ABSTRACT
With the first publication of essays from Russian literary theorists on the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and their translation in the early 1970s in Germany, and a few years later in the United States, the literary and text-theoretical discussions of so-called Formalism were shifted into the center of film theoretical theory development. 2 In the early 1980s, one started talking about a paradigm change in film theory that began with Neo-formalism. This instigated a fruitful discussion of Formalist theories, and thus the impact of the concepts of Eikhenbaum, Shklovsky, Tynjanov and others reached a temporary zenith. Even if the intensity of these debates on the meta-theory of film studies has noticeably diminished in favor of image-political, media-theoretical and film-philosophical lines of inquiry, several crucial theoretical and methodological questions regarding the importance of Formalism in literary theory and its consequences for the analysis of film have remained either unasked or unanswered. Some of these questions revolve around the problems in regard to the perception of film images, the constitution and connecting of chains of meaning and their contextualization that are all involved in the construction of filmic subjectivity.
