Freie Universität Berlin/ Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, 2015–2024

Whether in a historical film, the evening television news or a blurred YouTube video from a crisis area - cinematic images are not only about historically, culturally or politically relevant issues. Rather, the images themselves are part of a public discourse in which objects of shared memory as well as attitudes to questions of culture, politics and community are continuously modulated. This makes it all the more important to examine not only what the images show, but also the forms - both aesthetic and poetic - that they use to do so. But how can cinematic images be analyzed, evaluated and classified in discourses if they are not understood as representations but as technical modeling of perception? To what extent does the academic view of the historical, cultural and political dimension of film change if film is viewed not as a representative document of public discourse, but as a medium of an independent discourse conducted in images and sounds? “Cinepoetics” aims to answer these questions and develop a corresponding methodology for analyzing cinematic discourses.

Initial assumptions

The basic hypothesis of the research at “Cinepoetics” is that filmic images are not to be equated with the artifact of the audiovisual image. Rather, this material artefact is only realized as a filmic image in the act of film-viewing. Filmic images are thus produced in a double sense: As a creative act of film-making and as a perceptual act of film-viewing. In this sense, we speak of the poiesis of film-making and film-viewing. From this perspective, we attempt to make the complex discursive interplay of production, appropriation and reciprocal referencing of filmic images fruitful as an agent of a poetics of audiovisual images.

Against this backdrop, the central thesis is that filmic images do not depict, mirror or similarly reflect the spatio-temporal parameters and schemata of perception; rather, they model these parameters and schemata - and thus create new frames of cognitive and semiotic processes. Such an understanding of filmic images is inextricably linked to the idea of a poiesis of film; for us, the concept of poiesis denotes a poetic making that – in the form of filmic images – produces new spaces of perception with which the aesthetic, semiotic and pragmatic coordinates of the construction of meaning are refigured. Thus – according to another basic assumption of “Cinepoetics” – it is ultimately not film production per se, but rather the poiesis of film-viewing that produces the discourse of cinematic images as a socially, culturally and historically situated 'thinking of film'. This poiesis of film-viewing can be understood as an embodiment of the constructions of meaning, affect scripts and perceptive schemata given in the cinematic images in a concrete experience – the effects of which in turn continue to have an effect in films, texts and images and become observable therein.

Questions

The central question of the research group arises from the challenge of methodologically implementing the basic theoretical assumptions outlined here in the field of analyzing filmic images and discourses. Specifically: How can films and audiovisual images be analyzed if we understand them not as products of the entertainment industry or the art world, but as evidence of a poiesis of film-viewing? If we do not place them in the socio-economic, media- and cultural-historical contexts of their production, but rather align them with other films, theoretical models, poetic concepts, etc., in which the effects of a historically, culturally and socially situated 'tactic of image consumption' (de Certeau) are reflected? In short: How can audiovisual images be read as imprints of a comprehensive poiesis of cinematic images that continually produces, takes up and structures forms of cinematic thinking?

Goals

The goal of “Cinepoetics” is a.) to develop a theory of the filmic image based on the concept of the poiesis of film-viewing and b.) to develop a methodology for analyzing filmic discourses on this basis, with which c.) the history of audiovisual movement images can be reconstructed as the history of the production of ever new logics of thinking in variable space-time schemes, i.e. as the poetology of thinking in filmic images.

Only such an understanding of (film) history – as a constantly new figuration of the perceptual spaces of a poiesis of film–viewing – opens up a view of the discourse of filmic images as the poetics of cinematic thinking. It is precisely this discourse that will be conceptualized and reconstructed in exemplary studies. For us, the concept of poetology thus does not – as in classical rule-based poetics and genre theories – point to taxonomies and conventions of cinema, but rather to the historical and cultural ramifications of the poiesis of film-viewing. This approach paves the way for researching the history of audiovisual descriptions and re-descriptions of a shared world within highly disparate and heterogeneous communities of taste and media consumption.

Directors

Prof. Dr. Hermann Kappelhoff (Freie Universität Berlin)

Prof. Dr. Michael Wedel (Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF)