford University Press.

Metz, Christian

1974a Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press.

1974b Language and Cinema.. The Hague: Mouton.

Reisigl, Martin and Wodak, Ruth

2001 Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London et al: Routledge.

Rheindorf, Markus

2004 Praxen der Reartikulation in den neuen Medien: Texte und Kontexte des Videospielfilms und seiner Rezeption In: Oswald Panagl and Ruth Wodak (eds). Text und Kontext: Theoriemodelle und methodische Verfahren im Vergleich. Vienna: Königshausen und Neumann, 105–130.

Toman, Jindřich

1995 The Magic of a Common Language: Jacobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Wodak, Ruth

2001 What is CDA about — A summary of its history, important concepts and its developments. In: Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds.) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 1–14.

Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Wiegand, Viola

2021. Book review: Markus Rheindorf, Revisiting the Toolbox of Discourse Studies: New Trajectories in Methodology, Open Data, and Visualization. Discourse Studies 23:1 ► pp. 102 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.