Word and Film

This chapter details the coauthored 1965 essay “Word and Film” by Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Wilfried Reinke, which was originally published when all three taught at the Ulm School of Design's trailblazing film department. Words can interact with film in a hundred different ways. Add to this the diversity of conceptions of film. For every one of these conceptions, for every kind of literary expression, the issue presents itself differently and demands a different answer. Walter Hagemann argues that film does not raise any new questions, “because it does not speak a new language; rather it conveys the old language through a new medium. This is the real reason for the backlash which the language of film suffered with the advent of sound.” The authors of the essay then recognize the need to examine how the old language relates to the old film, how new forms of language available today relate to new concepts of film, and how the interplay of word and film may produce new, nonliterary forms of language.