What does it mean for cinema to redeem physical reality? Developing this idea is the primary concern of Siegfried Kracauer’s substantial book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, now in the 60th anniversary of its initial publication. Kracauer is a common name to film folk, mostly for his previous book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, published just after WWII. Theory of Film remains lesser known in the Kracauer oeuvre, but it is a masterwork of film writing in the broadest sense. Taking nearly two decades to write, the result is a work of genuine care and intellectual titillation, where tossed-off observations feel foundational and the central thesis leaves contusive marks on one’s understanding of what film is and can do.
Two years after its publication, Pauline Kael published a snot-nosed reviewed in Sight & Sound. Titled “Is there a Cure for Film Criticism? Or: Some Unhappy thoughts on Siegfried Kracauer’s Nature of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality,” the piece engages in some common misunderstandings and misreadings of Kracauer’s work. Kael’s tone throughout is hall monitor-like at best and anti-intellectual at worst. Her attempt at a pithy rebuff results in viewing this open and embracing work as restrictive and didactic. Kael likely helped to perpetuate the biggest misconception about Kracauer’s book, namely that he’s working toward an aesthetic criterion used to judge the artistic merits of individual films. Kracauer’s theory is not about the trees but the forest. It is not an ontology of cinematic aesthetics, but rather a theory of film’s capabilities and affinities, chief among them its ability to redeem physical reality. Part of what leads Kael down the wrong path is her disregard for historical context. There is a reason that Kracauer begins his book with a chapter on photography, which has been an interest of his since the 1920s (his essay “Photography” from 1927 is one of the greatest essays on image aesthetics in the 20th century). What this signifies, which Kael doesn’t seem to grasp, is that cinema as a form was developed out of and uses the photographic apparatus, a technological invention that possesses inherent affinities. Kracauer is less concerned with defining cinema as art and more with what cinema can offer to our experience of the world.
Wading further into the thickets of Kael’s critique is, given its general flatfooted argument, not a helpful endeavor in absorbing the value of Kracauer’s book. Although it may be worth noting that Kael chides Kracauer—a Jewish man who fled Nazi occupation while his longtime friend, Walter Benjamin, was forced to suicide by the encroaching German forces—of being too “politically” stringent to engage with the work of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. It is worth mention because, one, it evinces Kael’s acrimonious approach, but also because an understanding of Theory of Film is yoked to the cultural and political trajectory of the 20th century. In the “Photography” essay mentioned above, which he wrote during the tumultuous Weimar period, Kracauer points to the photographic turn as igniting a “go-for-broke game of history,” referring to the photographic medium’s and therefore cinema’s potential to either galvanize the masses towards revolutions or aid the rise of fascism via the dissemination of propaganda. This was unfortunately proved correct. Kracauer wrote the bulk of Theory of Film post-WWII and the plangent undertone arcing through the book is questioning the good of film experience in world that produced Nazism, the Holocaust, and atomic weaponry, when the velocity of modern life is ever-fracturing and fragmentizing human experience.
Given this context, Kracauer’s central thesis is much more salient than Kael makes it out to be. One should readily agree that the world is filled with material objects, both strange and familiar, that populate the course of everyday life. A person passes by these objects in the physical world with a newfound speed in the 20th and 21st century—the unalloyed ages of fragmented experience. “Fragmentized individuals act out their parts in fragmentized reality,” he writes in a section entitled “Reality within reach.” But it is in the film experience, which is not dependent on artistic merit, that physical reality can be awoken from its dormant, unexpressed state, “it’s state of virtual nonexistence.” The inherent affinities of cinema—its ability to capture unstaged and fortuitous occurrences, its recording of endless or indeterminant events, and primarily its ability to render the “flow of life”—positions film as not only able to redeem the physical world, but maybe the only medium to offer such possibility. “Film,” writes Kracauer, “renders visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent.”
This is not an entirely novel claim. Less evolved variants of it existed prior, particularly in the work of film theorists Béla Balázs and Erwin Panofsky. Yet the truly pathbreaking part of Kracauer’s theory is how he believes film accomplishes the task of redemption. In an operative anecdote, Kracauer relays how a woman once said to him of differences between the theater and the cinema: “In the theater I am always I, but in the cinema I dissolve into all things and beings.” One achieves, by cinematic experience, attunement with the physical world and its variegated objects and diverse beings. These are the “psychophysical correspondences” that constitute the epiphenomena of viewership. In filmgoing, the “otherwise hidden provinces” of odd spatial formations, temporal discontinuities, and the brute matter of the world, are revealed. Kracauer’s reordering of subject and object to exist on a united and connected plain (i.e. the dissolution of self into a world of things and beings), rather than reassuming the traditional divide, is a revolutionary philosophical claim avant la lettre. It predates the work of Gilles Deleuze and the subsequent New Materialists by decades, mooring the notion of cinematic experience to a truly radical concept.
One can hopefully understand, given the current homebound status within quarantine, why a return to the material world is appealing. Contained within that desire, which is a desire that leavens Kracauer’s theory of film, is an understanding that cinema is not offering transcendence but a return to what is already here. The notion of transcendence is a beguiling one, no doubt disseminated to cinephiles through the spiritualism of André Bazin, but it is a misleading prospect. What outside of this world or our experience of the world do we have to venture to? In some ways, Kracauer and Bazin make for interesting polarities. Both wrote strikingly on the nature of the photographic image in addition to having highly complex understandings of cinematic realism and both were denied a life in academia due to debilitating speech impediments. Yet, their respective accounts of cinema push the form in opposite directions. For Bazin, transcendence; for Kracauer, films return us to the natural world. Yet, it is in Kracauer’s theory, rather than Bazin’s desire for otherworldliness, where something like Angela Schenelac’s vibrant spatial ruptures, the emotional dilations in Philippe Garrel, or the ataraxic hauntings in Kiyoshi Kurosawa can confer new perceptions onto the experience of everyday life. For Kracauer, the strange palpitations in the work of these filmmakers would be implicated into the rhythms of reality—film cements us in our fragmenting physical reality rather than furthering us to some ethereal elsewhere. The title of Kael’s review asks if there is a cure for film criticism, a question she never really answers. But here is one: less Bazinians, more Kracauerians.
The mark of a great thinker is to make their work cross the chasms of history, to make it seem as though they are speaking directly to the current cultural moment. Let’s leave with a short passage from the dazzling epilogue of the book, titled “Film in Our Time,” that embodies the lingering dynamism of Theory of Film:
“If you disregard for a moment articulate beliefs, ideological imperatives, special undertakings, and the like, there still remain the sorrows and satisfactions, discords and feasts, wants and pursuits, which mark the ordinary business of living. Products of habit and microscopic interaction, they form a resilient texture which changes slowly and survives wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and revolutions. Films tend to explore this texture of everyday life, whose compositions varies according to people, place, and time. So they help us not only to appreciate our given material environment but to extend it in all directions. They virtually make the world our home.”