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."

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.

Preface to the English EditionIntroduction: Two Image ResearchersI. Le Film qui penseII. The Camera as Brush - Film as PaintingIII. Deviation as Norm - Notes on the Essay FilmIV. Cut - Interlude in the Editing RoomV. Taking Pictures - Photography and FilmVI. Two or Three Ways of Speaking with the HandsConclusionNotesBibliographyAcknowledgmentsIllustration CreditsIndex