The essay addresses the key theoretical and practical aspects ofthe problem of scholarly approach to the analysis of artistic texts (films). Theauthor aims to clarify the term "discourse" both with regard to its content,origin and scope and with regard to the possibilities and prospects of using itin analytical work with films. From the author’s point of view, the discourseanalysis can solve a complex of serious problems that inevitably arise in thework with artistic texts.Since in the work with film texts the discursive practices of analysis arerare, or even sporadic, and the very concept of discourse is still being adaptedby Russian film theory, it is necessary to consider the term in more detail —particularly, the conditions of its appearance in the humanitarian sphere andthe prospects of its use in the artistic sphere and analytical work. The purposeof this essay is to summarize viewpoints which exist in the humanities regardingthe term “discourse” and to formulate the understanding of the term which canbe employed for the practical analysis within film studies.The term discourse is considered in the essay primarily in the linguistictradition — in particular, in connection with Ferdinand de Saussure’sdichotomy of language and speech; and then the author traces the gradualdeparture of the concept beyond linguistics into a broad sphere of semioticactivity. Modern semiotics, which grew up on the foundation of linguistics,has carried out the transfer of a number of linguistic categories — such aslanguage, speech, text, and discourse — to other sign systems, regarding thesecategories as universal and basic — among other things, as applicable to thesphere of art. The essay aims to clarify the subject of discourse analysis and itsspecificity in regard to other approaches, and to define a fundamentally newposition of the researcher taken in the process of discourse analysis in relationto the artistic text.