Film and video are too close for one’s theory to translate onto the other.

Evidence

If the experience of the movie screen and its mesmerizing images is distinct, and fundamentally different, from the experience of the television monitor -something that might be scientifically inferred by technical differences in their respective modes of encoding visual information but which could also be phenomenologically argued — then the very maturity and sophistication of film conceptualities will necessarily obscure the originality of its cousin, whose specific features demand to be reconstructed afresh and empty-handed, without imported and extrapolated categories. A parable can indeed be adduced here to support this methodological decision: discussing the hesitation Central European Jewish writers faced between writing in German and writing in Yiddish, Kafka once observed that these languages were too close to each other for any satisfactory translation from one into the other to be possible. Something like this, then, is what one would want to affirm about the relationship of the language of film theory to that of video theory, if indeed anything like this last exists in the first place. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Kafka’s parable of Yiddish and German echoes the reader’s cognitive-mapping goal — understanding one’s own position requires a fresh vocabulary, not inherited categories.
• SEED: Angle: what happens when a new medium is theorized via the closest existing medium’s categories (film theory → video, but also print → web, radio → podcast)?
• DEEPTHINKING: The near-identical case (German/Yiddish, film/video) as the worst case for translation is a genuinely surprising and reusable analytical insight about when borrowed categories most obscure their object.