Vom Filmbuch zum Erzählfilm

The screenplay has been and remains the starting point of every film project since the origins of cinema. However, the connection between the two media forms is fragile, and the assumed certainty with which one seems to emerge from the other is merely a makeshift solution. This work understands the screenplay as a hybrid media form in the tension between the visible and the sayable, describing it in three steps as an ambivalent double code, as an (im)possible act of communication, and as a component of a media transformation machine. A central theme of this investigation is the special significance of the screenplay in relation to the often-cited liaison between film and narration. Due to its succession-logical structure, the screenplay text seems to be inherently characterized by a tendency to tell stories, which it equally transfers to the film that emerges from it.