This media-theoretical project studies the continuation of literary formats and theoretical problematizations with visual means in the film and text works of Harun Farocki, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, Trinh Minh-ha, and other filmmakers. Up to now, they have primarily been perceived as filmmakers or artists, which ignores their extensive textual work with and on literary and theoretical texts. The project attempts to identify systematically the text-based practices of reading and writing in their visual works, and their transposition into media-specific procedures of inquiry, which have remained largely implicit in their globally received films. Through this approach, film, video, and installation works will not only become readable as explicitly multimodal genres of narrative inquiry and visual forms of theory, but can also be analyzed as precedents for digital medium specificity and collective authorship, as older text-based practices are today increasingly being replaced by digital desktop narration, artistic research, or the visual public humanities.