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(1998a), pp. 135–6. 147 Ibid., p. 135. 148 Kracauer (1995a), p. 217. 149 Koch, Gertrud, Siegfried Kracauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 101. 150
Written in French exile, the following text by Siegfried Kracauer from December 1936 outlines a research project that the German-Jewish intellectual undertook with funding from the Institute for Social Research. The work outlined here would be a study of totalitarian propaganda in Germany and Italy through sustained comparison with communist and democratic countries, especially the Soviet Union and the United States. Appearing in English translation for the first time, this document from Kracauer‘s estate is crucial for a full understanding of his career as a sociologist, cultural critic, film theorist and philosopher, demonstrating the global scope of his engagement with cinema, mass culture and modernity.
express the inexpressible, that which exceeds the respective borders of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, to illuminate the subject in the object, and vice versa. A collapsing of these previously rigid ontological and epistemological boundaries need not be anti-political. Indeed, the early work of the Frankfurt School –political through and through –is notable for its attempts to theorize objects and to cultivate a feeling for things. The remainder of this chapter will show how the thought of Kracauer and Adorno contributes to this timely task. Siegfried Kracauer and the
relates more to a dream state wherein moments are selected because of their psychological significance at an unconscious level, rather than as a conscious perception of reality during an even, unbroken flow of time. In his book, Theory of Film , German film theoretician and historian Siegfried Kracauer argued that the principal aim of cinema is ‘the redemption of physical reality’, 2 whereas traditional arts offered perspectives
pedigree in philosophy, sociology and art history, among them Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Erwin Panofsky. They all enthusiastically elaborated on the link (or contrast) between film and the Middle Ages. 1 The central idea of early film studies – that (silent) film is a purely visual medium that opens up a new way of seeing – was based on the analogous assumption of medieval art as
real (or, from a more jaundiced perspective, reality’s taint). In a memorable phrase, David Thomson writes of film as ‘scooping up the momentary appearance of things, like a blood sample at a crime’ (2005: 100). As Chapter 1 noted, a belief that film is defined and empowered as a medium by transcriptions of reality itself underpins the critical writing of André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer and many others. Compare the tropes mobilised by that earlier wave of film theorists with a passage written much more recently by Dudley Andrew. While, for Andrew, the
of cinema has become entrenched for many film scholars. I have therefore tried to outline several approaches here to ‘filmic reality’, the ones that have seemed most important to me and which have allowed me to think through this ‘attitude’. Many other thinkers might have been found: Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Victor Perkins and many more besides. One hope might Rushton_09_Afterword.indd 191 31/08/2010 09:34 192 The reality of film be that such thinkers would provide fuel for future research. But, without question, the six theorists whose thoughts I
School proved vital in re-establishing Marx’s style of negative critique, which could once again expose the ideal of cultural authenticity as a thin veneer covering deeper fault lines in modern capitalist society. The work of Frankfurt School theorists like Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno took collective aim at the hypocrisy of the left-wing cultural elite’s democratic idealism
what culture is.’ 9 A Mirror for England attempts the ambitious task of dealing with the cultural significance of a whole tradition of film-making. In 1947 when Siegfried Kracauer had attempted to examine a period of German cinema in From Caligari to Hitler , he had constructed an over-arching theory – that German films of the 1920s manifested the internal sickness of German society and presaged
, ‘ Tracing the individual body ’. 5. See Mary Ann Doane’s discussion of Siegfried Kracauer’s notion of ‘shuddering’ in Emergence of Cinematic Time , p. 23. See also Siegfried Kracauer, ‘ Photography ’; Walter Benjamin, ‘ Little history of photography ’. 6. Callahan, Zones of Anxiety , pp. 64–5; see also Ashbery, ‘Introduction to Fantômas ’. 7. That is, the truth-effect of Fantômas has less to do with the expression of unconscious or uncanny desires – concerns so often misattributed to surrealism – than with the historical function of seriality itself