Project Details
Projekt
FOR 2229: Cinepoetics - Center for Advanced Film Studies
Subject Area
Humanities
Term
since 2015
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 256920011
Cinematic images shape the spatio-temporal parameters and schemata of perception, thus creating new framings of cognitive and semiotic processes. This thesis is central to the KFG´s theoretical work. It aims at a theoretical topos that has accompanied cinema from the early stages of film theory to contemporary philosophical debates regarding film: that cinematic images display new forms of thinking, a 'thinking of images'. This implies a conception that concerns the central paradigm of modern media theory: the thesis of the medium itself being the message. According to this thesis, media are not considered mere means of communicating given facts and issues. Instead they have to be thought of as technical extensions of human perception, altering the a priori conditions of comprehension, judgement and imagination. This thesis is hardly contested. Within cultural studies - and increasingly within the social sciences as well - referring to mediality is considered obligatory. Hence, the KFG rather asks how this thesis can be implemented in the concrete analysis of cinematic images and the discourses they form. Regarding such analyses, the media theoretical topos stated above remains in contrast to the larger part of analytical research on film. Whenever films are being analyzed as media of historical, cultural or political discourses, usually the mere representation of facts and issues is taken into consideration. But what are the theoretical and methodological bases of analyzing cinematic images, if they are not considered representations, if they are conceived of as technical modulations of basic forms of perception instead? What then is the discourse these images generate? From our point of view, these questions cannot be answered by primarily looking at the process of film production, but rather by an understanding of the process of film-viewing as a production of its own, a genuine act of generation. The KFG aims at a.) elaborating the topos of ¿thinking films¿ as a theory of the poiesis of film-viewing and b.) developing a corresponding methodology of analyzing cinematic discourses, that enables us to c.) reconstruct the history of the moving image as a history of the generation of varying logics of thinking in variable spatio-temporal schemata, i.e.: a poetology of thinking in cinematic images.
DFG Programme
Advanced Studies Centres in SSH
Projects
Spokesperson
Professor Dr. Hermann Kappelhoff
