THEORY THAT EXCEEDS FILM: THE STOJANOVIĆ-TURKOVIĆ DEBATE

Text topic: Film and Philosophy

Text author: Иван Велисављевић

The film theory of Dušan Stojanović went through the process of moving away from “the living structure of films” towards a more abstract structure of what we would today call, borrowing the term from David Bordwell - a “Grand Theory”. In addition to the idea that film is necessarily linked to the “illusionistic nature of the film scene”, two of Stojanović’s concepts are particularly important: (1) that the film system is modeled on a double articulation of language, and (2) that the viewer reaches the “top floor” of a particular movie, its connotations and meanings, by exceeding mere denotation of frames. Some issues related to the problems of these concepts are addressed in the correspondence of Dušan Stojanović and Hrvoje Turković, the key figures of film studies in Belgrade and Zagreb, published in 1976, in the journal Filmske sveske. This paper aims to examine some of the theoretical issues raised during the discussions, in both the synchronic context (the rise of Yugoslav semiotics in the mid-1970s) and the modern theoretical environment. The whole discussion is seen through the modern lenses of cognitivist film criticism and the notion of Post-Theory, and reframed as a valuable early contribution of Yugoslav film theory to the problems later raised in these critical approaches.