Summering (engelska):

This dissertation sets out to map the interrelationship between film and money as representational-operational forms. If cinema is an inventory of movements that our eyes cannot see and if money quantifies invisible relations of debt, what implications does this have for an understanding of the relationship between these media? If there is an interoperability between the two, is it possible to learn from one to better understand the other?

Film and money are abstractions from an unmeasurable reality, their quantification into units, however, is what makes their circulation in a new sphere possible. In money’s case, lived reality is hidden behind the unit of account, never to recover its intersubjective dimension. In film’s case, to the contrary, lived reality is highlighted—the fixture of representation in effect turned back into something living and social through the viewing subject. Yet, money too is an abstraction from a world of time, only later formed into the appearance of an object for the purposes of economic circulation. Thus, as time-based media, both film and money rely on the endurance of a subject relation. To follow this line of inquiry in a fruitful manner, rather than conceptualizing money as a commodity or object, I follow monetary theories emphasizing its basis in the credit-debt relation. Hence, instead of commodifying or objectifying the filmic image I treat it as a relation too: from its technological basis to the level of the cinematic experience and further into the wider network of the economy. This viewpoint leads to a problematization of image for-image exchange as the foundational nexus of cinematic synthesis as well as a critique of on-the-spot exchange as the locus for monetary value. 

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