Language-Cinema [Sprachkino] is a German book and a series of films based on Veronika Reichl’s doctorial dissertation. The project deals with semiotic questions: How do pictorial representations translate, relate to and comment on abstract linguistic statements? What kind of relationships between pictorial and abstract linguistic information are possible?
In order to answer these questions, I created a set of experimental animated films, which transpose short passages of original philosophical texts from authors like Beruch de Spinoza, Ludwig Wittgenstein or Jacques Derrida through different modes of analogy into animated film. The films present visualisations and spoken text simultaneously. This enables an exploration of how, and to what extent, animated film (as a flexible and possibly complex form of visualisation) can translate, enact and refer to abstract text.
In my theoretical investigation I compared the construction of meaning and in language and in animated film. How do these media address meaning? How does metaphors work in pictorial and in the linguistic media? What does the different relation to time do to a combination of both? Within the framework of semiotic positions of authors like Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Lambert Wiesing and many more I evaluated the experimental films.
The project shows why the relationship of text and film is necessarily asymmetrical, why it always contains a nonsensical part, and why this relation-ship is so closely related to the production of sense in general.
