Cinema and Experience

Film, Medium of a Disintegrating World

No pacifism, no communism, but an aesthetic defense of the dissociated world in the awareness of death. Roughly like that.

-Kracauer on the last chapter of his novel Ginster, letter to Ernst Bloch, 5 January 1928.

Among the first generation of Critical Theorists, Siegfried Kracauer rightly ranks as the only one who had significant expertise in matters of cinema. This reputation rests largely on his two later books written in English, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), and his collection of Weimar essays translated as The Mass Ornament (1963; 1995), while the bulk of his early writings on film remains unknown in English-language contexts. It would be shortsighted, however, to restrict an account of Kracauer's early film theory to writings that explicitly and exclusively deal with film, whether reviews of particular films or more general reflections on the film medium and the institution of cinema. Like Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, Kracauer understood the cinema as a symptomatic element within a larger heuristic framework aimed at understanding modernity and its developmental tendencies. While this framework was grounded in a philosophy, if not a theology, of history, it translated into a programmatic attempt to understand contemporary cultural phenomena in relation to the social and economic conditions that gave rise to them and to which they were thought to respond.

In Kracauer's case, these theoretical perspectives evolved both with and against the pragmatic pressures of daily journalistic writing. Between 1921 and 1933, the year of his forced exile, Kracauer published close to two thousand articles-notices, reviews, essays-most of them in the Frankfurter Zeitung, a liberal daily of which he became feuilleton (arts and culture) editor in 1924. Having abandoned his job as an architect to join the paper as a local reporter, he covered just about everything that figured under the rubric of culture-and increasingly areas and topics that did not. In addition to reviewing films on a regular basis (about one-third of the articles), he wrote on urban space and spaces: on streets, squares, and buildings; on train stations, subways, underpasses, and traffic lights; on bars, hotel lobbies, department stores, trade fairs, and arcades; homeless shelters and unemployment agencies; on picture palaces, the circus, and the variety stage; on radio and photography; on electric advertising and illustrated magazines; on courtroom trials, traffic, tourism, and sports; on typewriters and suspenders, pianellas and umbrellas. Kracauer's interest in the quotidian and ephemeral phenomena of modern life was no doubt indebted to the philosopher-sociologist Georg Simmel; but his exploration of the artifacts, sites, and rituals of an emerging consumer culture also points forward to semiological analyses such as Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957) and more recent work in urban ethnography and the critique of everyday life.

While film and cinema held a special position among Kracauer's topics, they were part and parcel of his larger project to read the "inconspicuous surface-level expressions" of the time as indices of historical change, in an effort to "determine the place" that the present "occupie[d] in the historical process." His attempts to grasp the specificity of film and cinema were bound up with the historico-philosophical inquiry into modernity or, more precisely, with the question of how the struggle over the directions of modernity took shape, and was being played out, in the photographic media and their respective institutions. This approach crucially distinguishes his early writings on film from the more standard debates over whether or not film was "Art," for the most part associated with, or opposed to, the movement of Kinoreform, or cinema reform, and over how film could and should become art if it ever was to gain cultural and social legitimacy. Kracauer's bypassing of the art question, however, makes him no less interesting from the vantage point of film aesthetics or an aesthetic theory of cinema. On the contrary, if Kracauer still speaks to issues closer to current concerns, it is because he approached the question of the aesthetic in the more comprehensive sense that Benjamin, too, was to insist upon-as relating to the organization of human sense perception and its transformation in industrial-capitalist modernity. Both writers discerned the aesthetic significance of cinema in the possibility of a new sensory relationship with the material world; yet, while Benjamin's interest in the photographic media was part of his larger engagement with the question of technology, Kracauer's exploration of new modes of mimetic experience, identification, and sociability was guided by questions of a more sociological and ethnographic nature.

In the following, I trace the development of Kracauer's thinking on cinema and modernity in some detail, not only because most of his early texts are scarcely known in English, compared to the relatively greater availability of texts in translation by Benjamin and Adorno. This attention is also warranted because Kracauer's early speculations on film decisively counter his long-standing reputation in cinema studies as a "naive realist," a reputation based largely on a reductive reading of his later works written in English. In addition to the tradition of film theory in the 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-ideas that were taken up (though this was for the most part unacknowledged), elaborated, and revised by Benjamin, Bloch, Adorno, and others.

Nonetheless, such conceptual distillation should not make us forget that Kracauer was not a systematic theorist in the manner of, for instance, Marcuse or even Horkheimer and Adorno. By philosophical standards, Kracauer's mode of analysis sometimes appears slippery and inconsistent, if not contradictory. This is not simply or necessarily a shortcoming. Rather, what ensures continued fascination with Kracauer's texts is that they are suffused with another kind of logic, a style of theorizing that we might call writerly or poetic. Kracauer argues as much through images and tropes, through figures of chiasmus, paradox, understatement, and literalization, as through analytic reasoning and allegorical abstraction. While his academic background included philosophy and sociology (in addition to professional training as an architect), he never held an academic position; he was a critical intellectual for whom journalism was not a default career but a chance and challenge to engage in writing as a public medium. No less, though, was Kracauer's choice of theoretical style(s), like Benjamin's, motivated by a critique of the academic discipline of philosophy, as a totalizing, systematic discourse that could not adequately address the contemporary transformation and crisis of experience. As I hope to show, this critique translates into critical practice not only by virtue of its turn to noncanonical topics but also because of a rhetorical mode that persistently undermines the traditional distance between the perceiving/describing/analyzing subject and the (mass-cultural) objects under scrutiny.

Kracauer's discovery of film and mass culture around 1923-24 reaches back into the lapsarian layer of his earlier writings, for the most part philosophical and sociological reflections on the problem of modernity. When he begins to develop a theoretical interest in film, he hails it as the perfect medium for a fallen world, an at once sensory and reflexive discourse uniquely suited to capturing the experience of a disintegrating world, a "life deprived of substance." In this capacity, film assumes an important function from the perspective of Kracauer's philosophy or, if you will, theology of history: specifically, the eschatologically tinged idea that modernity could be overcome-and could overcome itself-only by fully realizing all its disintegrating and destructive potential. Paradoxically, as we shall see, this desire to transcend modernity prompts a turn to a postmetaphysical politics of immanence, in which film figures as both symptom of the historical process and sensory-reflexive horizon for dealing with its effects. Accompanying this turn is Kracauer's discovery of the institution of cinema, including but exceeding the projected film, as an alternative public sphere-alternative, that is, to the institutions of both bourgeois culture and the labor movement. Many of Kracauer's early film reviews are actually cinema reviews, in the sense that they include remarks on theater design, performance practices, musical accompaniment, and audience response. From 1925 on he began to reflect on the cinema more generally as a catalyst of a new kind of public, symptomatic of the culture of leisure and consumption that he saw emerge in Germany with the introduction of principles of mass production and the concurrent mushrooming of the class of white-collar workers or employees. When, toward the end of the decade, his writings on film and cinema increasingly shifted from a materialist physiognomy of modernity to a critique of ideology-prefiguring the approach of From Caligari to Hitler (1947)-it was because, in the face of the mounting political crisis, contemporary cinema was failing on both counts: it neither advanced the negativity of the historical process, or "self-sublation" of modernity, nor lived up to the liberating, egalitarian impulses in which Kracauer had discerned the contours of a democratic mass public.

I will trace these movements and countermovements from two complementary angles. The present chapter deals with Kracauer's efforts to develop an aesthetics of film from the perspective of a particular experience and critique of modernity. The following chapter focuses on his exploration of modernity as a mass-produced and mass-consumed, highly ambivalent and contested formation, in which film and cinema were playing only one, though a crucial, role. As a hinge between these perspectives, I discuss Kracauer's essay "Photography" (1927), a text that displays key traits of his peculiar method-his shifting among the registers of ethnographic observation, micrological analysis, critique of ideology, and philosophy of history; his effort to grasp the historical moment in both its devastating and liberating possibilities; and the inclusion of himself as experiencing subject in the cultural practices he describes.

Kracauer's writings prior to the mid-1920s by and large participate in the period's pessimistic, lapsarian discourse on modernity. Within a predominantly philosophical and theological framework, modernity appears as the endpoint of a historical process of disintegration, spiritual loss, and withdrawal of meaning from life, a dissociation of truth and existence. Expelled from a traditional order of life and a corresponding religious sphere, the individual is "thrown into the cold infinity of empty space and empty time," a state summed up in Georg Lukßcs's phrase "transcendental homelessness." Drawing on contemporary sociology, in particular that of Simmel, Max Scheler, and Max Weber, Kracauer ascribes this state to the progressive unfolding of the Ratio, a formal, abstract, instrumental rationality-or perverted form of reason-propelled by capitalist economy, modern science, and technology. With the encroachment of mechanization and rationalization on all aspects of life, human beings are alienated not only from the spiritual sphere but also from all forms of communion and community (Gemeinschaft, as opposed to Gesellschaft). They are thus deprived of an experiential, discursive horizon that would help them make sense of these very processes.

That Kracauer participates in this culturally pessimistic discourse on modernity, with its worn-out idealist rhetoric, is not all that surprising, nor do his early writings differ in this regard from those of other Critical Theorists, in particular Benjamin, Bloch, and the early Lukßcs. What is remarkable, however, is the distance that Kracauer will travel, in a rather short time, from the metaphysics of Weltzerfall (disintegration of the world) to a more sober, analytic, politically astute, and yet passionately curious attitude toward the concrete phenomena of modern life, in particular mass culture. The beginnings of this transformation can be traced back to the experience of World War I, which for Kracauer, as for many of his generation, shattered the illusions of high idealism and cast its monstrous shadow on the subsequent decade; it is no coincidence that his semiautobiographical novel, Ginster, written toward the end of the 1920s, is set during the war and its aftermath. Hence Kracauer's turn to a more materialist perspective should be imagined neither as a sudden conversion nor as a progressive development toward a more critically correct position, but rather as a process of reorientation and complication in which earlier perspectives both give rise to and persist, even if incongruently, with later ones. His interest in film and mass culture does not just emerge with his often-flagged turn to Marxist thought and empirical sociology around 1925-26. As I will argue, the effort to theorize film precedes that turn and has its roots in precisely the lapsarian construction of history he had initially assumed toward modernity, specifically, in the peculiar form of materialism that this construction entailed.

It is significant that Kracauer elaborates his early metaphysics of modernity in a "philosophical fragment" on the detective novel, a genre of popular fiction that thrived on serial production and that in Germany occupied a lower rank on the ladder of cultural values than in England or France. Rather than considering this genre from the outside, as a sociological symptom, Kracauer reads it as an allegory of contemporary life, incarnating the "idea of a thoroughly rationalized civilized society" (W 1:107). The critical distinction of the detective novel vis-α-vis mere affirmation of that society consists in the way the detective's methods mimic the mechanisms of the autonomous Ratio: "Just as the detective reveals the secret buried between people, the detective novel discloses, in the aesthetic medium, the secret of the de-realized society and its substanceless marionettes." It thus transforms, by virtue of its construction, "incomprehensible life" into a "counter-image" of reality, a "distorting mirror" (Zerrspiegel) in which the world can begin to read its own features (W 1:119, 107).

Kracauer elaborates the trope of a distorting mirror in an essay on the circus, written around the same time, in which he attributes a similarly allegorical-and allegorizing-function to the clowns. If the acrobats miraculously triumph over the laws of gravity and the human physis, the clowns point up the "unreality" of that triumph: "While the real actors suspend the conditions of the life assigned to us, [the clowns] with their off-key seriousness in turn suspend the unreality of those actors. This should lead one to expect that they restore normal reality but, on the contrary, they are only a caricature of caricature; it feels like being in a hall of mirrors, and from the successively arranged mirrors the beholder's own countenance radiates in ever more distorted form." It should be noted that not only does the clowns' mimicry render strange an already estranged reality but the hall-of-mirrors effect also affects the self-perception of the beholder, confronting the viewing subject with its own precarious reality.

The idea of representation as a distorting mirror is a familiar trope of modernist aesthetics, implying that, since the world is already distorted, reified, and alienated, the iteration of that distortion, as a kind of double negation, is closer to the truth than any attempt to transcend the state of affairs by traditional aesthetic means, be they classicist or realist. In Critical Theory, for instance, we find one highly influential articulation of this trope in Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), with its revision and rehabilitation of allegory, which, in contrast to the romantic symbol's semblance of organic beauty and totality, showed the petrified, fragmented landscape of history for what it was. Likewise, the trope resonates in Adorno's philosophy of modern music and aesthetic theory, in particular his insistence, against Lukßcs, on the distinction between objective and reflective reification, the latter being the task of any truly modern art. Yet, if Benjamin elaborates this idea in writing on the Baroque Trauerspiel and on Proust, and Adorno on Sch÷nberg and Webern, Kracauer develops it in the context of popular fiction, live entertainments-and film. This to say, he insists on finding the antidote to modern mass culture within mass culture itself, by focusing on its disjunctive devices and reflexive possibilities.

While reviewing films was part of his local reporting duties from 1921 on, it was not until the fall of 1923 that Kracauer displayed a more theoretical interest in the medium. In the reviews that followed over the next few years, he frequently uses phrases like "the spirit" or "essence of film," "film aesthetics," "film language"; speaks of topics "proper to film" (filmgerecht); and discusses individual titles as examples from which to develop an "as yet unwritten metaphysics of film" (FZ, 16 December 1923). His earliest notions of what is and is not "proper" or specific to film actually sound remarkably like the criteria of the later, more familiar Kracauer, though there are still important differences. Reviewing two contemporary German films dealing with imposters, Der Frauenk÷nig (Jaap Speyer, 1923) and Die MΣnner der Sybill (Friedrich Zelnick, 1922), he praises them for their looseness of construction and refusal of interiority: "Compared to the historical spectacles which have recently become fashionable, [these films] after all have the advantage that they do not show carefully rehearsed scenes and elaborate plots which one could just as well see on stage but, instead, improvise thrilling events out of the quotidian and, moreover, renounce the display of soul [seelischer Gehalte] in favor of a film-specific rendering of phantomlike surface life." The difference, or distance, of this position from what Theory of Film will call the "redemption of physical reality" hinges, of course, on what Kracauer means by "surface life" and which particular cinematic techniques, modes of representation, and genres he considers appropriate for capturing that life.

The most graphic account of the world "assigned" to the medium of film can be found in Kracauer's enthusiastic, almost rhapsodic reviews of Karl Grune's film Die Straße (The Street, 1923). Following the Frankfurt premiere in February 1924, Kracauer reviewed the film not just once but twice (with some overlap), first in the local section and the following day in the feuilleton section of the paper. He returned to the film the following year in his programmatic essay "Der Kⁿnstler in dieser Zeit" (The Artist in Our Time), in which he calls upon it to illustrate the dilemma of the contemporary artist-how to engage the gap between "truth" and "existence," the phenomenal world-and to make a case for a particular philosophical and political stance. As late as 1929, in a review of one of Grune's subsequent works, Kracauer still refers to Die Straße as "one of the best and most forward-pointing films." Like many titles he reviewed during the Weimar period, the film resurfaces in his writings in exile, in particular the Caligari book, though without reference to the earlier accounts and with a decidedly different valence.

In the 1924 reviews, Kracauer hails Die Straße as nothing less than a manifesto of metaphysical malaise, of the "suffering of the languishing soul in the lifeless bustle" of modern existence. In an exemplary way, the film captures the experience of modern life-"a life deprived of substance, empty as a tin can, a life which instead of an internal relationality [statt des innerlichen Zusammenhangs] knows nothing but isolated events that form ever new series of images in the manner of a kaleidoscope" (W 6.1:56). With its emphasis on fragmentation and discontinuity, the film visualizes the spatialized experience of time typical of modernity: "the moment, which is only a point in time, becomes visibility." Accordingly, the individual's experience of space dissociates into random encounters with the fragmented material world, epitomized by the modern city street:

What intrudes upon the lonesome wanderer in the voracious streets of the night is expressed by the film in a vertiginous sequence of futurist images, and the film is free to express it this way because the pining inner life releases nothing but fragmentary ideas. The events get entangled and disentangled again, and just as the human beings are living dead, inanimate things participate in the play as a matter of course. A lime wall announces a murder, an electric sign flickers like a blinking eye: everything a confused side-by-side [Nebeneinander], a chaos [Tohuwabohu] of reified souls and seemingly waking things. (W 6.1:57)

The passage displays a number of topoi that recur throughout Kracauer's Weimar writings: the chiastic relation between the living and the mechanical, animate and inanimate, between people and things; the emphasis on externality, on the breakup and flattening out of vertical hierarchies of meaning into paratactic (dis)order (for which he ironically, though not coincidentally, uses the vernacular Hebrew word from Genesis tohuvabohu); and the metaphoric elevation of the city street as the key site of cinematic modernity (pointing toward its canonic inscription in Theory of Film but also resonating with the resurgence of the figure of the flaneur in Weimar culture).

Most important, Kracauer attributes the film's contemporaneity to its use of specifically cinematic codes, in particular editing. In the Feuilleton version of the review, he introduces Die Straße as "one of the few works of modern film production in which an object takes shape in a way that only film can give shape, a work which realizes possibilities that only film can realize.... Film patches together shot after shot and from these successively unfurling images mechanically recomposes the world-a mute world in which no word passes between human beings, in which the incomplete speech of optical impressions is the only language. The more the represented object can be rendered in the succession of mere images, the ensemble of simultaneous impressions, the more it corresponds to the filmic technique of association" (W 6.1:56). In other words, the affinity between the medium and its presumed object is grounded not in film's photographic capability, the iconic representation of a presumably given reality, but rather in its syntactic procedures-in the structural affinity of cinematic montage with the logic of fragmentation and random juxtaposition that for Kracauer defines the current stage of the historical process.

Kracauer conceives of film as a material expression-not just representation-of a particular historical experience, an objective correlative, as it were, of the ongoing process of distintegration. The solitude of the individual in a fragmented, empty world that the critic finds evoked in Grune's film rings with the pathos of personal experience; and the film in turn lends this pathos an allegorical significance and collective resonance. What is remarkable here is the extent to which the critic identifies with the film's nameless protagonist and his nomadic desire. The figure of the "lonesome wanderer" is referred to as "Sehnsⁿchtiger," someone driven by longing, and the narrative situation that propels his odyssey through the "peripheral world" is marked as one of a double exile. Kracauer describes the protagonist (Eugen Kl÷pfer) as lying on a sofa "in a petty-bourgeois living-room which is supposed to be home [Heimat] yet fails to be just that." Fascinated with the play of light and shadow on the ceiling, the dreamer gets up to look out of the window. While his wife sees the street only as street, to him the look "unveils the senselessly tempting jumble of reeling life which, alas, is no more a home [Heimat] than the living-room but, instead, adventure and untasted possibility" (W 6.1:54).

In such ekphrastic accounts, the writer acknowledges his own fascination with the same alienated surface life that the lapsarian critic of modernity deplores. Likewise, he identifies with the protagonist's rejection of bourgeois domesticity, which the film's misogynist economy associates with the unseeing wife (just as it will later associate female sexuality with prostitution and death). This configuration of a double homelessness-between the sham of the bourgeois interior and the anonymous otherness of the modern street-was to become emblematic of Kracauer's intellectual persona throughout the Weimar period. Just as emblematic, however, is the curious ambivalence by which his writing betrays an affinity with, an awareness of being part of, the allegedly fallen world whose transformation he sought to advance.

When Kracauer returns to Die Straße in his "psychological history of the German film," written in actual exile, both the perspective of transformation and the dimension of critical affiliation have disappeared. In the Caligari book, Grune's film is dismissed as a "nonpolitical avant-garde product." The film, Kracauer explains, had a considerable success: "it ingratiated itself with a rather broad public composed mainly of intellectuals." While he still praises the "realistic" effort in the everyday quality of the (studio) setting, the film now figures as an allegory for the regressive movement from rebellion to submission. Its wandering protagonist is reduced to a social type, a philistine acting out historically specific-and in retrospect, politically fatal-psychological mechanisms. With this analysis, not only has Kracauer shifted frames, from a metaphysics of modernity to a critique of ideology, but he also disavows his own earlier fascination with the film, his critical identification with the experience of the doubly exiled wanderer.

But not every film that received his stamp of approval did so because it could be construed as an expression of metaphysical malaise or "transcendental homelessness." On the contrary, many reviews written between 1923 and 1926 disclose a discriminating engagement with the actual film practice that unfurled on Frankfurt screens, a remarkable attention to the diversity of genres, modes of representation, and spectatorial effects. To be sure, Kracauer's stance remains normative throughout (there was probably never a time when he was not to some extent normative, whether in the name of a lapsarian philosophy of history or a politics of realism); still, the terms and criteria he puts into play cast a fairly wide net. The result is a canon that seems to be at odds, in part at least, with the "realist" standards of his later writings. Echoing Lukßcs's praise for film's imbrication of strictly nature-bound reality with the "fantastic," Kracauer emphasizes cinematic effects of "unreality" and "improbability," the "miraculous," "marvelous," and "grotesque"; he delights in moments of "kaleidoscopic" vision, "chance," "improvisation," and "mobility." Accordingly, he favors such genres as thrillers and adventure dramas revolving around detectives, impostors, and the circus; animated and trick photography; fairy tales; and slapstick comedy or any form of high-speed physical farce.

What these reviews amply document is that Kracauer considers film's historic chance to truthfully express its time to be as much a matter of aesthetic choice as of structural affinities between cinematic technique and contemporary experience. The point is not just to mirror the world that is, literally, going to pieces but to advance that process. If anything, this demands a mode of representation decidedly antinaturalist. Praising an animated short of Munich scenes, Kracauer writes: "Its improbability, which runs counter to any naturalism, fully corresponds to the essence of film which after all, if it is to achieve its very specificity, has to completely break apart the natural contexts of our lives." Similarly, he commends a fantastic drama about a missing lottery ticket for making happen "what has to happen in film: the continual transformation of the external world, the crazy displacement of its objects [die verrⁿckte Verrⁿckung ihrer Objekte]."

One strategy of displacement and transformation is the "bracketing" of the represented world by means of irony, hyperbole, satire, or caricature-that is, by the supplementary logic of a "distortion of distortion" that we have seen in his analysis of the circus clowns. On the occasion of an adventure drama set in a cosmopolitan, high-tech milieu of generic Anglo-American origins, Kracauer asserts: "Genuine film drama has the task of rendering ironic the phantomlike quality of our life by exaggerating its unreality and thus to point toward true reality." The hyperbolic doubling of modern surface life promotes a demolition and transcendence of that world by way of humor. A "deeper meaning" of this "amusing joke" is that it "reveals the nothingness of a world that lets itself be set in motion over a nothing and provokes laughter over its previously detoxified seriousness."

Kracauer's preference for films that, in his reading, hyperbolize contemporary reality's "unreality" is rooted in the historico-philosophical assumption that modernity could and would ultimately be overcome, that a different life, the "true reality" that was now absent and inaccessible, was still conceivable beyond the present state. The utopian residue in Kracauer's thinking during this period accounts for his early endorsement of the fairy tale film, a genre in which "film has conquered a domain that fully belongs to it." Because of its liberation from the norms of verisimilitude, the fairy tale provides a modality that allows us "to get to a happy ending without lying" (Alexander Kluge), a utopian moment under erasure that, as Kracauer will elaborate a few years later with regard to Chaplin, nonetheless radiates with visions of justice and peace. Much as the substance of the ending matters, Kracauer seems interested in the fairy tale as a mode of all-but-impossible imagining, a way to uphold the longing for a different world in the face of overwhelming facticity. In his enthusiastic review of Murnau's Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), he defends the film against critics' objections to the tacked-on happy ending-"a fairy tale-like postlude [Nachspiel] which is so unbelievable that you may just believe it." Chance alone, thanks to the "providential intervention of the ironic author," can raise the "last man" (Emil Jannings's demoted hotel porter) to the position of the "first," and his random inheritance enables him to dispense temporary economic justice in the phantom world (Scheinwelt) of the Hotel Atlantic. If anything, by Kracauer's standards, the film's ending is not fantastic enough: "The epilogue would have to have been rendered even more unreal and playful for it to appear as the fairy tale-like anticipation of a different world." In the Caligari book, he still calls the film's unlikely happy ending an "ingenious" conclusion, but interprets it as "a nice farce jeering at the happy ending typical of the American film."

Whatever disjuncture there may be between Kracauer's early preferences for particular styles and genres and his later judgments, his disapproval of certain types of film crystallizes quite early on and remains rather persistent throughout his life. The titles he reviews in the key of ironically amused to caustic critique usually belong to genres such as literary or theatrical adaptations, mythological or historical spectacles, and "society films" (Gesellschaftsfilme). A review of The Merchant of Venice (1923), for instance, criticizes the film in terms of qualities that violate the "spirit of film": "instead of grotesque surface, false profundity of soul; instead of surprise improvisations, carefully prepared scenes." Thus, in the practice of daily reviewing, especially of culturally prestigious productions, he formulates and recalibrates an aesthetics of film that seems to turn on assumptions about medium specificity.

If there is a common denominator to the films and genres Kracauer criticizes, it is their strict adherence to principles of the classical narrative film, which means the stylistic system formulated most clearly and hegemonically in American cinema from the 1910s on but emerging as well, in alternative forms and with delay, in other national cinemas. The classical system is defined, roughly, by principles of thorough causal motivation, mostly centering on the psychology and actions of individual characters, linear and unobtrusive narration, verisimilitude, intelligibility, and compositional unity-principles that ensure the effect of a coherent and closed diegesis, or fictional world of the film, to which the viewer has access as an invisible guest. In contrast to the well-made plots of classical films, Kracauer prefers narratives whose motivation is loose (unsolid) and defies academic logic (Schullogik), narratives that have "neither beginning nor end." He finds this counterlogic at work in the seriality of American slapstick comedy, as a defining characteristic of that genre; by 1925, he frequently extols, in an almost ritualistic gesture, the comic shorts in the surrounding program, as a relief from and antidote to the pretensions of the dramatic feature. But he also praises noncomedic narrative films (including Hollywood features) constructed loosely enough to leave space for relatively independent details-epiphanies, episodes, elements of performance and improvisation. And he increasingly pinpoints conditions and practices of exhibition that either advance or restrict the range of improvisation and chance in the way films are experienced in the theater.

The most remarkable articulation of Kracauer's anticlassical stance can be found in his essay "Calico World," in which he describes a tour through the backlots of the UFA studio in Neubabelsberg. Marveling at the vast array of fragmentary sets and props that defy natural interconnections and proportions (including sets for well-known films like Fritz Lang's Nibelungen and Metropolis and F. W. Murnau's Faust), he highlights the fact that, to produce the effect of a coherent diegetic world in a film, the world is first cut to pieces. "This dismantling of the world's contents is radical; and even if it is undertaken for the sake of illusion, the illusion is by no means insignificant" (MO 281-82). With obvious irony yet also wide-eyed delight, he evokes the mortification and disorganization of the seemingly natural world-the surreal assembly of the "ruins of the universe ... representative samples of all periods, peoples, and styles," inventoried and stored in warehouses (MO 282)-in terms that resonate with his essay "Photography" of the following year. Similarly, if less explicitly, "Calico-World" links the paradoxical relation between fragmentation and diegetic unity to the historical dialectics of nature, arrested in the appearance of the social order as natural. Classical cinema perpetuates this appearance through its adaptation of bourgeois aesthetic principles, such as theatrical illusionism based on the invisible boundary between viewer and the fictional space of the proscenium stage. The director has the task to organize "the visual material-which is as beautifully disorganized as life itself-into the unity that life owes to art" (MO 288; W 6.1:197). By means of continuity editing and intertitles he turns the "huge chaos" into a "little whole: a social drama, a historical event, a woman's fate." Tongue-in-cheek, Kracauer acknowledges that most of the time the desired effect is achieved: "One believes in the fourth wall. Everything guaranteed nature" (MO 288).

Kracauer's interest in forms of cinematic expression that exceed narrative motivation and integration is coupled with a more porous conception of spectatorship. In a review of a film by E. A. Dupont, for instance, Kracauer singles out ephemeral interludes-"little entrefilets"-not only for the digressive glimpses they afford but also for the way their arrangement appeals to the viewer: "The sequencing of shots is exemplary: the alternation of close-ups, optical fragments, transitions, and master shots leads the imagination [Phantasie] up kaleidoscopic mountains." Even as these montage sequences serve to evoke the "desired atmosphere," the notion of propelling the viewer's imagination into kaleidoscopic gyrations is quite distinct from the effects of diegetic absorption, illusionist mastery, or, for that matter, hypothesis-forming attention that have been attributed to classical narrative. It rather suggests a centrifugal movement away from the film-toward a more autonomous agency that Alexander Kluge was to call "the film in the spectator's head," the disavowed source of experience, of the social wealth of fantasies, wishes, daydreams, and associations appropriated by commercial cinema.

At certain moments, Kracauer's enthusiasm for nondramatic optical delights betrays less the disposition of an anticlassical critic than that of a preclassical moviegoer, which Tom Gunning has described as an "aesthetic of astonishment." Until he developed a more critical stance toward the ideology of so-called "nature films" and travelogues (from about 1926 on), Kracauer relished their strange and marvelous sights in a manner harking back to early cinema when scenics and travel films were highly popular genres and landscape views were perceived as attractions in their own right. Thus, he often singled out "nature scenes" and other views of touristic appeal, even in films that he rejected on aesthetic and political grounds (e.g., shots of Venice in The Merchant of Venice).

It is in this vein that we have to read his initial enthusiasm for the so-called mountain films, the genre that made Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker famous and that, in Kracauer's later critique, promoted a mixture of heroic idealism, immaturity, and "antirationalism on which the Nazis could capitalize." As late as 1925, Arnold Fanck's Der Berg des Schicksals (The Mountain of Fate, 1924) moves Kracauer to this enraptured account:

More important than the plot with its beneficial solution are the magnificent nature views [herrliche Naturaufnahmen] which were taken under the most difficult circumstances during months of patient persistence. The rock formations of the Dolomites-Cimone della Pala, Latemar, Rosengarten, whatever their names may be-stretch toward the sky under every conceivable kind of lighting, they are reflected in the lakes and surrounded by agglomerations of clouds: cumulus clouds, giant cloud massifs that are fraying, oceans of clouds that ebb and flow, striped drifts and flocks of cirrus clouds. They rush close faster than in reality, cheated out of their duration by time-lapse photography. They shroud the peaks, encircle them, and briefly desist from their siege: a kaleidoscopic spectacle, always the same and ever new. Rarely has one seen in a film such heavenly scenes; their curious fascination above all derives from the fact that processes which in nature take hours to unfold are here presented in a few minutes. The cloud events concentrate and the distortion of time creates a delightful optical intoxication.

The concluding remark recommending the film to as many viewers as possible-"it shows the impassioned community between human beings and nature from a peculiar angle"-would have been highly unlikely only a few years later. Not only did Kracauer amplify the negative connotations in his concept of nature on philosophical and political grounds (as in the essay "The Mass Ornament"), but he also embarked on impassioned expeditions into urban modernity and came to prefer the artifices of second nature over the increasingly abused mystique of the first-which he discerned, among other things, in the proliferation of vernacular imagery of the Alps (see chapter 2).

The "optical intoxication" or fascination Kracauer pinpoints in his viewing experience of the mountain film has its referent less in the sights of an ostensibly more primary nature than, more generally, in the cinema's technical ability to render the world of "things," a designation at once more opaque and in excess of the qualities that define material objects in quotidian usage. While he still excoriates modern science for promoting a "loss of our relation to things" (as in his obituary on Rudolf Steiner, FZ 18 April 1925), he discovers in film and particular kinds of film practice, a way to recover, transform, and reanimate the world of things, in modes of consciousness not unrelated to dreams and involuntary memories. Film is capable not only of rendering objects in their material thingness and plasticity, bringing them into visibility, but also of giving the presumably dead world of things a form of speech. Reviewing an adaptation of an Andersen fairy tale, Kracauer attributes this effect to the role of movement and mobility-through techniques of framing, staging, lighting, editing-in translating the plot "into a sequence of light and shadows, a rondo of figures in the snow, a silent scurrying and flitting on stairs and along bridge railings, a rhythmic condensation of all visibilities which begin to speak without words."

By foregrounding the material qualities of objects through cinematic techniques, film has the capacity to reveal things in their habitual, subconscious interdependence with human life, to capture in them the traces of social, psychic, erotic relations. Reviewing Jacques Feyder's (lost) film ThΘrΦse Raquin (1928), Kracauer extols the film's representation of the petty-bourgeois Paris apartment, "which is populated by ghosts.... Every piece of furniture is charged with the fates that unfurled here in the past. There is the double bed, the high armchair, the silver dishes-all these things have the significance of witnesses: they are palpably infused with human substance and now they speak, often better than human beings might speak. In hardly any film-except for the Russian films-has the power of dead things been forced to the surface as actively and densely as here." Kracauer describes an aesthetic quality that Benjamin, in his defense of Battleship Potemkin, had referred to as a "conspiratorial relationship between film technique and milieu" (a quality he was soon to elaborate in terms of the concept of the "optical unconscious")-except that in Kracauer's account of ThΘrΦse Raquin the oppressiveness of the petty-bourgeois interior predominates over the liberatory energies emphasized by Benjamin.

More generally, the idea that film may lend special articulation to the world of things is reminiscent of BΘla Balßzs's concept of film as modern physiognomy, in particular his notion that cinematic technique is capable of conveying the "expressive" quality of material objects, landscapes, and faces; likewise, there are important resonances with the writings of Jean Epstein. Indebted like Balßzs to Simmel's philosophy of art, Kracauer assumes that what animates the cinematic representation of things has as much to do with the emotion of the subject as with the moving object. Film's physiognomic capacity offers a mode of perceptual experience that blurs analytic distinctions between subject and object and allows things to appear in their otherness. But while Balßzs, even as a Marxist, adheres to the romantic and idealist undercurrents of Lebensphilosophie, or the philosophy of life, Kracauer, as we shall see, enlists film's physiognomic ability in a materialist philosophy of death.

Toward a Modernist Materialism

That Kracauer's film theory has its motor in a particular relationship to the world of things is one of the many insights in Adorno's ambivalent homage to his old friend and mentor on the latter's seventy-fifth birthday. As shrewd as it is condescending, Adorno's portrait of Kracauer concludes with the observation that the "primacy of the optical" in him was not just, as suggested earlier in the essay, a matter of his architectural training or talent: "Presumably, [it] is not something inborn but rather the result of this relationship to the world of objects." Adorno speculates that Kracauer's special penchant for visuality has its roots in a "fixation on childhood, as a fixation on play," that compensates for the suffering inflicted upon the self by human beings with a "fixation on the benignness of things." This translates, in Adorno's judgment, into a major theoretical and political deficiency: "One looks in vain in the storehouse of Kracauer's intellectual motifs for rebellion against reification." Considering that the concept of reification is a cornerstone of Adorno's own theory of modernity, we can easily imagine how Kracauer's engagement with the world of things seemed tantamount to a critical sellout, a nostalgic yearning for a place beyond critique: "The state of innocence would be the condition of needy objects, shabby, despised objects alienated from their purposes."

What eludes Adorno is that Kracauer's allegedly uncritical immersion into the world of things, his lack of protest or indignation vis-α-vis reification, is perhaps responsible for the enormous historiographic and cognitive wealth his writings yield, his careful registering of modernity's multifaceted and contradictory realities. And what Adorno elides is the extent to which this immersion also allowed Kracauer to revise and reconfigure the terms of critical subjectivity. For in his forays into the fallen world, Kracauer had no problem seeing himself as both belonging to this world and advancing its analysis and transformation.

Kracauer's truck with the material world allowed him to experience-and to discern theoretically-a different constitution of the subject that manifested itself in that new relationship with things, in particular things modern. The subject that enters the movie theater with/as Kracauer is clearly not the sovereign, unitary, critically distanced subject of transcendental philosophy or the connoisseur of haut-bourgeois culture; it is, to vary on Adorno's characterization of Kracauer, a subject "without skin," and it knows its boundaries to be precarious. What is more, this subject seems to seek out situations in which its very sense of identity, stability, and control is threatened by the otherness of the material world, betraying a masochistic sensibility of the kind that we find stylized in Kracauer's novel Ginster and that resurfaces in the early drafts of Theory of Film.

In his beautiful essay "Boredom" (FZ 16 Nov. 1924), for instance, Kracauer compares the effect of listening to the radio, with its boundless imperialism of bringing the whole world into our living room, to "one of those dreams provoked by an empty stomach: a tiny ball rolls toward you from very far away, expands into a close-up, and finally crashes over you; you can neither stop it nor escape, but lie there chained, a helpless little doll" (MO 333; S 5.1:280). A similar, somewhat less threatening though just as visceral encounter appears earlier in the essay when the impersonal subject of boredom takes a stroll through the nightly streets, filled "with a feeling of unfulfillment from which a fullness might sprout." While his "body takes root in the asphalt," his spirit "roams ceaselessly out of the night and into the night" with the luminous advertising and returns only to pull him into a movie theater-where it allows itself to be polymorphously projected: "As a fake Chinaman it squats in an opium den, turns into a well-trained dog that performs ludicrously clever tricks to please a film diva, gathers up into a storm amid towering mountain peaks, and turns into both a circus artist and a lion at the same time. How could it resist these metamorphoses? ... One forgets oneself gawking, and the huge dark hole is animated with the illusion of a life that belongs to no one and consumes everyone" (MO 332, S 5.1:279).

Kracauer does not simply fall back on the nostalgic complaint that film destroys the sovereign subject by displacing a presumably intact, well-grounded, autonomous spirit with an invasion of alien, heteronomous images (as in Georges Duhamel's polemic quoted by Benjamin: "I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images"). Rather, despite his ambivalence over the sense of loss and emptiness that comes with the cinema illusion, Kracauer does not disavow the pleasure in the sensory expansion it affords, along with the theoretical insights it might yield. For the passage quoted describes a form of involuntary mimetic identification operative in film viewing, a phenomenon theorized in contemporary biomechanical discourse as Carpenter's Effect (referring to the ideomotoric phenomenon that muscular contractions of a person in motion are unconsciously imitated by another person observing the former). What is more, it also suggests that, inasmuch as the moving objects on screen seem to metamorphose into something other than they appeared, such psychophysiological mimesis affords the viewing subject the sensation of participating in this transformation, evoking the possibility-both threatening and liberating-of liquefying fixed structures of social, critical-intellectual, gendered identity.

The subject of experience in Kracauer's texts cannot be said entirely to dissolve into a "subjectless" subjectivity akin to what Martin Jay discerns in Benjamin's writing as a prose equivalent of a modernist style indirect libre. On the contrary, Kracauer needs the distinctions between personal pronouns for a particular rhetorical strategy-a shifting of perspectives from a third-person, impersonal distance to a more personal voice, whether first-person plural or second-person singular (the latter, as in the above example of the radio, used to evoke a sense of imminent violation). This rhetorical strategy more often than not signals a shift in the critic's attitude toward the phenomenon or mode of behavior described, a revaluation of an earlier negative stance.

The shift in pronouns is particularly salient when it refers to forms of cultural consumption that were previously criticized from what appeared as an external, intellectually superior position. In his essay "Travel and Dance" (FZ 15 March 1925), for instance, Kracauer reads the rise of tourism and modern forms of dancing ("and other outgrowths of rational fantasy" like radio and "telephotography") as symptoms of mechanization and rationalization, of "a depraved omnipresence in all dimensions that are calculable" (MO 70; S 5.1:293). Accordingly, these leisure activities are symptomatic of the "double existence" imposed on human beings cut off from the spiritual sphere. And yet, not only is this "Ersatz" real, even if compromised, but it also offers "a liberation from earthly weight [Erdenschwere], the possibility of an aesthetic behavior vis--vis organized toil" (MO 72; S 5.1:294). The turn from pessimistic critique to critical redemption culminates in an emphatic switch of personal pronouns:

We are like children when we travel; we playfully delight in a new velocity, the relaxed roaming and roving, the synoptic viewing of geographical complexes that previously could not be seen at once. We have fallen for the ability to have all these spaces at our disposal; we are like conquistadors who have not yet had a quiet moment to reflect on the meaning of their acquisition. Likewise, when we dance, we mark a time that did not exist before, a time prepared for us by a thousand inventions whose substance we cannot gauge, perhaps because for now their unfamiliar scale appears to us as their substance