MICHAEL WITTE

“Kracauer’s ‘Curious Realism’: Reading Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film”

(Spring 2012)

In the last decade, the work, ideas, and frameworks of classical film theorists have re-surfaced in new contexts.  One of the more fascinating cases of this phenomenon has been the critical re-appraisal of Siegfried Kracauer’s late work Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960).  

Since the appearance of Miriam Hansen’s articles in the early 1990s historicizing Theory of Film, contemporary theory’s reading of Kracauer has radically evolved. Hansen’s work on Kracauer based in the archive, along with the work of Heide Schlüpmann and a few others, and the appearance of English translations of Kracauer’s earlier writings in recent anthologies and in the pages of the New German Critique, has since qualified much of what had been previously thought or assumed not only with Theory of Film, but with some of the views that Kracauer held on topics such as photography, modernity and theories of culture, as revealed in his Frankfurter Zeitung essays and the records of correspondence between him and colleagues such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.  

Introducing to these writings and relationships a greater insight that has often radically changed the subject, Hansen in particular has, in her work of the ‘90s, presented a model for how archival research and persuasive historicization can radically change the reception and understanding of the period, the texts, and the theory.

The ‘revival’ of Kracauer’s film theory, meanwhile, very much re-invigorated discussions on film ontology.  The relative attention paid to the topics he raises in Theory of Film, likewise, in many ways, adds yet another set of tools for the benefit of the phenomenological approach in film analysis, as well as having opened, or re-opened, another chapter in the increasingly subtle and esoteric realist/formalist debate that Kracauer himself was engaged.

I fear, however, that in order to aptly characterize Theory of Film’s revival, I must first review its, and his, initial reception, since the publication date in 1960.  

In the American institution, Kracauer’s reputation was almost entirely based on his two English works, 1947’s From Caligari to Hitler and, over a decade later, Theory of Film.  Together, there is nothing systematic about Kracauer’s approach—the juxtaposition of the two works reveal seemingly disparate ways of theorizing and writing about film.  

Much of this formed the charge that was leveled against Kracauer after the publication of Theory of Film: that he had abandoned the ideological or the social, political/cultural framework of analyzing film that had characterized his earlier (more popular) work in Caligari, instead replacing that theory with the “normative ontology” and the rubric of a seemingly naïve ‘cinematic realism’ apparently central to Theory of Film.  

He went from, in other words, a study that analyzed the cultural and political embeddedness of the Weimar cinema to a theory of film that was ahistorical, quasi-schematic and unsuccessfully transparent.  Some contemporary critics, such as Heide Schlüpmann, suggest that both tomes, although now in their own right classical texts, are inferior because of their tendency to generalize and subsume the particulars of Kracauer’s otherwise fluid film theory within overly schematized conceptual constructs.  The strength of his essays of the 1920s, published in the Frankfurter Zeitung—noteworthily “Kult der Zerstreuun”and “Die kleinen Laden madchen gehen ins Kino,” which deal directly with the cinema—lies in their method of thoughtful, phenomenological procedure: the reflective and personal tone of those essays versus the “false academic tone” of both of his English works.  

I would argue that, while in agreement with Schlüpmann that the earlier phenomenologically-oriented texts of the ‘20s ought to be appraised when negotiating the worth of an overall ‘Kracauerian’ film theory, it is rather the matter of an epistemological shift that differentiates the form and content of these works with his Theory of Film.  Although in the 1920s, Kracauer’s excursions into the reality of the medium touch upon the questions of an aesthetic specific to film, he nonetheless avoids making the “essence” of film his central concern.

Here is where I argue that the “amateurish thinking on his feet,” in Adorno’s words, as the method of his now-popular and relevant phenomenological studies of the 1920s, meets his seemingly “systematic” and “ontologically normative” theory of Theory of Film.  It follows, by the sentiment of Adorno in his remarks on Kracauer in 1964, in “The Curious Realist”:

The medium of his thought was experience, not that of the empiricist and positivist schools, which distill experience itself down to its general principles and make a method out of it.  He pursued intellectual experience as something individual, determined to think only what he could fill with substance, only what had become concretized for him about people and things.[1]

With this argument, hinging on the anecdotal relevance of the type of epistemological philosophy known of Kracauer by his colleagues and students, by the fact that he studied philosophy outside the institution, his thought cast in the vein of an anti-formalism, against the prevailing neo-Kantianism of his youth and against the German institution, towards an intentionally unsystematic set of beliefs organized loosely in an anti-philosophy (i.e., allowing him to see the connection, without the institutional stigma, between high theory and sociology), one ought to re-think the intention of his shift to ontology in his later thought in film theory as anything but the quest for normativity.  Rather, the phenomenology of his earlier writings and his theories concerning ontology share a vital connection with each other, perhaps lost in the writing, and certainly lost in the reception.

As Hansen argues, the link between the unpublished notes on “film aesthetics” pre-dating the 1960 publication of Theory of Film, as well as Kracauer’s earlier writings, should suggest that he was primarily engaged with film through the notion of, or through the relation of film to the subject (as Hansen reasons: “both [as] a practical critique of bourgeois fictions of self-identity and a discourse for articulating the historical state of human self-alienation”).[2]  

The idea that Theory of Film presents a doctrine espousing a “naïve realism,” based on the direct intentional referentiality of the film image with its object in the material world, is therefore something to be questioned.  Likewise, neither is the content of Theory of Film entirely “systematic.”  Its organization constitutes, rather, a loose set of topics, most of which develop, in some manner, the primary focus of his theory—that is, towards analyzing the ontological limits of human perception by witness of the mechanical eye of the camera, and the trace of reality, the index, left by the photographic image.  The principle notes of Kracauer’s text concerning the “ontological realism” of film finds his discussion of theory not dependent on categorizing the qualities of film in itself, abstracted from the subject, but rather on its effects. 

Kracauer gives the majority of his notes to highlighting film’s affinity for alienating and disorientating its subject: i.e., how the film image engages the limits of human perception: in the distortion of scale, in the ability of the film image to capture the imperceptibly small, and, in the obverse, to miniaturize and concentrate the large; in its affinities for the transient, the fleeting, the fortuitous; the material “flow of life”; the un-staged, the uncanny estrangement of the familiar, and so on—all of which have at their center the human body. 

This idea of the spectator becomes more or less de-stabilized, as the theory develops towards Kracauer’s philosophy of film’s “immanence,” a crucial element for negotiating, on the one hand, perceptual limits and, on the other, the inherent tactility of cinematic spectatorship.

It has been argued, by Hansen and others, that much of what I characterize above as central, organizing concerns of Kracauer’s film theory was in fact residue of his earliest work, left over from the first drafts of the Theory of Film manuscript.  These were notions derived by Kracauer during his exile in Marseilles, when he shared close proximity to Benjamin, and prior to what recent commentators define as his ‘turn’ to a more liberal, humanist thinking and political conservatism.  

According to Thomas Elsaesser, Kracauer’s writing in this period, as he shifts from a practical film criticism to an academic film theory, similarly reveals a turn from his earlier Marxist-inspired dialecticism towards a more classical liberal ideology, potentially as an intellectual response to Stalinism in the Cold War era.  Certainly, in contra-distinction to Elsaesser’s thesis, Kracauer’s corpus has too been characterized as exhibiting a continuity from his earliest essays. Karsten Witte, for instance, reads in the whole of Kracauer’s work the prevailing “intention to decipher social tendencies revealed in ephemeral cultural phenomena.”[3]  In any case, this early Marseilles period represents at least one-half of the major concerns of his Theory of Film text, as well as provides the theoretical bulk of his film ontology.

Perhaps the most mythologized part of this pre-writing period is the close intellectual tie between Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in Marseilles.  Theory of Film’s references to Benjamin’s work on the Trauerspiel, Benjamin’s concept of allegory, shock, and innervation, as well as his and Kracauer’s mutual concern with alienation, as an element likewise central to Benjamin’s artwork essay, might demonstrate how Kracauer had initially envisioned his work. 

Ergo, there has been a trend in Kracauer scholarship that, inasmuch as it offers a re-theorization of his work, instead redoubles a more properly ‘Benjaminian’ hypothesis in its place, by selectively ignoring some of the sections that do not quite fit.

 In contrast, Patrice Petro maintains that a ‘truer’ image of Kracauer and his thought will take into account his development through the 1950s, to incorporate into its picture a more accurate description of the historical conditions Kracauer was dealing with at the time of publication: therefore reading Theory of Film as a hybrid text that partakes in both his earlier dialectical Marxist critique as well as an emergence of certain traits of an auteur theory, which, arguably, arrived with his late-‘50s “uncritical embrace” of American culture.[4]

Yet despite this, the basic ontological theory of Theory of Film remains consistent with what we have previously outlined—owing to a materialist view that relates the centrality of the human body in its mode of perceiving “cinematically”: the theory concerning this mode remains a given through Kracauer’s development.  

I would argue as well that the basic structure of Theory of Film, in terms of its chapter formatting, is too consistent with its purpose in illustrating this ontology.  Yet the most controversial aspects of the work consist in his notions of reality and his definition of film as an advancement of photography to ‘capture’ the duration of said reality: “They [films] represent reality as it evolves through time.”[5]  

This differentiation of film and photography comes after a chapter on the basic concepts of the film medium, where he writes that the affinities between the two media lie in the ability to record “empirical reality” as data.  The “camera-reality” of film, however, exceeds (in dimension, in its rendering of movement and time) the realistic tendency of still photography, and, in turn, this difference allows for greater opportunities in the formative faculties of the filmmaker (after which, he strays for a moment from ontology to talk about the two main tendencies of filmmaking, the strict realist, e.g. Lumière, and the formative, e.g. Méliès).  

