Cinema and Experience. Miriam HANSEN
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media culture—as prefigured in the cognitive regime that links weekly newsreels and illustrated magazines, and as metonymically present in the photograph of the film star—he opposes an alternative configuration of intermedial relations in which the unstable specificity of one medium works to cite and interrogate the other.119
Around the time the photography essay was written, the kind of film it envisioned may not have existed, though there are clearly affinities with experimental films of the period (e.g., René Clair, Jean Vigo, Dziga Vertov, and Kinugasa Teinsuke, all of whom Kracauer reviewed). By and large, contemporary commercial cinema had no use for the defamiliarizing and disjunctive aesthetics projected in the essay. Kracauer was well aware that, with the stabilization of German film production from 1925 on and mounting political instability toward the end of the decade, critical reviewing required a more direct language than that indebted to photographic negativity or, for that matter, to material expression of Weltzerfall and hyperbolic distortion of distorted conditions. A signal juncture in this regard, preceding the photography essay, was his intervention in the political controversies surrounding the 1926 German release of Battleship Potemkin.120 Defending Eisenstein’s film against the charge of Tendenzkunst (art with a message), Kracauer’s decisive review of Potemkin brings together aesthetic criteria developed in his early writings on film—the restriction to physical exteriority appropriate to the medium, an associative fantasy (“filled with indignation, terror, and hope”) that guides the sequencing of optical impressions, and a fairy-tale ending—with an enthusiastic endorsement of the “truth” presented by the film, its dealing with a “real” subject such as “the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors” and “the moment of the revolution.”121 He praises the film’s engagement with the real not least because it highlights, by contrast, the regressive and escapist bent of capitalist film production that takes on inequality, injustice, poverty, and revolt only to the extent that their representation does not threaten the dominant social order.122
The positivization of truth and concretization of the social reality that film can and should confront mark a shift in Kracauer’s writing toward a more immanent, politically grounded critique of ideology that takes aim at the films’ recycling of outdated bourgeois forms, settings, and values, the gentrification of exhibition practices, and the shaping of a mass-cultural imaginary in collusion with the emerging white-collar class. Increasingly, his critique of these developments tends to imply a betrayal of cinema’s anarchic and materialist legacy: its beginnings in the habitat of popular entertainments and dime novels; its capacity to register and advance the disintegration and transformation of the phenomenal world. Kracauer invokes this forgotten potential both as a critical standard for the present and as a promise that the discarded possibilities of film history could yet become decisive for the cinema’s future.
In its inscription of the technological media as a historic gamble, the photography essay highlights an important dynamic in Kracauer’s early work on film and mass culture, which at once dates it and makes it prescient. For its radicalism still participates in the 1920s’ break with the “long nineteenth century,” a century prolonged by efforts, enhanced by the capitalist entertainment industry, to restore a cultural façade that Kracauer, like the avant-garde artists of his time, strongly believed could not be patched up. Moved by a modernist impulse that made him defend the cinema against the educated bourgeoisie, he found in the technological mass media a sensory-perceptual discourse on a par with the experience of modernity, encompassing its traumatic, pathological effects as well as its transformational, emancipatory possibilities. Accordingly, the essay discerned in technologically and mass-based media institutions like the illustrated journals and cinema the emergence of new forms of publicness (different from the traditional liberal public sphere of the newspaper, to whose readers it was addressed) that demanded recognition and critical debate, insisting that these new publics were key to the political future of Weimar modernity.
Beyond its prognostic purchase on the imminent future, the photography essay contains a remarkably acute premonition that the issue was not merely that a discourse equal to the challenges of modernity was lacking—a lack to which film and photography supplied a certain answer—but that these same media generated and circulated an exponentially increased abundance of images, a random multiplicity and an indifferent interchangeability and convergence. It thus anticipates a key feature of contemporary media culture, in a changed socioeconomic and geopolitical landscape, to be sure, and in new, infinitely more powerful technological forms. The point is not just that Kracauer’s disintegration of the star photograph into an abstract grid of halftone dots intuits something of the logic of digital procedures. It is at least as important that his rhetorical magnifying glass discovers a similar logic of abstraction and recombination at another level, in the protocols governing the use of photographs in contemporary media practices. What is just as remarkable, however, is that this analysis, if not the driving ethos of Kracauer’s early film theory, is fueled by a gnostic-materialist vision of modernity that converts the photographic media’s participation in disintegration into new sorts of animation and at once aesthetic and political possibilities of reconfiguration.
2
Curious Americanism
As we saw in the preceding chapter, Kracauer’s early reflections on film and photography suggest a range of specific meanings that the term modernity might have for film theory and film history. These reflections in turn contribute to the archive of modernist aesthetics insofar as they expand the canon of aesthetic modernism to include the technological media, not just with experimental film and photography but also with the vernacular practices of commercial cinema. In this chapter, I reverse emphasis to focus on the significance Kracauer ascribed to cinema and other new entertainment forms as indices of the direction(s) of twentieth-century modernity, which he increasingly saw as defined by mass production, mass consumption, and the emerging contours of mass society.1 In particular, I trace the ambivalences and revaluations surrounding his utopian proposition that, like their American prototypes, these entertainment forms might provide something like “a self-representation of the masses subject to the process of mechanization,” that is, the conditions of possibility for a democratic culture. 2
Kracauer’s exploration of modern mass culture was part and parcel of the discourse of Americanism that catalyzed debates on modernity and modernization in Weimar Germany and elsewhere. As has been well documented by historians of Weimar culture, the metaphor of “Amerika” encompassed a wide range of ideas, images, and clichés: Fordist-Taylorist principles of production—standardization, rationalization, calculability, efficiency, and speed, the assembly line—and attendant promises of mass consumption; mass democracy and civil society, that is, freedom from traditional authority and hierarchies, egalitarian forms of interaction, and social as well as sexual and gender mobility (the “new woman” and the alleged threat of a “new matriarchy”); and not least the cultural symbols of the new era—skyscrapers, jazz (“Negermusik”), boxing, revues, radio, cinema. Whatever its particular articulation (to say nothing of its reference to the actual United States), the discourse of Americanism crystallized positions on modernity, from cultural-conservative jeremiads through euphoric hymns to technological progress. Within pro-American discourse, the political fault lines were usually drawn between those who found in the Fordist gospel a solution to the ills of capitalism and a harmonious path to democracy (“white socialism”) and those who believed that modern technology, and technologically based modes of production and consumption, furnished the conditions, but only the conditions, for a truly proletarian revolution (“left Fordism”).3
As has often been pointed out, the discourse of Americanism should not be conflated with the actual historical process of “Americanization,” that is, the transfer of American-style business practices to Germany (and other parts of Europe).4 Still, with the introduction of Fordist-Taylorist principles of production in both industry and the service sector, along with the accompanying spread of cultural forms of mass consumption, the very categories developed to comprehend the logics of capitalist modernity assumed a more concrete, and more complex and contradictory, face. To be sure, Germany had seen experiments in and debates on rationalization earlier, in fact before World War I.5 And while