한스 리히터의 필름에세이 개념: 포토에세이와 Kulturfilm의 역사적 수렴

초록

This paper reveals that Hans Richter's 1940 film essay concept arose from the convergence of the photo essay and Kulturfilm in 1930s Swiss non-theatrical culture. While existing scholarship has often limited the genealogy of the essay film to literary traditions and postwar theory, it has overlooked its foundational relationship with preceding visual media forms. By synthesizing conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) and media archaeology, this study demonstrates how Weimar-era photo essays established a visual essayistic form that organized thought through image sequencing, a spatial montage that Richter subsequently transformed into a temporal one. Furthermore, it traces Richter’s critical reappropriation of the pedagogical impulses inherent in the 1930s Kulturfilm, revealing that these two traditions converged in the specific spatiotemporal context of Basel (1939–40), mediated by Swiss nontheatrical film culture. Richter’s Filmessay was a political gesture intended to construct a ‘cinema of thought’ against fascist propaganda. Although the text was long neglected, its core problematic was independently rediscovered in postwar Europe. Ultimately, this study redefines the Filmessay not as a mere appropriation of literary forms but as a mode of visual thinking constructed through trans-media transformation, thereby extending the genealogy of the essay film from postwar modernism back to interwar visual culture.

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