Frampton's Affective-Descriptive Anti-Theory of Film

Daniel Frampton founds his theory of filmosophy and of the filmind on a supposition that film is its own world with its own laws and creativities: film is not a part or a reproduction of the world, it is a world, it is its own world. In the article we try to examine, if filmosophy meets the standards of a conceptual theory. Frampton’s principal suppositions are not new at all and seem to be as old as filmtheory itself; for instance the fact that the film is ensured an absolute autonomy or the fact that filmind means organicising the relationship of form and content, which was carried out in a much better and conceptually much more rigorous way by Lotman who argued a semantization of all formal elements of art. Frampton does not offer one single convincing specifically cinematic formal element around which the film meaning emerges. So we compare his attempt with other film-theories which precisely do rest on some conceptual opposition: frame / cut, subject / object, auteur / many auteurs etc. We maintain that each theory is a place of conceptual immanence (it therefore outlines a domain of one’s own and isn’t reducible to the laws of some other domain), and is established by a concept which in the field of immanence represents the point of difference. Frampton on the other hand levels every possible opposition, every point of difference in the field of immanence, back to some sort of uniformity. What his theory leaves us with is nothing but a description of affections with which the film affects the spectator.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!