Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
Language: English
Pages: 408
ISBN: 0520265602
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
translation of Theory of Film in early 1965 that his major problem with the book is its failure to address that “against which, after all, the resistance to film on the part of serious human beings is directed”—that, since it is “much more immediately harnessed into the commercial system than any other form of expression, [film] has not evolved an immanent [aesthetic] logic of its own” (AKB 688). To which Kracauer coolly replies that the peculiar characteristics of film that he had discovered and
Anthropological Nihilism, Jung). Also see Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, chs. 5 and 8. 65. AP (K1a,3); AP 390; interpretive translation in Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 274. On Benjamin’s insistence on the historicity—and historiographic significance—of childhood, especially children’s experience of technology, see ibid., 261–65, 273–79. 66. The theory Benjamin refers to is Ludwig Klages’s; see ch. 4, above. 67. “Negativer Expressionismus” (ca. 1921), in GS 4:132. 68. SW 3:94;
nothing and photography assembles fragments around a nothing” (MO 56). Rather than affording a prosthetic extension into a period not lived by consciousness, the photograph irrupts into the beholder’s living present in an unsettling way, signaling his own physical transience along with the instability of the social and economic ground of his existence. In its emphasis on discontinuity and estrangement, this account anticipates Kracauer’s later discussions, in Theory of Film and his posthumously
the cars are driven by young girls, “poor young things who are straight out of the many films in which salesgirls end up as millionaire wives.” They relish the “illusion” of power and control, and their screams are no longer that liberatory. “[Life] is worth living if one plunges into the depth only to dash upward again as a couple [zu zweit].” The seriality of the girl cult is no longer linked to visions of gender mobility and equality, but to the reproduction of private dreams of heterosexual
narrow sense, my frame of reference will be Kracauer’s conversation, actual or virtual, with other Critical Theorists. Therefore, I will try to highlight particular concepts and theoretical tropes in Kracauer’s early texts—such as the motif of an aesthetics of reification, the turn to the surface, the valorization of distraction, the notion of film’s particular capacity to reanimate and reconfigure material objects—that were taken up (though this was for the most part unacknowledged), elaborated,