In this discussion of the realistic and formative tendencies that film allows in its practice, Kracauer reaches a delicate tension.  Within this tension—between the realistic, pertaining to the “camera-reality” of the film medium, and the formal, the elements of editing, lighting and staging—one comes to gauge the “cinematic.”  Hence, arguably, with the idea that these distinctions represent complementary ‘tendencies’ of filmmaking, rather than forms imposed on blunt facts of “camera reality,” it can be inferred that a subject only addresses the “cinematic” through this already-mediated, self-conscious process of ‘reading’ an image.

It is by logic of this epistemic dimension of film that Kracauer thus casts the repeated assertion that “film enacts the historical turn to materiality.”  It is likewise this logic that characterizes Kracauer as a “curious realist,” as Adorno would remark: “that realism of a special coloration which has as little to do with the customary image of a realist as with a transfiguring pathos, or with the firm conviction of the primacy of the concept.”[6]  

This idea of realism, from Kracauer to Adorno, exemplifies the connection between Kracauer and much of Adorno’s scholarship of the following decades.  What comes to mind, namely, is the relationship of Adorno’s concept of the “preponderance of the objective,” part of an argument he makes in his Negative Dialectics, to the basic onto-phenomenological account within Theory of Film, wherein Kracauer comments on the film image as witnessed by the spectator via simple apprehension—i.e., the image as it exists before the spectator is able to anchor said image with certain meaning.  

To put this definition of preponderance bluntly, it means that if one were to witness something truly “objective” he or she would not be able to make much of it.  That preponderant moment for Kracauer is where ontological truth has its access (or at least it is as close as anyone will get), and likewise where Adorno draws his theory’s fundamental difference with Hegel, in the sense that, for Adorno, the synthesis between identity and nonidentity is ultimately nonidentity.

This is likewise where the concepts of “shock” and “innervation” play in for Kracauer’s theories on early film, and its effect on the spectator (albeit, argued exclusively in earlier versions of the text).  For Kracauer, the aesthetics of early cinema rehearse threats (the threats associated with post-Baudelarian modernity, hyperstimuli, etc.) to the viewer’s sense of identity and stability, by producing in its imaginary chaos the momentary inability of the spectator to isolate the image.

Theory of Film, in its extant form, is obsessed with such distortions, with “special modes of reality,” blind spots and “things normally unseen.”  The “pre-objective” moment present in the indeterminacy of the immediately distorted image, Kracauer defines for the theoretical limitlessness of the “psychophysical correspondences” between subject and object.  To the image as pure senseless icon before its arrangement into narrative, Kracauer writes: “the shot delimits without defining.”[7]  Hence, with no inherent linguistic sign attached to an image, or to the “image” of real movement in time, the image in-itself, pre-modal, pre-linguistic and for a short matter fleeting and uncanny for its subject, Kracauer presents this moment in terms of the ultimate ambiguity of the real, providing the gap that separates this reality from the perception of the subject.  

This notion of reality is disparate from its counterpart Bazinian notion[8] that realizes in such ambiguity, rather, an aesthetic.  Kracauer’s conception of the shot (as “delimited without defining”), furthermore, differs from Bazin’s in the latter’s thinking, of the more traditional realist bent, that “meaning” is something transferred into film by the material and automatic processes of photographic registration: the “aesthetic of reality” in the style of the ambiguously-defined “image-fact.”           

Fine tuning these historical conceptions of realism has been a useful tool for contemporary phenomenological approaches to film.  Likewise, Kracauer’s emphasis on detailing the psychological penetration of reality and the “inner motion” of perception to the “outer motion” of empirical movement acts as an encouragement for phenomenological formal analysis.

Though the final version of Theory of Film, as Hansen shows, has done away with much of the profound notions of Kracauer’s thought—the demolition of the subject, film’s materialism and his argument of “immanence”—neutralized in his notions of “physical reality” and “the flow of life,” it is precisely the logic inherent in Kracauer, despite whatever contradictions appear in the text, that blurs the notions of realism that have much characterized an entire side of film theory.  A look at his overall film theory, how it correlates his related theories of history and modernity, reveal that Kracauer’s interest in “reality” is marked by its inaccessibility—provided in the episteme of film.  That is, a film that foregrounds this vector—this mysterious connection between the mind and the physical world—is, for Kracauer, properly “cinematic.”

[1] T.W. Adorno, “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer” (1964), republished in New German Critique, No. 54, Special Issue on Siegfried Kracauer (Autumn, 1991), 162.

[2] Miriam Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), 444.

[3] Karsten Witte, “Introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘The Mass Ornament,’” in New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975), 59.

[4] Patrice Petro, Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (Rutgers, 2002), 50.

[5] Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (Oxford, U.P., 1960), 41.

[6] Adorno, 176.

[7] Kracauer, 69.

[8] I.e., of theorist André Bazin.

Michael Newell Witte (UCSD) is an art historian, theorist, and translator. His research lies at the intersection of literature and the visual arts, juxtaposing the histories of aesthetic theory with the development of late 19th and 20th century modernisms.