Abstract

This essay explores Flusser’s theoretical texts on the cinema and the concept of cinematic technical imagination. Flusser wrote about the cinema at two specific moments in his career, in the mid 1960ies and the late 1970ies. Altogether, however, this corpus amounts only to a handful of texts, very little indeed if compared to Flusser’s extremely prolific output on the philosophy of photography and the creative works of single photographers. In his analysis Flusser draws a radical distinction between film making and the structure of movie theaters, that is, between production and distribution. The cinema not only is far from having realized all its creative potential as a medium, the very way films are consumed thwarts the revolutionary force hidden within the medium. To really appreciate its force fully one would have to study the cinematic technical imagination and its ability to create a radically new vision of the world