Since its early days as a fairground attraction, cinema directly targeted physical pleasures. Even before we are able to decode the films’ sounds and images, they make our bodies tremble. At the same time, cinema has never done without text: silent film was already accompanied by subtitles, and in its reception, film develops as a narrative. Early film theory recognized the importance of the body. With the linguistic turn in the 1960s, this aspect temporarily fell into oblivion. Film was now primarily understood as a form of textuality that was to be decoded in reading. It was not until the 1990s that the somatic again became a central object of research in film and media studies. Yet both perspectives on film have up until now stood alongside one another, or are even conceived as oppositions. Based on numerous fall studies, this volume explores how text and body in film can be thought together. The reader is published bilingually in German and in English. The e-book on CD features numerous film clips to support the findings presented in the articles.