Film’s Aesthetic Turn: A Contribution from Jacques Ranciere

On the infinite contradiction, the condition of aesthetic production.

– F.W.J. Schelling

The closer we look at the state of film theory in this post-semiological era and the greater our efforts to trace its cartography, the more we recognize its object’s extraordinary force. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s La mort d’Empédocle (1986), P.P. Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), and Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) confound “theory,” at least the kind of theory that has reigned supreme in the field of film studies until recently. Efforts to master such works, from the first film grammar to the first film semiotics, from the code to psychoanalysis, passing through semio-pragmatics, generative semiology, cognitive psychology and, most recently, narratology and textual analysis – all such attempts to organize a “cinematic system” have been powerless to grasp the film object in all its complexity.